In Defense of Middle Management

[MUSIC] Deals not just another payroll platform, it's when your team might actually enjoy. HR, IT, and payroll together finally, built in-house, built for peace of mind. Visit d-e-l.com/hbrpodcast. [MUSIC] Welcome to the HBR IDA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard. [MUSIC] 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. But 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. So 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? And 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 co-author with Brian Hancock and Bill Shannonger 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. Hi, Allison, the question being here. So why are there so many negative stereotypes around middle managers? You know, in some ways, we have to go back to a bit of the evolution of the role of the manager, right? If you go back to the '50s, the '80s, what we saw was that being the manager, that was the dream, right? Walking around with your briefcase. The reality is that, you know, 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. And then there became a bit of a question of, well, then what do managers do? And this idea of, do they create work? Are they just a bureaucracy layer? It doesn't help write that plenty of leaders call their middle management layers permafrost. Nothing can penetrate through. And I think it's really time to say, this is a critical role. And how do we empower them? But 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. Yeah, it seems though that this is a job that's really hard to do well. In part because of the negative stereotypes, but 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. And people really struggle to do it well. So why is that? I like to say that you can't just manifest great managers. You have to develop them. And I'll actually add on to some of the challenges you've described, Alison, right? The technological changes, automation, the great well-being crisis. Managers cannot deliver the massive job that they're expected to deliver when they're burnt out themselves, right? When they are feeling really squeezed in the middle. And they've got their teams that are burned 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 in the pandemic, and the implications on the workplace and hybrid, right? The role of the manager? I don't think it was ever easy. One thing's for sure, it's never been harder. And so 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. And 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 well-being crisis, managers took so much on their plates because they were firefighters. They saw fires that needed to be put out and then got after it. It was almost, if not me, who? And now we need to say, how do we really think of managers as the job reimaginers, 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? And also ask the question, are some things I'm doing actually no longer needed? And we can just remove them altogether. Managers are more burned out than any other population in the workforce. To the tune of 43% of managers reporting burnout, and so something has got to give. Yeah, and there's also sort of 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. That's right. And you know, we're not against that. So the same study I described found that the average middle manager spends two days a week on individual contributor work. And 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 have. But the player coach model is only one archetype of management. And 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. And so it's all about really saying, aren't 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, so 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. And 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. 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 Pritzable of companies promoting people for being good at doing something, but then finding their terrible at leading people doing the same thing. So how do we change those things? Yeah, there's a lot of factors at play. And 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 right technical workers, coders, programmers?" They often say, "Yes, but 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. And so, moving your best individual contributors to manage your roles, you just lost your best individual contributor, and maybe they're not great at being a manager, and maybe they don't want to be. And that's a common problem when I talk to, you know, 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 in expert paths, 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. And so, even for a people manager, the next step is to be a manager of managers. And then, many organizations layer upon on-layer, manager of managers, right? And so the second somebody gets good in their role, they're being promoted to the next level. And 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." And so we've got to think about different tracks for different people. And 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? And 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. - So how do organizations figure out what makes great people leaders for those workplaces and those workplaces alone? - So I think there's a few factors to consider. One is your strategy. How are you gonna be creating value in three to five years? How are you delivering your growth agenda? It could be through innovation, right? 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 wild to think about continuous improvement and able to empower the next level. You really have to think about your strategy, what it takes for you as an organization to deliver and then what archetype of leader do you need? Then you also wanna think about your culture, your values, right, as you think about collaboration. Do I need someone that can really work effectively across business units to get things done together? And then finally, you wanna really think about studying the exemplars in your organization. Who are the great people leaders? You know who they are, right? And 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 intrinsic, how do they think? What are their motivations? And say, what can I take from that and actually build into a leadership model and then start assessing for those capabilities and also start developing them in the organization. Well, of course, making sure you're also thinking about, you know, 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 strengths. And so as an executive, you wanna build your team of spiky leaders that have complimentary strengths. - Now you mentioned the layers, you know, the manager of managers, the manager of manager of managers. Is there an argument for getting rid of some of those seeming redundancies? - So again, I think this is where you have to look to the strategy, how are you creating value? And I think it's a mistake to say just, you know, 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? And then really think intentionally about the organizational structure and say, who do we need? What are the critical roles that we need that they're gonna deliver thus? What are the skills that we need to build? And one of the sort of pitfalls of paper growth is there's almost this mushrooming effect, right? 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, right? 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 of fact 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. And so 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. - Okay, 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? - So 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? And how are the manager needs to be spending more time thinking about what are the interdependencies? What are the risks that are barriers that I can mitigate or unblock? How am I thinking about can we accelerate value? How can we push progress and pace? And how do I make sure I'm importantly building the capabilities of my team? And so if you think about a manager as uniquely suited to tie everything together, they do need to also go be able to helicopter up and go down to, you know, so 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 sort of this task list, right? 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? 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. So how have you seen companies sort of better tap into that information? I think it's really about leaders asking managers what they think and it sounds so simple, right? But 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, you know, 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." And you know what, maybe it's not, you know, Tuesday Wednesday Thursday of every week, but maybe it's about at the key moments where the team is coming together on a project to kick off or maybe they're coming together to deliver the products. And one of the right times to come together, managers are the folks that know this, right? Some of the CEOs 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 and really think about the team norms and how they as a team can deliver to meet both the team's goals and the business needs as well as people's individual needs. - Yeah, we are in this era of flux, right? You know, both with how people work and what they're working on. And you talk about the key role that middle managers should play in sort of reimagining what the jobs of the future will look like, especially given, you know, for example, recent advances in AI. So talk more about that, like how are you seeing, how are you seeing those people in that layer of the hierarchy, you know, push us forward to what, you know, work is going to look like in the next couple of decades? - Yeah, so we really think about managers when empowered, when developed as the great reimaginers of jobs. If we said based on, you know, 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, you know, while 85 million jobs could go away by 2025, 97 million jobs will be created on the same time scale. And so 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?" And then what's left for them? What else? Where's the additional value that they can add? And then what are the skills that they need in order to be able to do that? And if you think about the manager, you know, for example, in a grocery store, of, "Hey, if we're moving the self-checkout, what about re-skilling some of our cast's shares to actually be the troubleshooters of the checkout devices?" Right? That's the role of the manager to understand the re-bundling and then to match the worker to the work at hand to be able to do that. And talk more about the power that managers have to recruit and develop and inspire talent. Yeah, this could not be more important as we think about particularly Gen Z in the workforce and what they 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, you know, I think folks are thinking about it wrong. I think sometimes hiring managers think they would be so lucky to get to work with for us. And we are just assessing that. And let me tell you, it's a two-way street. Even in this economy, candidates, prospective employees are trying companies on for size. And we've seen time and time again. People pass up, come 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 and really think about this as the two-way street that it is. And 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. And it's the role of the manager to help be, that sort of multiplier, to help people be more successful than they ever thought they could be. Yeah. And can you point to a few specific organizations that you think are doing a good job at everything you're talking about, you know, 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? As you can imagine, client confidentiality is something we take really seriously. And so I delighted to share examples, well, not naming specific organizations. 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. And every year they actually have employees assess their managers on the frequency of those behaviors. And they actually really make the findings public and the coaching develop the managers. And so that's one example of an organization that's really thinking differently and also harnessing data to be able to actually make it happen. Now what about a public example? I think waffle house is a really interesting one, right? If we think about, you know, 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 develop their employees. And specifically they're back at the restaurant, a grill staff. When you start your entry level employee, your sort of, you know, on the line, you know, flipping patties and whatnot. But as you advance, as you grow, as you develop, and you actually become, so you keep getting new titles, new levels of elevation, new levels of recognition and promotion to till you hit the sort of ultimate destination, which is what they call the grill master. They are the Elvis of the grill. And this Elvis of the grill is still an individual contributor in fact, right? They're so good at their job that they're not going to promote this person to an assistant manager 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 kind of like a celebrity right in the back of the restaurant. They're respected and it comes with a salary and a lot of recognition and along the way. Yeah. So I mentioned before, you know, when times are tight, people look for excess bureaucracy to target many companies are in a period of cross cutting right now. Why shouldn't middle managers be on the chopping block or should some of them be? So this really gets back to this concept of thinking about the strategy right now. I hate to be, you know, a broken record on this, but 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 and then what's the right structure to be able to do it? And then who are the people I need to be able to do it when we think about sort of the work in any organization approximately 2% of roles create 80% of the value and 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 and many of those roles not all are manager roles. So we should be really careful to then that we know those roles and those aren't ones that we're looking to cut 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. And I wish that more people had the same Emily. Thanks so much for your time today. My pleasure Allison. 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" by managers hold the keys to the future of work. And we have more episodes and more podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization and your career. Find them at hbr.org/podcasts or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. This episode was produced by Mary Doe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhart. Our audio product manager is Ian Fox and Hannah Bates is our audio production assistant. Thanks for listening to the HBR idea cast. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Allison Beard.