A better approach to middle management

Why most organisations don't get it right

Those who seek power are rarely in the position to wield it correctly.

When I interact with PMs who have been doing IC (individual contributor) roles since a while, I see a strong desire to graduate to being a people manager. However, once some of them actually become one, it’s often not clear to them what their actual role is. This is, more often than not, a problem with how most organisations approach middle management. Let’s dive deeper.

Why middle management?

The concept of middle management is closely related to a tree heirarchy of organisations, so it’s useful to question why that exists.

At a fundamental level, any business exists to serve customers. Let’s say you start a business as a one-person shop to sell clothes. You procure clothes through your contact, use your judgement to display the best ones, sell in your network and perform admin functions of accounting and taxation.

This is easy for one person to do when the scale is small. As it grows, the span of work within each function grows and more people need to be hired. Now, there would be one person in each function and everyone reporting to the founder. Soon that grows to multiple people within functions and multiple layers within those people.

Let’s take the sales function for example. Suppose it is structured this way -

Because one person alone wouldnt be able to handle the wide range of customers across the country, there are multiple zones, and then states and cities within those zones.

Now imagine the life of the Zonal head.

He/She is getting pressure from up - orders from the National head to increase sales and

pressure from down - complaints from the State heads on the problems faced by them in increasing sales and maintaining customer relationships.

If the org is not careful, very often the role of the middle manager reduces to that of a postman, just conveying information from top to down and down to top. But the actual role of middle manager is much different:

Each manager is actually a synthesis layer for the org

This means that all the information about on-ground execution with customers has to be synthesised by the middle manager. This will include customer feedback on company policies or products, competitor reviews by customers, key problems faced by customers.

Each manager is also a re-destribution layer for the org

Suppose that a state is deploying some experiments that are working. The Zonal manager is the only one in a unique state to see that and contextualise it for another state. No other person in the org would be able to do it for the same function.

A abstract way of looking at this:

there is energy coming from bottom, there’s energy coming from the top, this position acts as a gatekeeper for which energy to channel where. This is the value you truly add, as you take decisions with the context that only you have. In the context of org, this energy can be information, resources, ideas etc.

Limitations of a middle manager role

1. You will always have to hold the tension between top and bottom. E.g. The top wants a particular product executed in a month, but resource and execution constraints at the bottom may only lead to a quarter timeline.

2. Beyond influence and direction, there’s limited role you play. Paradoxically, your direct power reduces as you become a manager as you are not directly detailing out each initiative and executing it with stakeholders. You can mould the initiative to the best of your abilities, but ultimately, the onus of coming up with all such initiatives and refining them lies with the PM, with you as the Merlin to the Arthur.

   
   

3. The information often gets distorted while travelling. E.g. Customer may have asked for a price of 300Rs, but sales person would have conveyed 250 just for additional buffer that can help in sales.

4. Once people enter middle manager roles, they often get comfortable with just reviewing rather than creating. Once this state occurs, there’s often a tendency to throw people at a problem than getting your hands dirty. People often justify this by saying that their time and judgement is best used at that level, and not in execution. This is an excuse imo and a big problem, since once you lose that execution muscle to comfort, it’s very hard to build it again.

   
   Steve Jobs says in this video that the best managers often become managers reluctantly, since they know no one else will be able to meet the standards they want. This is very true.

5. On a similar note, if you’re not careful, you also lose direct feedback with the customers and rely only on your subordinates for that. This impedes your ability to take good decisions from your gut. If you plot number of customer conversations by seniority level, most organisations look like the green line below. But the best ones look like blue, where every level spends time talking to customers, including CXOs.

Tony Xu, CEO of Doordash, spends 15-30 mins answering support queries; think of how many CEOs of multi-billion $ companies actually do that.

This practice needs to trickle down to middle managers, with a proportionately larger time share on customers, to help develop customer centricity and also feel more connected to the business mission.

In most organizations, middle management is the easiest thing to screw up because of enough attention not being paid to how these energies are getting transferred, synthesized or redistributed. If you’re in one such role, make sure you take the time out to define your role and the energy flows first to get the best out of it.

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