In defence of middle managers
Are you old enough to remember when everyone was talking about flat company structures, stripping out the layers of middle management, bureaucracy and complexity? The belief was that if you axed as many layers as you could between the top level management and the workforce on the front end, organisations would magically transform overnight into wieldy, agile, fleet-footed entities, unfettered by the dread hand and dead weight of admin.
Did it work? Take a look around. How many companies or organisations do you know that have truly flat structures? There’s a reason all those layers existed in the first place. Did they make companies function better? Possibly. Maybe. Maybe not. But the fact is middle managers exist for a reason. Just like any thing else in the middle, they’re a buffer between one thing and the other. In this instance, between the bosses and the workers.
Try and imagine, for example, what would happen if a business really did have a structure where there were no layers between the CEO and the salesperson or worker on the shop floor. While it’s true that the CEO might gain a better understanding of what those people do and the pressures they’re under, he or she would struggle to get any time to do their own job to any satisfactory level. Simply put, there just wouldn’t be enough hours in the day.
Channel partners are a bit like middle managers, sitting between the vendor and the customer. Sometimes, vendors and customers are tempted to believe that a flat structure which cuts out the middle man or woman altogether would be a more efficient system and time and time again, they come to realise it just doesn’t work.
Why? Because the man or woman in the middle provides a very important service that has a tremendous value to both: he or she takes on the burden they would otherwise suffer from having to deal directly with each other, saving both parties an awful lot of time and effort. A burden shared is a burden halved, except, in this instance, most of the burden falls on the channel partner so it’s possibly quartered or less for the vendor and customer. Channel partners provide a buffer for vendors and customers, they insulate them from each other.
The same goes for middle managers. If they existed solely for the purpose of insulating top level managers from facing the consequences of their actions, such as being forced to speak directly to each worker they decide to fire in the next wave of layoffs, that would probably be a price most bosses would think worth paying.
With that in mind, I think it’s encouraging to some extent that, according to research from Robert Walters Ireland, more than half of Gen-Z professionals have stated that they don’t want to be middle managers, with 57% arguing it is “too high stress, low reward”. Only 13% of them think the traditional hierarchical structure is fit for purpose.
Suzanne Feeney, country manager of Robert Walters Ireland, warned the reluctance to take on middle management roles “could spell trouble for employers later down the line”.
She added that an increasing number of professionals of all ages believed that multiple layers of management created “an ‘us vs. them’ attitude between the main ‘do-ers’ and ‘delegators’ of an organisation”.
But the survey also found that 91% of employers viewed middle managers as crucial to their organisation. Feeney said organisations needed to “transform the role from just being seen as an ‘unnecessary layer’ of management to a ‘facilitator’ who empowers their teams to take their own initiative.”
The problem is that most Gen-Z professionals view middle managers very much as the former description while most top level managers would be reluctant to grant the level of autonomy suggested by the latter.
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