In Defense of Middle Management

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.

When you hear the phrase middle management, what comes to mind? For many, it might be parodies of corporate life, like Dilbert or The Office, where layers of bureaucratic hierarchy are full of ineffectual leaders who stand between the top executives and the real workers and tend to create more problems than they solve. Middle managers are people who are paid well but don’t produce much extra value. Those are the negative stereotypes. In most organizations with scale, middle managers play a really important and necessary role. They can be recruiters and developers of talent, project guides, team builders, information gatherers, problem solvers. Why does middle management have such a bad rap?

Is it that most people aren’t good at it or that outsiders don’t understand the job? Why are so many middle managers burnt out? How can we help them be more effective? When budgets are tight, should they really be some of the first people to go? Today’s guest is here to help us answer those questions. She thinks we need to defend and protect middle management, but argues that the role should be reimagined for our new world of work.

Emily Field is a partner at McKinsey & Company, and she’s the coauthor with Brian Hancock and Bill Schaninger of the HBR article, “Don’t Eliminate Your Middle Managers,” as well as the book, Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work. Emily, welcome.

EMILY FIELD: Hi, Alison. Pleasure to be here.

ALISON BEARD: Why are there so many negative stereotypes around middle managers?

EMILY FIELD: In some ways, we have to go back to a bit of the evolution of the role of the manager. You’re right. If you go back to the 50s, the 80s, what we saw was that being the manager, that was the dream. Walking around with your briefcase. The reality is, is that in the late 90s, early 2000s, with the internet, CEOs no longer had to communicate through managers. They could just go right to everyone and fast. Then there became a bit of a question of, well then, what do managers do? This idea of, do they create work? Are they just a bureaucracy layer?

It doesn’t help that plenty of leaders call their middle management layers permafrost: nothing can penetrate through. I think it’s really time to say, this is a critical role and how do we empower them? What’s really important is they need to be set up for success. The role has to actually work for the organization for managers to create the value that they’re uniquely suited to create. We have to build manager capabilities and we have to support, develop them and hold them accountable to be able to live into the value of their role.

ALISON BEARD: It seems though that this is a job that’s really hard to do well. In part, because of the negative stereotypes. Also, just because you’re caught between that really senior level that’s making strategic decisions and then the frontline workers who are dealing with all the customer client work-related problems. People really struggle to do it well. Why is that?

EMILY FIELD: I like to say that you can’t just manifest great managers. You have to develop them. I’ll actually add on to some of the challenges you’ve described, Alison, the technological changes, automation. Also, the great wellbeing crisis. Because managers cannot deliver the massive job that they’re expected to deliver when they’re burnt out themselves, when they’re feeling really squeezed in the middle, and they’ve got their teams that are burnt out and having challenges. The manager is not a therapist. The manager is not trained to be a mental health professional. However, the manager actually has a really important role in sensing how are folks doing.

Also, the great attrition and people leaving in mass. COVID-19 and the pandemic and the implications on the workplace and hybrid. The role of the manager, I don’t think it was ever easy. One thing’s for sure, it’s never been harder. As we think about that, we actually have to really ask ourselves, have we developed managers? Have we empowered them? We did a study of how middle managers spend their time. Middle managers spend their time over a day a week on administrative tasks, time reports, expenses. We have to say, is that really the best use of a manager’s time, or are we setting them up to fail?

Again, if we think about the context of the great resignation, the pandemic, the wellbeing crisis, managers took so much on their plates because they were firefighters. They saw fires that needed to be put out, and they got after it. It was almost, if not me, who? Now we need to say, how do we really think of managers as the job re-imaginers, the rebundlers of jobs who are able to also do that for themselves and push down things that someone else is better suited to do. Also ask the question, are some things I’m doing actually no longer needed and we can just remove them all together? Managers are more burned out than any other population in the workforce, to the tune of 43% of managers reporting burnout. Something has got to give.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah, and there’s also this problem, I think in the book, you call it the player coach model. Where managers, while they are team leaders and having to do those administrative tasks, are also still expected to be strong individual contributors.

EMILY FIELD: That’s right. We’re not against that. The same study I described found that the average middle manager spends two days a week on individual contributor work. When I talk to some middle managers, they say, “Don’t take that away from me. I love that. It keeps me close to the customer. It keeps me close to the work.” There’s real value for them to add. The player coach model is only one archetype of management. We have to really say, are people spending their time on the right things? A supervisor who is really focused in guiding a large team, they should spend less time on individual contributor work.

It’s all about really saying, are we being thoughtful about the time a manager is spending on individual contributor work and then admin work? I’d argue as little time as humanly possible, certainly less than a day a week. That then we can free managers up to do the work that they’re uniquely suited to do, to really focus on strategy and execution of the strategy and enabling their teams. Then to really be that coach and develop their teams. If you’re a people manager, you should be spending the vast majority of your time with your teams, problem solving, coaching, developing.

ALISON BEARD: One of the criticisms of middle managers is that a lot of people who are in those roles seem to have done it because they want to move up the ladder from individual contributor, for the title or money or stepping stone to the C suite. But they haven’t given much thought as to whether they’re suited for management or will actually like the job. You know, you also hear about the Peter principle of companies promoting people for being good at doing something, but they then find they are terrible at leading people doing the same thing. So how do we change those things?

EMILY FIELD: There’s a lot of factors at play. We also have to think about the fact that not everybody wants to be a manager. Especially in tech organizations, when you ask people, do you have to be a manager to move up? Technical workers, coders, programmers. They often say, “Yes.” When we ask them, “Do you want to be a people manager?” They’re not so sure or they know they don’t want to be. Moving your best individual contributors to manage your roles, you just lost your best individual contributor. Maybe they’re not great at being a manager and maybe they don’t want to be. That’s a common problem. When I talk to chief technology officers, I lost my best programmer and their team left too because they hadn’t put the right person in the role.

There’s a few things we can do. One, really thinking about a diverse set of career paths. Choose your own adventure, where individual contributors who aren’t maybe excited about a people leader path can continue to advance and grow on an individual contributor track, perhaps an expert path. Perhaps they become a program manager instead of a people leader.

Then as we think about the people leader role, there’s this idea that the only way is up. You’ve got to keep advancing, keep advancing. Even for a people manager, the next step is to be a manager of managers. Then many organizations, layer upon layer, manager of manager of managers. The second somebody gets good in their role, they’re being promoted to the next level. Oftentimes, what we see, and we have examples in the book of folks who say, “I got to that next level and I was miserable.” I hated it. I wasn’t getting to do the work that I love.

We’ve got to think about different tracks for different people. Then we’ve got to get really clear and organizations have to spend the time saying, what makes a great people leader in my organization? My organization are the keywords there. Because it’s not just about saying what makes a great leader generally wholesale. It’s actually about saying, what makes someone really out-deliver in this organization as a people leader? Then we need to assess for it, we need to develop it, and we need to evaluate for it so that we’ve got the right people leader capabilities at scale across the organization.

ALISON BEARD: So how do organizations figure out what makes great people leaders for those workplaces and those workplaces alone?

EMILY FIELD: I think there’s a few factors to consider. One, is your strategy. How are you going to be creating value in three to five years? How are you delivering your growth agenda? It could be through innovation. It could be, I need people who can think big and really be creative. It could be, “Hey, I’m about eking out the next point of margin. If that’s the case, I need people that can really execute with precision. People who are wired to think about continuous and improvement and are able to empower the next level.” You really have to think about your strategy, what it takes for you, as an organization, to deliver. Then what archetype of leader do you need.

Then you also want to think about your culture, your values. As you think about collaboration, do I need someone that can really work effectively across business units to get things done together?

Then finally, you want to really think about studying the exemplars in your organization. Who are the great people leaders? You know who they are. As a leader you might say, “Wow, if I could just clone, insert name.” Well, understand what they do. You can actually study that. How are they naturally wired? What are their intrinsics? How do they think? What are their motivations and say, “What can I take from that and actually build into a leadership model?” Then start assessing for those capabilities and also, start developing them in the organization while of course, making sure you’re also thinking about building a diverse and inclusive organization that’s not just one type of leader. Because what we know too is that the best leaders, by definition, are spiky leaders. They’ve got a couple of really towering strains. As an executive, you want to build your team of spiky leaders that have complementary strengths.

ALISON BEARD: You mentioned the layers, the manager of managers, the manager of manager or managers. Is there an argument for getting rid of some of those seeming redundancies?

EMILY FIELD: Again, I think this is where you have to look to the strategy. How are you creating value? I think it’s a mistake to say just wholesale, I’ve got to get rid of this entire layer. Again, how are we creating value three to five years out? What are the business units that we expect to grow? What are the business units that are declining? Or maybe they become more of a preservation play of market size. Then really think intentionally about the organizational structure and say, “Who do we need? What are the critical roles that we need that are going to deliver this? What are the skills that we need to build?”

One of the pitfalls of hypergrowth is there’s almost this mushrooming effect, where organizations grew so quickly in the past handful of years that if we’re being honest, the structure wasn’t set up to succeed. If we’ve got managers reporting to managers, reporting to managers, are we clear on decision rights on accountabilities? Have we sufficiently empowered people, or is the managerial layer effect actually just resulting in what one organization I know calls the bubble up effect? Where any decision just has to bubble up all the way and then get trickled back down. That’s not serving us. You want the structure that’s going to drive your business strategy and then set the roles up to be able to succeed and hold those roles accountable for delivering on their mandate.

ALISON BEARD: Ok so, let’s say that we’ve solved some of the problems that you’re talking about. We’ve eliminated some of the firefighting, some of the administrative tasks. We’re trying to empower our middle managers and give them the time to truly lead. What does an ideal middle manager do with his or her or their days?

EMILY FIELD: An ideal middle manager is really thinking about their overall mandate and what does success look like and how are they empowering each member of their team, the managers of teams below them to really deliver? The manager needs to be spending more time thinking about, what are the interdependencies? What are the risks or barriers that I can mitigate or unblock? How am I thinking about, can we accelerate value? How can we push progress and pace? How do I make sure I’m importantly building the capabilities of my team? If you think about a manager as uniquely suited to tie everything together, they do need to also though be able to helicopter up and go down. Helicopter up, see the view, and then helicopter down with their team into the weeds to engage deeply in problem solving. Oftentimes, they’re so bogged down by that administrative work that they become this task list. They become their to-do list instead of really pushing themselves to say, “You need thinking time to really push the problem to think beyond the next step and to really be thinking about how is your group accelerating value creation?

ALISON BEARD: One of the points that you make in the article and the book is about the insight that middle managers have into both employee sentiment and organizational operations. How have you seen companies better tap into that information?

EMILY FIELD: I think it’s really about leaders asking managers what they think. It sounds so simple. Instead of a leader from on high dictating exactly what to go do, actually empowering the managers. Setting the vision of what success looks like, and then telling the manager, develop a perspective about the right way to do that. Just to give a practical example that’s on the forefront of many people’s mind is, return to office. A CEO might say, “Hey, I want to see people in the office more. I think it’s important for growth and collaboration and innovation.” I think the organizations that get this right are saying, “Hey, let’s have the managers work with their teams to figure out the right times for folks to come together.”

You know what? Maybe it’s not Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday of every week. Maybe it’s about at the key moments where the team is coming together on a project kickoff, or maybe they’re coming together to deliver the products. What are the right times to come together? Managers are the folks that know this. It’s not the CEO’s job to say exactly when teams are best suited to collaborate. That’s the manager who’s able to see the full playing field and think through the work that people are best suited to do in person, versus together. Really, think about the team norms and how they as a team can deliver to meet both the team’s goals and the business need, as well as people’s individual needs.

ALISON BEARD: We are in this era of flux, both with how people work and what they’re working on. You talk about the key role that middle managers should play in reimagining what the jobs of the future will look like, especially given, for example, recent advances in AI. Talk more about that. How are you seeing those people in that layer of the hierarchy push us forward to what work is going to look like in the next couple of decades?

EMILY FIELD: We really think about managers when empowered, when developed as the great reimaginers of jobs. If we said based on what we’re hearing currently in current reports that approximately 10% of any knowledge job could be removed or automated from generative AI, what we also know is that while 85 million jobs could go away by 2025, 97 million jobs will be created on the same timescale. This is not just about jobs going away and fewer people, it’s about new jobs that are being created. If we think about any job as a composition of tasks, managers are really well suited to say, what’s the 10% that will go away for my team because of generative AI or AI broadly or insert technology.

Then what’s left for them? What else? Where’s the additional value that they can add? Then what are the skills that they need in order to be able to do that? If you think about the manager, for example, in a grocery store of, if we’re moving to self-checkout, what about re-skilling some of our cashiers to actually be the troubleshooters of the checkout devices? That’s the role of the manager, to understand the rebundling and then to match the worker to the work at hand to be able to do that.

ALISON BEARD: Talk more about the power that managers have to recruit and develop and inspire talent.

EMILY FIELD: This could not be more important as we think about particularly Gen Z in the workforce. What they’ve told us loud and clear is, I care about my own purpose. I care about doing work that matters to me. Managers have an absolutely critical role as the hiring manager and as the day-to-day manager in tapping into that purpose and helping connect what an employee cares about to the work to be done. Also, as we think about recruiting, I think folks are thinking about it wrong. I think sometimes hiring managers think they would be so lucky to get work for us, and we are just assessing them. Let me tell you, it’s a two-way street. Even in this economy, candidates, perspective employees, are trying companies on for size. We’ve seen time and time again, people pass up perfectly lucrative, compelling job offers because they say, “You know what? I want to go do something that’s more aligned to my purpose.”

It is the hiring manager’s job to get to know the candidate. To be able to connect that candidate. What drives them, what motivates them, their development goals to the job at hand? Really, think about this as the two-way street that it is. Then it’s so important that managers develop their people. They think about, what are their strengths? Let’s harness them. What are their development areas? How can I coach and grow that colleague so that they’re able to deliver more and be fulfilled on the job? Because people don’t want to come to work every day and just be mediocre, or worse, not performing well. It’s the role of the manager to help be that multiplier to help people be more successful than they ever thought they could be.

ALISON BEARD: Can you point to a few specific organizations that you think are doing a good job at everything you’re talking about, both allowing managers the time to do the really important work of managing, finding the right people to be managers, and just really empowering them?

EMILY FIELD: As you can imagine, client confidentiality is something we take really seriously. And so I’m delighted to share examples, while not naming specific organizations or to share some public examples as well of companies that have done some interesting things. A specific bank comes to mind for me, where they’ve actually gone so far to have managers be assessed on a scorecard of how well they’re performing the behaviors that they expect around giving recognition, developing their employees, building strategic clarity. Every year, they actually have employees assess their managers on the frequency of those behaviors. They actually really make the findings public and they coach and develop the managers. That’s one example of an organization that’s really thinking differently and also harnessing data to be able to actually make it happen.

ALISON BEARD: Now, what about a public example?

EMILY FIELD: I think Waffle House is a really interesting one. If we think about, I’m sure late night you’ve been perhaps to a Waffle House, and perhaps what you didn’t know is the way that they developed their employees, and specifically, they’re back at the restaurant grill staff. When you start, you’re an entry level employee. You’re on the line, flipping patties and whatnot. As you advance, as you grow, as you develop, you actually become, so you keep getting new titles, new levels of elevation, new levels of recognition and promotion till you hit the ultimate destination, which is what they call the Grill Master, the Elvis of the grill. This Elvis of the grill is still an individual contributor, in fact. They’re so good at their job that they’re not going to promote this person to an assistant manager or a manager where they’re going to lose that person doing the work that they’re awesome at, but they actually get all of this praise. They’re like a celebrity in the back of the restaurant. They’re respected, and it comes with salary and a lot of recognition along the way.

ALISON BEARD: I mentioned before when times are tight, people look for excess bureaucracy to target. Many companies are in a period of cost-cutting right now. Why shouldn’t middle managers be on the chopping block, or should some of them be?

EMILY FIELD: This really gets back to this concept of thinking about the strategy, and I hate to be a broken record on this. This is about saying, “Hey, peanut-buttering targets, that’s not the answer.” The answer is actually saying, what do I, as an organization, need to create value? Then what’s the right structure to be able to do it? Then, who are the people I need to be able to do it? When we think about any organization, approximately 2% of roles create 80% of the value. Actually knowing, every CEO should know what are the critical roles that are disproportionately important. I should make sure I’ve got the right people in those roles. Many of those roles, not all, are manager roles. We should be really careful too then that we know those roles and those aren’t ones that we’re looking to come.

ALISON BEARD: Sounds good. For what it’s worth, I have a very excellent middle manager who does all of the things that you’ve been talking about. I wish that more people had the same. Emily, thanks so much for your time today.

EMILY FIELD: My pleasure, Alison.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Emily Field, a partner at McKinsey & Company, and co-author of the HBR article, Don’t Eliminate Your Middle Managers, as well as the book, Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work.

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This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Our audio product manager is Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates is our audio production assistant. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.