Want to improve organizational performance? Focus on middle management
Fat or energy store? Reframe your perspective to get an accurate view.
Middle management gets a bad rap. The ire is heightened by the spatial analogy of it being like belly fat that needs to be trimmed down.
Like human health, being “lean” is not equal to being starved. It requires achieving a balance where everything is performing its normal task optimally. Instead of reviling middle management, it’s important to understand the crucial role it can play in organizational performance.
Reasons & Issues
We see many headlines where a CEO arrives and “takes the blade” to middle management to reduce “fat”. What is this “fat”? Too many people in mid-managerial roles? Or the middle layer not being efficient as a whole?
In an ordinal scale (e.g., High Medium Low), the polar ends are easy to understand. The middle section however can be nebulous.
Organizations are no different and many are prone to bloat. This can be “quantitative” bloat — too many people . This usually results from bad org design, over hiring, politics or a combination of these. It can also be “qualitative” — existing people are not able to do what they’re supposed to.
Middle managers are often “pulled in” from both ends. Sometimes they are doing work delegated by their superiors. Other times, they are tied up too deeply in operational issues. All this comes at the expense of the work that they were supposed to do.
Root cause
There are many debilitating forces acting on the middle layer. Amidst such force-fields, it’s easy to forget the purpose of middle management.
An organization has 3 hierarchical layers — strategic, tactical, operational. The difference in each layer is vision.
Operations have immediate vision, C-suite have long-term vision.
The middle layer has, or is supposed to have, intermediate vision.
The trouble is that often, this (intermediate) vision is usually not properly articulated, not fully understood, “lost” or deemed superfluous. Quantitative and/or qualitative bloat further compounds this issue.
The job of the middle manager is to keep an eye for trends that are developing just beyond the field of vision.
We can imagine an organizational pyramid. Teams report to operational leaders who report to middle managers who report to senior leaders. This is a control-based view. Complementing this is a vision-based view.
The vision-based view is obvious at the operational layer. At the strategic layer, having a 10000ft view is a badge of honour. For the middle layer, there is a gap! Due to various factors, does not have a vision that corresponds to its place in the hierarchy.
What does intermediate vision look like? While this answer is highly contextual, a simple heuristic is:
- being 2 steps ahead of the operational view
Operational teams have the daily ground view. Operational leaders (should) stay 1 step above. The intermediate or tactical view is a further step above. It takes a functional perspective, and asks questions like:
- What (new) is emerging beyond the operational horizon?
- What’s the latest development in my function or domain?
- What systems should we start putting in place?
Middle managers need to monitor the vast space between strategy and operations for improvements, opportunities, threats, trends etc., and communicate their analysis via the organizational channels.
They (should) provide a problem-solving capability that strategic and operational teams may either miss or not have capacity for.
When presented with an unwieldly burger, we rarely adjust the top or lower bread. Instead, we tinker with the filling(s) to make it amenable.
Next time a performance or purpose debate comes up, and middle management is presented as the scapegoat, take a pause. Ask if they are set up to add the vision and value they are supposed to add? Adjusting the middle may lead to gains at both strategic and operational ends.
