The commoditisation of middle management

“We were too enthusiastic...we’ve got to make cuts.” The Head of Department on the receiving end isn’t surprised, she's simply resigned to her team paying the price for a failed initiative she had no influence over. There’s little point in arguing as the CFO, who was an enthusiastic supporter of the new strategy, is now in dread of the resulting cost/revenue imbalance and has drawn the CEO into his fear.

HR is activated, consultations are processed and the department is reduced to less heads than it had before the new strategy was introduced.

In the same office a couple of months later the Head Of is trying to explain to the CEO why her team (the team she’s focused on keeping motivated following the cuts) cannot take on any more work for a particularly important client.

Causation is asleep and logic has gone on holiday. Welcome to middle management.

Both of those conversations involved one of my earliest coaching clients, but provenance isn’t necessary as they happen everywhere, often. Post-Covid, even more so.

A recent survey found that only 38 per cent of full-time employees wanted to move into management (with the figure at only 32 per cent for women).

How has middle management, which not long ago was a desirable career aim, become so uncomfortable and, increasingly, unwanted?

Tenure turmoil

Possibly the reason can be found here:

• Average C suite tenure – 5 years

• Average middle management tenure - ?

• Average junior staff tenure – 2 years

The question mark is revealing. There are many studies of C suite and junior staff tenure, but I couldn’t find one for middle management. It was hard enough to find two definitions of what middle management is that vaguely overlapped. It's almost as if no one cares.

Five years at C level is long enough to get you embedded, trusted, have great change ideas that move into implementation and then…well, you leave.

Two years at junior level is long enough to get bored or be engaged, or realise you like or dislike your employer and then…you probably also leave.

My guess is that middle management tenure is longer than either and represents the main stability between the revolving door above and the even faster revolution below. At any single point in time, middle management embodies the most realistic understanding of how an organisation works on a day-to-day basis. The top team is looking (rightly) at the strategic future and the lower level is focused (rightly) on their personal futures. Middle management is focused on keeping things going.

What would happen to any organisation that simply stopped keeping things going? It would suffer, quickly and painfully. So why – even given the impermanence of the layers surrounding them – does middle management get taken for granted?

30 years of slicing

Externally, there’s been a lot of bad news for middle management over the last 30 years. In the early 1990s, management thinkers working on business re-engineering theories inadvertently (or not) created a conceptual environment that allowed, or even encouraged, senior leaders to downplay the importance of middle management. Three severe recessions also hit the tier hard (seen as being not as important as the top team, but more expensive than junior staff) alternating with M&A booms during periods of growth (with their synergistic sheddings of middle-tier jobs). And then Covid reinforced all that had gone before.

Covid wasn’t just a quantitative reinforcement, it introduced a range of qualitative challenges as well. Big, vital decisions were taken quickly by small groups at the top. Both the thinking time, and the range of people involved in the thinking, were severely contracted. It was understandable; decisions needed to be made, and made quickly, and that was the best way to do it. But, in many organisations a C suite hangover was created which confused the right way of doing things in a unique pandemic with the right way to do things forever.

Add to that the challenge of managing remote working (one that largely falls on middle management) plus the economic realities of the loss of state support post pandemic and it’s no surprise that many middle managers still in position are either considering a way out or are feeling pressured into numbness.

Paternalism to iconoclasm

The external factors have been matched by changes in individual behaviours in organisations over the same period. There was, hard to believe now, a time not that long ago when members of the C suite (or the executive board) had an unspoken pride in their immutability. They believed their subject knowledge and experience to be as advanced and extensive as it could be. Personal evolution ended as soon as they got into the top team (as did their desire for advancement: no figures are available for average tenure in 1990, but in 2000 it was twice as long as it is today).

This was possible because senior management was fishing in a small rock pool of concepts and possibilities compared to the ocean upon which many of them are currently adrift. The upside for middle management was that it belonged to its senior management, it was an extension of their expertise and knowledge and had (external factors aside) a diluted version of their permanence and immutability. There was a degree of organisational safety.

Middle management was seen both as a necessity to allow the top team to not dirty their hands with the day to day, and as a talent pool from which a few would eventually ascend to a level of corporate exultation.

Now, the C suite is often dazzled by the endless possibilities to evolve personally, to position themselves as radical theorists or iconoclastic destroyers/creators. Whatever personal brand they choose, their frame of reference for middle management is often entirely negative: process automation, flat structures, digitisation of knowledge and experience, self-managing teams, outsourcing/consultancy and (woefully) decision-making processes entirely driven by data. Throw AI into the mix and middle management’s anxiety levels are hitting peak.

I also think that while the C suite has been relentlessly focusing on change, it has ignored the changes that have run concurrently in middle management. The effects of the acceleration caused by the move to digital have touched everyone, not just the top team. Pre digital, I knew that I could do the jobs of most of the people who reported to me (and probably most of the people who reported to them). Post digital, I knew that I understood their jobs, but didn’t have a chance of doing them as well as they did (or, in many cases, not at all). There has been a huge upskilling in the middle with little recognition from the top.

Loss of organisational knowledge has always been recognised as a downside of slimming the middle tier, but potential loss of new skills and abilities hasn’t yet been equally recognised. As an example, take the introduction of any function-specific SaaS tool to a business. To the C sponsor, it’s streamlining, efficiency and cost reduction - and often the thinking stops right there. To the manager implementing it, it’s work. Work to make it as effective as possible, to integrate it and to justify its price. How often is that work recognised?

The performance crutch

But middle management itself has to take some responsibility for its current situation. Middle managers know that their world has changed. They’re aware of the forces impacting them, and they’ve largely adapted professionally to deal with them. What they have often failed to do, though, is change their relationships with their organisations and reorder their personal priorities to match.

‘No one has a job for life’ and ‘organisational loyalty is dead'. These are not new ideas, they’ve been circulating (meaningfully) for at least 20 years, yet so many middle managers still think and behave as if they will be the exception, that they’ll be the ones who are valued and developed and promoted and kept. Based on what? Potentially on outdated thinking and the wrong priorities.

If the paternalistic hierarchy of the old corporation has been replaced by constant top-down flux and inadequate recognition, why do so many managers in the middle still behave as if nothing has changed? Take the continuing prioritisation of performance as an example. It’s understandable that at a time when there’s declining job security the primary instinct is to strive to show better performance metrics than the rest of the peer group.

It’s understandable but, I think, at least partially incorrect. The insecurity has been driven by significant technological and social change in a short period of time which has, in turn, created new organisational assumptions. One, usually unspoken, assumption is the splitting off of value from performance. In the C suite mind, how natural is it to now view human performance metrics from the middle as a commodity item capable of substitution? Increasingly natural I think.

Commoditisation

It's possible, therefore, that middle managers who solely focus on achieving high performance metrics are expending all their energy on hitting a target that has already been (to some extent) devalued in the minds of those setting the targets. This is not a new form of performance box ticking, as that (at worst) resulted in management neglect and stalled progression. This now introduces an element of jeopardy. Focusing on things that might no longer matter means that no focus is given to the things that now do matter.

Of course, this isn’t happening everywhere. Many organisations still genuinely evaluate middle managers’ potential to move up on the basis of strong performance…but even in those places it’s likely that the hidden evaluation of potential takes precedence over performance when promotion or redundancy decisions are made.

How do you know if you work for an employer whose senior team (consciously or not) views middle management performance as a commodity? A few warning signs are:

• little or no input into strategy formation prior to the communication stage

• informal briefings and insight down the management line is rare

• operational efficiency decisions relating to your function are often passed down with a thin veneer of consultation

• performance metrics are hit or exceeded but the only reward is that you get to do it again next year

• underperformance on performance metrics, is met with almost similar indifference

• there's an assumption from above that technology (particularly in the form of bought-in services) will free up your resource (often a euphemism for cutting it)

• you have input into several key projects, but not enough time to follow through on most of them…but this rarely results in criticism

The last point is being seen more frequently. I doubt there ever was a time when middle managers couldn't complain that they had too much to do but it was, to some extent, quantifiable. Such has been the knowledge uplift for middle managers that they are now often needed to give key input into several multifunction projects at the same time...projects whose time commitments cannot be fully recognised at inception. Letting a lack of input slide is often an implicit admission by the top team that too many change initiatives are in progress, but it's also a by product of viewing middle management performance as a commodity. Throw enough projects at it and some will stick.

If you’re at the junior end of middle management, probably the only one of the warning signs that you should be concerned about is a lack of reaction to under performance, but if you’re in the middle or top of your tier and you recognise three or more then you need to think hard about your priorities.

Reordering your priorities will mean putting less time against your performance metrics and more time on the types of activity that give you a good chance of being seen as an individual with potential to contribute beyond your current role. The end point will be when you are no longer seen as simply part of the middle management commodity but as someone fully attuned to the dynamics of your organisation and its future trajectory.

Just in case you wondered, the Head Of mentioned at the start is no longer in corporate and is now happily Head Of herself. She still has tough meetings with her new boss, but at least they are driven by a clear relationship between cause and effect.