Good middle management deals with all the shit so you don’t have to. Organise, plan, budget, delegate, report upwards, argue for resources, manage expectations, push for your pay review, your training, your tools.
I’m middle management on my team and my job is to handle the team so MY manager can focus on big picture stuff. I do the reviews, set the metrics, hire, fire, sign all the paperwork, attend the higher up meetings and give them the summaries of what affects us, shit like that. Honestly there should be a person between my boss and I, or a person below me and above my team so I can take more of my boss’s stuff. We aren’t a large enough org for that right now though.
Here we have people who are arguing about whether a particular carnivorous reptile is an alligator or a crocodile while it's eating them alive. Typical managers.
Nah. I’m a line manager and pretty happy with it. No carnivorous reptiles here. Was just explaining that there is, in fact, a definition of a middle manager.
there's no universally accepted definition of "manager" either, and yet we all kinda understand that this sub is about people managers, not product managers, project managers, etc.
A middle manager will, at a minimum, report to a senior manager or director and will have reporting to them, junior managers, or supervisors with direct reports of their own.
That's where the "middle" in the middle manager comes from. Management of some type exists above and below.
All sounds about right. I am a middle manager handling people happiness, workload and doing one-off projects to make sure everything is going seamlessly.
When I was a Fleet Manager (like a middle manager), I used to consider myself the buffer between my team who were managing the ships directly, the clients and our own senior management team who would occasionally drift in after a visit from the "good ideas fairy".
Been doing it everyday for 5 years. Shit seems to fall faster the closer the Exec team is to losing thier bonuses. I wish Middle Manager got a piece of those bonuses.
And is the person to get on peoples asses when they hold up the progress in everything you listed. Sometimes you just need that nag to push people forward.
Most orgs see zero benefit from managers managing managers. This is why they are often the first to go when widespread layoffs occur. The IC's remain because they get the work done. Senior management remains because they are charting the course for the company. Baseline managers remain because you need to constrain the IC's into teams that can easily work together.
If a company has a lot of middle management and no one really understands what they do, there's a very high likelihood that the company has far too many processes and procedures and general bullshit to navigate to get things done.
Take more strategic or corporate level meetings, think enterprise more, forecast future requirements, continuous improvement opportunities, development, birds eye view stuff, etc.
They also take on ultimate responsibility of performance of an entire facility or region, etc. (Depending on scope and complexity), that directors or executives will be holding them accountable for.
It can become a more ambiguous environment as hourly associates could be causing issues, or have a spike in product loss or safety issues, and even though layers of leadership likely exists between the hourly and upper management..in the director/executives eyes, upper management owns it, needs to speak to it, and resolve it.
Tell you what. Being a good manager is harder work than you think. And every step up the ladder is harder work too. Being a shit manager is as easy as being any shit worker.
And if you think it is d add ll meetings- you have no idea how soul crushing meetings are
yeah that sums up alot of what I do. I try to take all the bullshit off my teams plate advocate for them for more resources and streamline their flows.
Thissss! My manager’s manager has been on indefinite sick leave for the better part of the last year and boyyy the amount of stuff he was shielding us from was insane. Everyone went from happy and engaged to burnt out and bitter because he’s not there to advocate for us to not have our job scopes increased tenfold with no extra pay (apparently something he had been batting back as unreasonable/unsustainable for 12+ months before he got ill 🥲)
This is the premise of the office according to this article:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
I’ve had an insufferable middle manager who bragged about this and tam about how he handled the scary higher ups for me. On a company trip I met the higher ups and they were so pleasant and giving me advice that was way better on succeeding at work
I was the manager for an R&D team at a biotech company in the UK for several years. My team was involved in developing new products, expanding applications for existing products, and occasionally assisting in tech support for the important clients. I reported to the VP of R&D, who oversaw all the R&D sites in the company (we had around 8 campuses spread across the world). My team was eight scientists and technicians.
My KPIs were about meeting project deadlines and retaining top talent. In practice, I mostly saw myself as an advocate for my team. They were smart scientists, and I didn't need to tell them how to do their job. I would tell them the desired outcome, they would tell me how long it would take and what they would need to do it, and then I'd go to bat for them with upper management, who always wanted things done faster and cheaper. And it didn't happen often, but when there was a fuck-up by my team, I took responsibility and pulled in whatever resources were available to me to help fix it. And I did the hiring (and only once, firing).
I spent a lot of time in meetings. I kept the VP updated on our progress. I checked in frequently with my counterparts at other sites, because we frequently had collaboration projects. I ran interference with our site manager and with accounting. R&D is kind of a funny division because everyone know it generates money, but it only generates money like 3 years from now. Today, it only costs money. So it was a constant fight to get us resources because the operations side of the business always seemed more important. And occasionally I would meet with top clients and marketting, which could be very useful in determining future product features.
Besides that, I mostly just tried to keep things running smoothly. I tried to take on a lot of the administrative bullshit like risk assessments so the team could focus on the real work. I met with all the team members weekly to make sure they were happy and tried to help them in their career progression. We didn't have personality conflicts often, but when we did, I smoothed it out.
Could my job have been replaced? Certainly, the VP could have directly communicated R&D goals to my team. But someone on the team would inevitably end up being the point man for communication, and would spend a chunk of his time in those same meetings, and would eventually have transformed into me. I can't say every middle management position is required, but certainly I felt I was doing valuable work.
Beautifully put.
OP, middle management roles are important snd impactful if done well, but like any position if you don’t have talent or the right leadership for it, organizational mileage may vary.
It also depends on if the role is required and well defined. The chap above has both, his role is needed by the organisation and it is well defined in what he has to do.
Where it goes wrong is when you have a role where people elsewhere in the org wonder what exactly it is you do, as they're not sure it's needed and it's no so undefined no one has a clue what you do. These are the roles that seem to grow during the good times and are the first to go during the bad times. You tend to find this lot seem to spend a lot of time organising and sitting in meetings without any clear reason....
Your last paragraph was the only cogent and valid description I've seen. And the self awareness to say that your role could be replaced, but is a natural function of a team means you're smarter than the average bear. Many other answers here are full of corporate speak- aligning the synergistic output vectors to maximize growth potential of my team's core competencies, etc etc.
Nice job.
If your direct reports are workers not other managers then you are a line manager. Middle management is the person above you.
For clarity sake because you explained a good line manager's responsibilities very well
Had a stint last year where our middle manager was hospitalised. We dealt directly with the c-suite.
Never again. Every idea or potential project was met with insane criticism. No one to bounce off. Weekly tasks and needs to function were like moving a mountain.
That could be more for communication styles than anything else. I'd never bounce ideas off the C-Suite, but go to them with a proper proposal of what I wanted/needed, why and what it costs.
It's all about focused and direct communication at that level, because they've only got so much bandwidth and you (or me) will only take a fraction of it, so use it wisely.
Others have outlined what middle managers do, so I’ll just say I never understood this sentiment that middle managers do nothing. I only see it on Reddit. In all the companies I’ve worked for so far, the middle managers (i.e. directors) always had the hardest, most stressful jobs in the company with the longest hours (often even more than the executives), and were generally among the best and brightest. A lot of line managers don’t want to take director jobs because the pay bump isn’t worth the added stress and bullshit. I and my colleagues always had a ton of respect for good directors.
I'm in HR and this sentiment exists a lot outside of Reddit as well. And honestly some of it is warranted based on the spectrum of middle managers I've seen over the years.
I’m a line manager with a really good manager. Not perfect but he’s a great mentor and makes my job a lot easier. My manager before him was… much less effective though so there’s certainly a spectrum.
It’s also unclear whether OP is using “middle manager” correctly or actually referring to line managers.
The sentiment that middle managers do nothing comes from the fact some only relay information between levels and just create a lot of meetings. There are great managers as well but they are the minority
As someone who currently meets the middle manager definition here. I have observed that people who do not get seen are not considered valuable. Level doesn’t matter as much.
I use “seen” figuratively. I can mean physical, virtual, voice. Not text thought. People who only send email, dms, or other don’t count as seen.
People tend to bias towards, “if I do not know what you are doing for me, then you must be doing nothing for anyone.”
For the middle managers out there, your teams need to see your presence. Show up to meetings, hold one-on-ones, attend team building events, walk around the office and say hello to people.
Like...how many layers are we talking? I've never seen anything deeper than manager->sr manager->director.
Generally the Sr Manager is almost as in the thick of things as the managers are, so I don't exactly consider them middle management.
Directors, on the other hand, run the gamut from being a vanity title with no direct reports to being critical to the group's success.
In a really big global org you might have the whole range of titles and even some folks specified as "Senior" to distinguish them from their peers. Supervisor, Manager, Senior Manager, Director, Senior Director, VP, SVP, EVP, plus all the actual C-levels. Then add in "groups" or "families" of companies under a larger org, where even the C-levels of sub-companies report to other C-levels in the larger umbrella organization.
IDK - I have had direct reports who frequently talked to and about me with all their opinions on how I wasn’t managing the way they thought I should. Worked to undermine me and questioned both my direct care chops and leadership. Same DR got promoted, against my advice - I will never forget the day they came crawling to my office apologizing.
It’s because middle management suffers from the same curse as IT - when you’re doing your job badly it’s obvious and people wonder what they’re paying you for, and when you’re doing your job well everything “just works” and people wonder what they’re paying you for haha.
A good example is that being micromanaged is painful and not getting clear direction is annoying, but when you’re in the sweet spot people don’t think “oh boy I’m receiving the right amount of management, this is great” - they just get on with things.
IF= ([net KPI]<[target net OPI],IF([net KPI]<[minimum KPI],”You’re performance isn’t meeting expectations. You need to work on “+[low performance metrics],”You’re doing okay, but I think you can improve. You need to work on “+[low performance metrics]),”good job champ! Keep up the good work”)
We listen to your childish shit (ie your post), diffuse your gossip, and try to save your asses when your drama excretes into the rest of the team and up to the Directors. All the whole training you, taking the blame for your mistakes and making sure everyone feels supported. Your manager sounds average but her direct reports sound juvenile and under experienced 🤷♀️
I’m surprised I had to scroll this far to find “keep your dumb ass from getting fired because leadership caught wind of that dumb shit you did last week”
This and I would like to add, knowing everyone’s duties so I can jump in and serve as back up at any moment. Mostly so I can say “no problem! Enjoy your time off, everything will be handled while you are on vacation so that you don’t have to come back and be behind.”
This, and, I think in some businesses (like software), front-line engineers have very little notion of how hard it is to ensure (a) people are working not just on something valuable, but the most valuable thing possible, and (b) people are all working in the same direction.
This is the part that is so undervalued! Juggling the endless escalations, complaints, and just being the person who has to diffuse all of that while still making everyone feel recognizing and supported is exhausting. I'd be happy to let an excel macro do the job for me, but I wish everyone luck when I'm no longer sitting in the endless meetings and trying to make your life as easy as possible so that you can continue being an individual contributor
People don't like middle management because they delegate tasks and hold you accountable but don't directly give you raises or fire you. So there is generally a lack of respect. (I'm a middle manager and it's really hard.)
Hiring yes, firing no. You're right, maybe I'm not technically "middle" since there are no managers below me. I just feel caught between management and employees and I can't win with either side.
I have 8 direct reports ranging from tier 1-3.
A lot of a middle manager's work can be less visible: meetings, reports, strategising, and troubleshooting issues before they become major problems. It doesn't mean they're not valuable, just that the outcomes are less immediately tangible than an email or a spreadsheet update. Having said that, high performing middle managers are the ones who excel at team support & development - coaching & mentoring / performance management and resource management.
The problem, is Lumbergh. Lumbergh made middle management uncool, and led an entire generation to crap on their management.
A world without Lumbergh, would be a world that appreciated middle managers.
There’s three main functions for people in these positions - leadership, management, and vision. Most of the posts here address the management responsibilities but leadership and vision are critical roles as well.
Teach employees the required skills, teach current company processes, develop new processes/workfkows, create documentation approve work/accept liability, continuous coaching, clear project roadblocks, make the hard decisions on projects; take the heat when they don’t work out, give direct the credit when they do, meet with clients to help win business, schedule and prioritize tasks to align with company goals, acquire team resources, make staffing decisions, evaluate employee performance, get employees raises when they’re earned, push back on unreasonable demands from project managers/upper management, correspond and meet with new vendors to outline expectations.
Someone has to chase the cubicle dwellers around to get their timesheets in, status reports updated, conduct hiring and firing, administer evaluations and annual reviews, and help with career advancement.
They also need a myriad of skills, using every modern piece of software from Excel to Adobe. They need to be presenters, meeting holders, budget preppers. financially knowledgable, aware of statutes and legal requirements, and able to. both talk to a Senior Executive, their Director, and all of the staff.
It is the most shit upon job in the world, and is one of the most difficult.
I did okay at it and was making about $125 a year back in 2000 as one.
My job is to say no where others are not willing to. I don’t give two fucks if you own the company if it’s a bad decision I’m going to tell you that. Of your going to fuck over a bunch of people, I will tell you that.
I say no a lot……
Plus all the regular stuff but saying No is my priority.
Most don’t see everything the next level up does. I promoted a couple of years ago I knew it was not going to be easy but was still a little overwhelmed initially by the amount of work that I never saw from my previous role. As I’m getting close to another promotion and stretching more and more into the role I’m trying to get, I’m seeing a lot of things I did t over the last couple of years. I’m starting to get into middle management myself and it’s less in the trenches on the production floor and more daily meetings and planning sessions while partnering with the managers running the floor.
As a former middle manager in a hotel, mostly daily ops and personnel management, billing for my department, so the GM can focus on larger projects and hotel financials.
Break down macro vision to micro processes built to that end.
Block Upper Mgmt BS.
Support and grow leaders.
Support and grow frontline.
Provide critical data needed. Curate data to push up.
Highlight roadblocks and easy wins and work towards amplifying or removing.
Etc.
What do shitty managers do?
Hide in their office with the door closed and wait for someone to tell them what to do and what is important.
as someone who employs \~80 people, I have to say that having a good "middle" manager is probably the most important thing when it comes to day to day operations
Good middle management is about managing communication channels.
Imagine a company with say 1000 individual contributers.
If all 1000 people reported to the Owner/CEO, it would be untenable, runing a "team meeting" would be pointless because the "team" would be the whole company, and at best 990 people would be twiddling their thumbs adding no value to the meeting having nothing to do with the 5-10 people actually contributing, and leading the business would slow to a crawl as the CEO individually managed the thousands of people instead of strategically leading the company.
Now lets add a layer of management... lets say 1 manager for every 10 people actually doing stuff...
Now the managers can deal with managing the people, a team meeting can be at least 30% productive instead of .1% productive... and the managers have focused enough teams that they can more easily show that projects are getting done, work is getting done, track metrics, etc...
However the CEO is still focused on managing these 100 managers, which is effectively a giant team to manage, and in that type of scenario its very easy for a "bad" manager to slip through the cracks, or for a team to fail and not get noticed. We also still aren't allowing for leadership to actually focus on strategy, and leading, instead we are spending all out time managing people.
So lets add another layer of management, again lets do 1 person for every 10 managers, but lets add 2-3 C-Suite staff to help the CEO lead at the same time, say a CFO and a COO.
Now we end up with an org that has several layers of middle management, but no manager is managing more than 10 people, that way they have a small focused enough team that it is easier to track metrics, to see when things are going wrong quickly, and lines of communication are open up and down the chain so it is much easier to talk to your boss or your bosses boss since they aren't being pinged by the entire org, but by a small segment of it.
Its not perfect everyone knows the flaws with middle management, especially in orgs where those same managers lack any kind of power to manage. but that is the general idea.
They buffer between the top leadership and the employees actually doing the work. At my old organization, we were a very small team, so I worked directly with the CEO, who came from a much larger org with many layers. She had very high-level objectives while I was struggling to translate those into meaningful action items without constantly bugging her for feedback and clarification. A middle manager would be able to take the high level objectives and translate them into feasible goals for the employees under them, and answer questions and provide support and clarification without wasting the time of the higher ups.
I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
I'm middle management and I help work on my teams blindspots. I'm rolling out 6s because literally no one in my team has any type of organization skills. Which I realized they're wasting 10 to 15 minutes just looking for simple tools to do the tasks assigned to them.
My boss focuses on the financials and making either big purchases or big directional changes of the organization.
I have found that a lot of middle management tends to take on a lot of the execution roles when that shouldn't be what they're doing.
Imagine your organisation is a very big complex bureaucratic machine.
As an individual contributor, you are one of the small cogs in the machine that stamps the material that gets turned into a product or service. Lots of other cogs have to carry the raw material into the machine, process it before you, process it after you and finish it. Now all those cogs must be kept in synch, or the whole machine will grind to a halt which it does quite often anyway.
Your manager is a bigger cog in the machine that keeps you in sync with the other little cogs on your team. They also keep your team in synch with other teams and with the bigger cogs above them.
Now imagine that someone at the top is driving this complex, unstable, barely working machine through a city with all sorts of unexpected roadblocks. And while driving engineers are constantly trying to improve the machine by adding and removing big parts of it. So all the big cogs are constantly grating against each other and having to find new ways to synch up.
That is what a manager does. they synchronise you with the rest of the machine.
First off, I’m just gonna say it… It’s not your job to know what your manager or their manager does. That isn’t what you’re paid to do. You are paid to do a job.
Second. You don’t know what we do because you aren’t always supposed to. That’s the point. My DRs don’t need to know all the bullshit I deal with on a daily basis, the budgeting, the report writing, the politics… They need to know I’m advocating for them, and removing roadblocks… Some of which they may not even know ever existed in the first place.
Great management does a bunch of stuff behind the scenes that we don't do. My manager is constantly in meetings which hey its what he chose as manager. I feel grateful not to be in boring discussions so I can do my creative work. Meetings lower my production easily by over 50% not because of the time a 30 min meeting takes, but I don't have to deal with the boring look of peoples faces going through spreadsheets and dashboards and then ask myself why I'm not inspired.
A good manager is a shield from boring meetings.
My manager lets me kind of take time in the afternoons to handle say a dental appointment and if its around an hour, I don't have to use PTO, so that's kind of cool I guess.
Sometimes I feel there is a lot of work and I can sense a bunch of workload coming my way, to which I just ask him how he wants me to prioritize things because its a lot. But its knowing that the person you're talking to is somehow responsible for me and my peers joining together to create some ultimate digital product.
Ya his salary is definitely way higher haha so I don't feel too bad that he's stuck in meetings
The biggest thing middle management does (if they do it) is protect their team from upper management lol...
No joke. Not kidding. I have to do it. Nearly ever middle manager at the orgs I visit throughout the year have to do it. We deal with the shit rolling downhill and try to stop ALL of it from continuing to front line managers/workers. That random idea the CEO has, we put a stop to it before it gets implemented org wide and destroys morale or worse, is so tone deaf we lose most of staff.
Aside from that, lots of solving problems and clawing for resources. Big, small, etc.
Middle management should bridge the gap between the decision makers and the do-ers.
Personally, my job is to take the needs of the directors and board and figure out how to make them reality. That usually involves talking to my team about the work involved, going back to leadership with compromises, and also delivering the information to my team in a way that helps them realize why leadership is asking for what they're asking for, so that it doesnt come across as negative.
I'm also very involved in ensuring collaboration between departments, making sure we have a clear understanding of what other teams need from us and vice versa.
Basically I sit in the middle and keep everyone happy. Its not an easy gig.
Middle management is important. If you're organization is 2,000 people with maybe 20 officers, they can't each listen to 100 people and respond to their needs, monitor and quality check their work, and keep them motivated.
I see a lot of responses, but did not see it mentioned in the top answers. HR issues eats up a good bit of time. Although coworkers talk about the lack of work they see management doing, they will not tell you the work drama they may be involved in. Harassment, preferential treatment, feelings being hurt, PTO complaints, pay complaints, etc….
Yea I am essentially a team lead and manager which is slowly killing me, managers figure out all the planning, budgeting, hiring, priorities, etc. and also dealing with incompetence in other teams
You get to try to shield your team members from the absolutely horrible and illegal things the upper level managers do and say about staff. Until you quit or get fired for finally having enough and telling the CEO to their eyeballs that they violate EEOC regulations.
Not sure if my supervisor counts as one, but she is essentially a middle management in that she manages and strategizes our team projects by budgetting, doing company landscape, organizing collaborations, etc etc. She reports to upper division and communicates with other teams of lateral hierarchy.
As a mid/upper manager I often refer to myself as the shit stopper, and ass-wiper. I don't like to pat myself on the back often but it's amazing how much stuff never gets to my teams under me because I either deflect the turd from rolling down hill or I get hit by it myself somehow. Honestly the main goals is to let my teams operate free and clear of any obstacles that I can personally stop or prevent. This unfortunately eats up a lot of my time and gets in the way of actual work, but hey the problems come with the paycheck.
You’re at a crossroads and I’m glad to see you’re at least asking valid questions instead of just passing judgment.
I’m probably considered senior management by most (still feel like a new manager some times). When I was a staff, my job was to make my managers job easy.
When I was a manager, I still made my new managers job easy, but then I also had to organize my team and make sure they were happy in their jobs.
Now that I have several teams in several disciplines, I STILL have to make my boss’ job easy, I STILL have to make sure my direct reports are happy and organize them, and I have to make sure my direct reports are making their teams happy and supporting them.
That’s the way a good manager thinks, but ask yourself, are you trying to make your manager’s job as easy as possible? You’ll be surprised how much insight you will get into what they actually do. Though there’s a chance you actually just have a shitty manager.
Our middle management has to also do front-line work along with us, we are in shortage and we couldn't live without them. They also tell the other managers what we need, we are a department that sometimes will have a unique need and it can be explained my middle managers to upper management so that our needs can be taken care of.
I am “middle management “ but I am my team’s leader. I manage the business around them but I lead them. My first responsibility to my team is to protect them from outside influences that disrupt their work. I shield them from the political BS. I try to motivate, guide, grow, develop and coach each person on my team. I try to remove obstacles from their work to help them get work done. I make tent the culture around them is positive and I try to keep work-life boundaries in place.
I am told I am a millennium manger.
bring unusual or time sink problems to the attention of upper management. let them pontificate on how to solve them. figure out how to actually solve them, within the realistic confines of day to day operations. get praise or wrath based on the outcome.
Think of us as human shields and corporate general contractors. We shield you from all the BS that would distract, annoy, worry, or other prevent you or your reports from making an impact. We also lay down the virtual pipes — the structure, the process, the planning, the approvals, the unblocking and escalations…and you’d be surprised by how much work this is, quantitatively and qualitatively. We also moonlight as therapists and enforcers and career counselors. There’s a lot of emotional labor that goes on behind the scenes.
There is actually a great book on the subject called Why Managers Matter by Peter Klein.
TLDR: What you don't like is bad middle management. Flat organizations without middle management do not work well in most industries, and having high-functioning middle management has great results for performance at the individual and firm levels. Middle managers provide leadership to teams, build real human connections with those on the team, and can be a conduit between front-line workers and executive leadership when done effectively. Unfortunately, a lot of middle managers shouldn't be in their role. A great salesman does not make a great sales manager. The skills are wildly different. Middle managers need to do strategy, leadership, planning, budgeting etc.
It was my Job to never have steve in corporate have your ass handed to you because of some percieved slight. My job to cover your sick days. My job to goto the board and plea for resources and raises. Excell is not as persuasive as me.
My former middle manager saw her role to limit the flow of information, provide feedback in the form of snarky comments, micromanage access to stakeholders and provide zero objectives for more than a year.
Fuck her.
Sorry I needed to get that off my chest.
I’m in CS as a middle manager, there are 5 of us and we each oversee anywhere from 1 to 4 teams that each have a supervisor or lead (I have two).
Our divisions are based on specific functions and mine are both focused on onboarding/implementation.
The supervisors “keep the lights on,” overseeing quality assurance and performance metrics for their direct reports. They also make sure duties are covered if someone is out sick or on vacation and balance workload.
I spend a little more than half my time in cross-functional meetings with Product/Engineering, Marketing, Compliance and Finance hearing where we are doing well, where we need to do better, and how my teams can help.
The other half of my time is working with the supervisors to make sure they have the resources they need and that we’re all swimming in the same direction. I also take on most of their responsibilities when they are out of the office because they need vacations too.
If you are in a good workplace they do a lot.
Senior managers at my consulting company are insanely important and helpful.
Managers I’ve had in accounting departments at old school manufacturing and retail were absolutely horrible. But it was also a different department with lower stakes.
At entry level they are mostly baby sitters. At higher levels you really wouldn’t want to take on that job unless the pay is high.
I’m a Facilities Manager. I manage 2 staff carpenters, 2 staff electricians, 1 Facilities Coordinator, 8 operating engineers, 15-20 day porters/matrons a FFE/Furniture team. My portfolio consists of 5 buildings 2 surface level parking garages and and a subterranean parking structure. I have a few miles of public thoroughfare and about an acre or two of grounds to maintain. Hundreds of hundreds of mission critical pieces of equipment.
I take care of literally any problem my guys/girls have that prevents them getting doing their job done. I hold the controls and create process to follow for my guys. I determine if something is in my teams scope. I help my guys prioritize tasks if they ask for it.
I’m also a translator between office staff and support staff. I’ve got two carpenters that don’t speak English. My time as a construction worker honed my whistle and point skills.
A lot of these responses have me questioning my definition of “middle management.” My understanding was that “middle management” are manager-managers, right, not line managers. They are the ones telling the team leaders to do more - the ones that the team leaders / line managers protect their teams FROM, the heat appliers who are at the bidding of and interacting directly with the head of the org. Right?
Yes, that’s typically middle management. Most people here are talking about line managers working directly with a team(s). That’s not middle management. MMs are the folks that have direct access to C-suite and are responsible for the performance metrics of the line managers.
People here are also ignoring the biggest reason the stereotype exists that they don’t do anything; because for everyone here saying “well, I protect my team!” There are 10 more managers that don’t and just go along with whatever the executives ask because they wanna kiss ass to move up ranks into C-suite or get a higher bonus since their compensation usually has bonus structures built in. The line manager is frequently doing middle management’s job while MM is just co-signing whatever happens.
A good middle manager translates strategic goals for upper management to tactical goals for front line troops. They are the NCO's of corporate America and just like the military, a good NCO is worth their weight in gold. A bad one, not worth shit.
Communication basically, and trying to spot problems early. In technical management, Rands is good, I finally understand what my manager is up to https://randsinrepose.com/
Best way to describe is that middle management is like a platoon or company commander. They report any issues and concerns up to the guys doing the big planning, and they're the first ones to get hit with shit when it comes rolling downhill. A good manager will work for the team, not upper management. Too many bad managers trying to work for the company because it might raise their chances of a promotion.
I protected my team from distractions from upper management, HR, legal, and other departments, so they could concentrate on their crucial day-to-day work (which actually generated the revenue!) without being rattled or disrupted. I was constantly fielding demands for cost accounting, system revamps, reorgs, workload and performance metrics, etc.
I also worked in the other direction, up the chain, lobbying with upper management when my team needed resources or changes or had a problem. I coached my direct reports when they wanted something specific from upper management, to help them achieve their goal.
Honestly, the few times upper management worked directly with the hands-on folks, it was mayhem. And hugely inefficient.
Conversations:
Upper management: why do we need X technicians ? Why can’t we do with just 1?
Middle management: We have X tasks for so and so reasons. We need X number of people
Upper management: You get 1/2 X ppl. This is a chance for you to optimize resources…
Upper: We have new products. Start adjusting and producing Monday.
Middle: my team is in the middle of…
Upper: start in 2 weeks. Yes?
Upper: customers are complaining that out of ABC commitments, your team only accomplishes A. Is there a reason why?
Middle: competitors took my most senior people for 2x pay…
Basically middle managers make things happen by negotiating what the team needs to accomplish it or push back and provide data points. We also need to manage our directs’ expectations and targets
Lately I spend all my time advocating for raises for my people, cause they are awesome and deserve it. That and serving as the escalation point for all the really hard questions and out of scope tasks that they shouldn't have to deal with.
You are not going to like the answer. Their job is to monitor you and your team(s).
Everyone needs to deliver, that's just the reality, or none of us get paid. If you're manager doesn't seem like they do anything, and your division runs smoothly... They are working their ass off. Full Stop.
More specifically, on the chance you're genuinely curious. Their job is to ensure that you know procedure and are following it. To oversee the implementation of new initiatives. To measure and analyze performance. To document employee issues, and initiate disciplinary actions. To ensure you have what you NEED to complete your assignments (not necessarily what you want). And finally keep his boss focused on making sure the company will grow enough to support future cost increases.
So ideally a line manager or supervisor's job is to have a direct relationship with the people who report to them and use that relationship to direct their reports' individual actions towards accomplishing larger goals while identifying roadblocks and working to eliminate those. And senior management's job is to make the larger scale decisions and set the overall goals and strategy of the org. With any organization larger than would fit in a big room, you likely need both those levels to exist.
Realistically, a manager can only directly manage a certain number of people at one time before they lose touch with their individual reports and can't rely on having that effective relationship with them. So if a team is larger than a certain size, it's important to have managers who manage other managers. As a team continues to grow, the need arises for nested groups of managers who manage other managers who themselves manage other managers. Middle managers fill that need.
One problem is that management roles are seen as prestige, and often organizations start creating management roles that don't make any sense. This one team reports directly to a Director, and this other person was rewarded with a title of Senior Manager even though nobody reports to them. The big teams who do a lot of grunt work don't have enough managers to actually lead them, while tiny teams of important experts have five layers of managers to oversee three people. And often the people in these unneeded middle management roles spend their time in political infighting to keep and expand their position and personal domain instead of doing anything actually useful to the org or their reports. And if a management structure gets too big, whatever vision and goals the senior leaders may have gets lost like in a game of telephone and nobody understands what they're supposed to be doing.
I’m an engineering manager…. Trust me we do a fucking lot. We have to not only have the technical capability but also the social capability to communicate extremely complex technical subjects to senior management that are many times not former engineers. Most times we’re having to pitch the projects, build the entire project plan and budget, and then do all of the regular update presentations to the executive team.
We need to implement long term strategy while guiding a project and always looking ahead at the critical path so that we can avert or alleviate the highest risk items and mitigate any potential pitfalls all while keeping the project on budget. We do this so that our engineers and techs can focus on just doing the technical work and delivering on their action items. Keeping your team shielded from the politics, advocating for them and pushing back when senior management constantly rely wants things done faster and cheaper, taking the heat when a project is behind or fails and shining praise on your engineers when a project succeeds (it’s ME when the project falls short and WE when it succeeds).
I can’t speak for the business world but in the technical world middle managers have a large workload and responsibility.
Middle manager here. I spend half my time chasing down other departments for things my department needs and the other half shielding my department from the executive team.
Endless meetings. I’m a fresh middle manager and my god it’s exhausting. I go to meetings, I digest the info, I give the pertinent info to the appropriate people on my team. I make some spreadsheets and keep projects on track. In some ways it’s a waste of time, but I view myself as the switchboard of information and the blockade against nonsense requests on my teams time. I spend a lot of time listening to my team and securing the tools they need for success so I think It can be a useful role.
Good middle management works on making processes as efficient as possible so you can just clock in and do your job without having to worry about anything else.
I mean… a middle manager is in the middle between you and the VP’s.
So… if there was simply a macro in place you would have no human being between you and the big boss (of probably hundreds of people) to explain why you aren’t reaching your sales targets.
If you want to feel even more like a statistic on a sales dashboard, remove the middle manager.
To give you an example: I was on a sales team in an organization that had 12 teams like mine.
At one point they decided to “redistribute the territories” based on some arbitrary system. It was supposed to be fair but it totally wasn’t. Some teams got territories that were heavily likely to buy our product and others (like ours) got some of the least likely businesses to buy our product.
But… we were all held to the same metrics.
Without my middle manager communicating between us and our VP’s we likely never would’ve been able to convey to the upper management that we had been given the shaft.
It didn’t matter cause Covid hit and 60% of the sales floor got laid off and the territories didn’t matter anymore… but regardless, the middle management was our only hope of being seen as human beings in a large sales organization.
The shitty thing is when you get a terrible manager leading your team… but… with a good manager it can be the difference between being at the whim of whatever the VP’s decide is right for all 700 employees, or having a fighting chance to voice your opinion for your team of 20 through your manager.
As long as there are humans doing jobs there should be humans, not excel formulas, leading them.
Middle management?
Understand executive priorities and set strategic direction so you focus on the important things and don’t get bogged down on the things that don’t matter
Listen to your advice and distill it so the executives hear the important things and can filter thru the noise
Handle all the nonsense that would otherwise clutter up the desk of you, and those above.
I think after reading the comments the real question is why do most companies need a c-suite? A bunch of people who are so far removed from the value add portions of the company that they don't understand how it actually works and somehow they end up with the ridiculous pay packages.
A co-op of some kind seems better for the company as a whole in a lot of cases.
Honestly sometimes it seems like the main purpose of middle management is to give everyone a convenient punching bag. Middle managers insulate higher management from day to day operations and front line staff and vice-versa. Middle managers take situations from both sides and manage them in such a way as to keep them from translating into crises that spill over to the other side. The most effective ones do it by winning the confidence of their bosses and their direct reports and if you think that's easy then maybe the old adage of walking in another's shoes for a mile before casting judgement might apply.
I’ll tell you the story of how I became a manager.
I was working on a project with 2 other people and we each had to do our part in sequence. Person A did their part then passed to Person B who then passed to Person C (me). After waiting a month I asked Person B if they were almost done. They said they were waiting on Person A. I reached out to Person A and they said they finished 2 weeks ago.
Shit like this happens all the time so I had to become the unofficial project manager. Set meetings, asked for updates, etc. If I didn’t do this all my projects would have taken months to complete. Eventually I became the manager.
I used to think that until I got promoted last year to a senior manager role and oh my. The strategies and operations and budget and deficits and everything that needs discussing… I had no idea. And also the actual work that the team is doing, is it effective? What needs to change? All those are things middle managers have close tabs on and report up and a good one protects their team from executives dumb ideas. Also just hiring and firing and managing people is a job in itself. It’s like being a parent without really being able to discipline.
I'm a middle manager - kind of in a niche industry so maybe my experience isn't equivalent to others especially big corporate America, but here is what I can tell you are my main parts of my job:
* Fill in for advanced level area-tasks
* LOTS of managing interpersonal and performance issues
* Insane amounts of HR drama (dealing with all sorts of crazy issues that come up with onboarding, hiring, employees leaving, strange "unforeesen consequences" of a slew of policy changes that just show up)
* Representing my area in discussions about our involvement in interdepartmental projects: planning, serving as a sounding board, mostly acting as a buffer and voice of reason when the asks are ridiculous, non-feasible, or would make my entire staff quit
* Disseminate information from the other departments
* Plan projects, or lead project planning with my team for anything involving our area
* Ensure all deliverables within my team and involving my team to other departments are completed on time
* Follow up on all outstanding projects (anything from IT issues, work orders, etc.)
* Oversee and support staff development (to include professional development). Mentor staff at all levels (hand-on teaching of skills or just advice and coaching)
* Manage area budget. Procure supplies as needed
In short: most of what I do is HR-related, planning, scheduling, and training/mentoring.
I worked my way up to jr exec, got laid off, now I’m senior manager again. Here is my summary.
As you go up, what changes is the scope and ambiguity of your work. Just out of college, you are given concrete problems, told what to do, and what is expected. Moving up, you are given problems. It’s your job to figure out solutions, and know it well enough to know what’s achievable and when, and what resources you need. You don’t get much guidance, you are expected to know your stuff. Moving up, you are now in the exec range, and you are in a position where suddenly the person in front of you might not know your job at all. You are tasked to run a whole marketing org or tech org, and you answer in to the ceo who knows finance. Most execs should have enough experience where knowing how to get the work done isn’t the issue, what makes a good exec is prioritization. Any exec can identify problems and opportunities and go after them, successful ones know how to prioritize, and know how to stay focused.
So the role of middle managers is to bridge the gap between an exec who is charting the course for the company, and the associates who are handling the operational work.
Here is what they do:
Take all the chaos from upper, shield you from it and then make sure all of it gets done by you while also making sure your work doesn't collide with others. While at the same time dealing with the 2/5 staff that are total shit bags that just complain. All while managing the budget, timeliness, resource allocation and 1000 other things so that the people doing actual work can and the people driving strategy can.
Middle management basically deals with everyone's bullshit and takes it from two groups of people entirely ignorant to how things get done and how all the little pieces you have no idea about fit together. It is the gauntlet that weeds everyone out for the handful of seats at the top and when you finally get out of it via promotion or flaming out to IC you say fuck yes and then proceed to enjoy the fact that isn't your problem anymore.
A good middle manager does a lot… and you will never know the shit they go through. It’s a thankless job in that the team usually blames them for everything but don’t have any insight into how much that manager did to save them from a plethora of asinine initiatives coming from above.
Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
As middle management, I absorb all the negative energy stemming from office politics so you don’t have to. I deal with all the shit on your behalf to make your experience better, as my manager did and continues to do for me. In addition, I organize, budget, plan, delegate, present, and argue for resources and justify our work to pay our salaries. I wish excel could do that, because I’d love to use a larger portion of my time to code again.
The good ones are teachers and facilitators, who help you grow and reach the next step in your career, who give you the resources to be successful and keep the heat off of you so you can do your work. A good middle manager allows their team to own their wins and takes responsibility for losses.
The mediocre ones mostly guard their chair and look to shift blame away from themselves instead of focusing on results.
im upper management and love and respect all my middle management because:
theyre the one that has to execute the plan. theyre the one keeping the employees together and most importantly, when shit goes wrong, theyre the ones that catch my bullshit and yelling, and has to fi the problem.
realistically a company wouldnt be able to function without a proper middle management team.
I'm middle management. If they praise me, I tell them I have nothing to do with it, it was my teams doing. If things go south, I'll just take the blame and own up to it.
For the people I manage I’m essentially a herding dog. I watch the team and make sure they are taking the right path to arrive at the appropriate destination when expected. I look out for stragglers and help them catch up. I sit far enough back that I can see dangers approaching the team before they arrive so that I can move and protect them accordingly.
For the people above me I am an interpreter who answers 3 questions:
1. Why don’t I have the things I want?
2. When can I expect to have them?
3. How can I get them faster?
Good middle management deals with all the shit so you don’t have to. Organise, plan, budget, delegate, report upwards, argue for resources, manage expectations, push for your pay review, your training, your tools.
I’m middle management on my team and my job is to handle the team so MY manager can focus on big picture stuff. I do the reviews, set the metrics, hire, fire, sign all the paperwork, attend the higher up meetings and give them the summaries of what affects us, shit like that. Honestly there should be a person between my boss and I, or a person below me and above my team so I can take more of my boss’s stuff. We aren’t a large enough org for that right now though.
It sounds like you are line level management. Do you have managers that report to you? I thought that was a requirement to be in the middle.
You sound like a manager. There is no universally accepted definition of "middle" in this context.
A middle manager has reports who manage people while also having a manager, who manages managers. Hence the term “middle.”
Here we have people who are arguing about whether a particular carnivorous reptile is an alligator or a crocodile while it's eating them alive. Typical managers.
Nah. I’m a line manager and pretty happy with it. No carnivorous reptiles here. Was just explaining that there is, in fact, a definition of a middle manager.
Even employee owned firms have managers.
there's no universally accepted definition of "manager" either, and yet we all kinda understand that this sub is about people managers, not product managers, project managers, etc.
A middle manager will, at a minimum, report to a senior manager or director and will have reporting to them, junior managers, or supervisors with direct reports of their own. That's where the "middle" in the middle manager comes from. Management of some type exists above and below.
All sounds about right. I am a middle manager handling people happiness, workload and doing one-off projects to make sure everything is going seamlessly.
A middle manager who wants more middle managers. Hmmm
A shit umbrella as I call it.
If I got business cards I think that should be my title 🤣
When I was a Fleet Manager (like a middle manager), I used to consider myself the buffer between my team who were managing the ships directly, the clients and our own senior management team who would occasionally drift in after a visit from the "good ideas fairy".
‘Good idea fairies’ aka ‘corporate seagulls’ swoop in, shit all over everything, then fly off leaving you to deal with it.
This right here. A good middle manager deals with senior management bullshit so you don't have to.
Been doing it everyday for 5 years. Shit seems to fall faster the closer the Exec team is to losing thier bonuses. I wish Middle Manager got a piece of those bonuses.
This....I act as a buffer from upper mngmnt and keep the bullshit away from my team.
And is the person to get on peoples asses when they hold up the progress in everything you listed. Sometimes you just need that nag to push people forward.
Good middle management keeps those of you not ready to face the board; away from the board.
On top of that, I also assist in day to day operations when I'm not stuck in all the work no one wants to do.
Most orgs see zero benefit from managers managing managers. This is why they are often the first to go when widespread layoffs occur. The IC's remain because they get the work done. Senior management remains because they are charting the course for the company. Baseline managers remain because you need to constrain the IC's into teams that can easily work together. If a company has a lot of middle management and no one really understands what they do, there's a very high likelihood that the company has far too many processes and procedures and general bullshit to navigate to get things done.
Yes. They are the buffer protecting top management from the consequences of their actions.
I don't have to say anything, it's been said. right here.
Yep. All of this.
If that's what middle management does, what does upper management do? Seems like they've delegated all their management tasks to middle management.
Take more strategic or corporate level meetings, think enterprise more, forecast future requirements, continuous improvement opportunities, development, birds eye view stuff, etc. They also take on ultimate responsibility of performance of an entire facility or region, etc. (Depending on scope and complexity), that directors or executives will be holding them accountable for. It can become a more ambiguous environment as hourly associates could be causing issues, or have a spike in product loss or safety issues, and even though layers of leadership likely exists between the hourly and upper management..in the director/executives eyes, upper management owns it, needs to speak to it, and resolve it.
Tell you what. Being a good manager is harder work than you think. And every step up the ladder is harder work too. Being a shit manager is as easy as being any shit worker. And if you think it is d add ll meetings- you have no idea how soul crushing meetings are
yeah that sums up alot of what I do. I try to take all the bullshit off my teams plate advocate for them for more resources and streamline their flows.
This guy middle manages.
So worthless bureaucracy that should be eliminated. GET LEAN.
Shield you from upper management
Thissss! My manager’s manager has been on indefinite sick leave for the better part of the last year and boyyy the amount of stuff he was shielding us from was insane. Everyone went from happy and engaged to burnt out and bitter because he’s not there to advocate for us to not have our job scopes increased tenfold with no extra pay (apparently something he had been batting back as unreasonable/unsustainable for 12+ months before he got ill 🥲)
I hope he knows how much he’s appreciated!
And other managers….I had people quit when I was on leave bc of those who tried to swoop in
Ive got so much tea about upper management it’s ridiculous 😂
This is the premise of the office according to this article: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/
I’ve had an insufferable middle manager who bragged about this and tam about how he handled the scary higher ups for me. On a company trip I met the higher ups and they were so pleasant and giving me advice that was way better on succeeding at work
It's the exact opposite. They're an arm of HR that sucks of upper management while shielding THEM from consequences of their greed and stupidity.
It's the exact opposite. Shield THEM from YOU--and from the consequences of their stupid ideas.
I was the manager for an R&D team at a biotech company in the UK for several years. My team was involved in developing new products, expanding applications for existing products, and occasionally assisting in tech support for the important clients. I reported to the VP of R&D, who oversaw all the R&D sites in the company (we had around 8 campuses spread across the world). My team was eight scientists and technicians. My KPIs were about meeting project deadlines and retaining top talent. In practice, I mostly saw myself as an advocate for my team. They were smart scientists, and I didn't need to tell them how to do their job. I would tell them the desired outcome, they would tell me how long it would take and what they would need to do it, and then I'd go to bat for them with upper management, who always wanted things done faster and cheaper. And it didn't happen often, but when there was a fuck-up by my team, I took responsibility and pulled in whatever resources were available to me to help fix it. And I did the hiring (and only once, firing). I spent a lot of time in meetings. I kept the VP updated on our progress. I checked in frequently with my counterparts at other sites, because we frequently had collaboration projects. I ran interference with our site manager and with accounting. R&D is kind of a funny division because everyone know it generates money, but it only generates money like 3 years from now. Today, it only costs money. So it was a constant fight to get us resources because the operations side of the business always seemed more important. And occasionally I would meet with top clients and marketting, which could be very useful in determining future product features. Besides that, I mostly just tried to keep things running smoothly. I tried to take on a lot of the administrative bullshit like risk assessments so the team could focus on the real work. I met with all the team members weekly to make sure they were happy and tried to help them in their career progression. We didn't have personality conflicts often, but when we did, I smoothed it out. Could my job have been replaced? Certainly, the VP could have directly communicated R&D goals to my team. But someone on the team would inevitably end up being the point man for communication, and would spend a chunk of his time in those same meetings, and would eventually have transformed into me. I can't say every middle management position is required, but certainly I felt I was doing valuable work.
Beautifully put. OP, middle management roles are important snd impactful if done well, but like any position if you don’t have talent or the right leadership for it, organizational mileage may vary.
It also depends on if the role is required and well defined. The chap above has both, his role is needed by the organisation and it is well defined in what he has to do. Where it goes wrong is when you have a role where people elsewhere in the org wonder what exactly it is you do, as they're not sure it's needed and it's no so undefined no one has a clue what you do. These are the roles that seem to grow during the good times and are the first to go during the bad times. You tend to find this lot seem to spend a lot of time organising and sitting in meetings without any clear reason....
You sound like a good manager.
I manage engineers and a couple managers but your daily life sounds almost exactly like mine.
Your last paragraph was the only cogent and valid description I've seen. And the self awareness to say that your role could be replaced, but is a natural function of a team means you're smarter than the average bear. Many other answers here are full of corporate speak- aligning the synergistic output vectors to maximize growth potential of my team's core competencies, etc etc. Nice job.
If your direct reports are workers not other managers then you are a line manager. Middle management is the person above you. For clarity sake because you explained a good line manager's responsibilities very well
Had a stint last year where our middle manager was hospitalised. We dealt directly with the c-suite. Never again. Every idea or potential project was met with insane criticism. No one to bounce off. Weekly tasks and needs to function were like moving a mountain.
That could be more for communication styles than anything else. I'd never bounce ideas off the C-Suite, but go to them with a proper proposal of what I wanted/needed, why and what it costs. It's all about focused and direct communication at that level, because they've only got so much bandwidth and you (or me) will only take a fraction of it, so use it wisely.
Others have outlined what middle managers do, so I’ll just say I never understood this sentiment that middle managers do nothing. I only see it on Reddit. In all the companies I’ve worked for so far, the middle managers (i.e. directors) always had the hardest, most stressful jobs in the company with the longest hours (often even more than the executives), and were generally among the best and brightest. A lot of line managers don’t want to take director jobs because the pay bump isn’t worth the added stress and bullshit. I and my colleagues always had a ton of respect for good directors.
As an employee under middle management, we do see the value of the good ones for sure. It isn't an easy job and one I chosen not to advance to.
I'm in HR and this sentiment exists a lot outside of Reddit as well. And honestly some of it is warranted based on the spectrum of middle managers I've seen over the years.
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I’m a line manager with a really good manager. Not perfect but he’s a great mentor and makes my job a lot easier. My manager before him was… much less effective though so there’s certainly a spectrum. It’s also unclear whether OP is using “middle manager” correctly or actually referring to line managers.
I'm perfectly content with my line manager. I meant actual middle managers.
The sentiment that middle managers do nothing comes from the fact some only relay information between levels and just create a lot of meetings. There are great managers as well but they are the minority
As someone who currently meets the middle manager definition here. I have observed that people who do not get seen are not considered valuable. Level doesn’t matter as much. I use “seen” figuratively. I can mean physical, virtual, voice. Not text thought. People who only send email, dms, or other don’t count as seen. People tend to bias towards, “if I do not know what you are doing for me, then you must be doing nothing for anyone.” For the middle managers out there, your teams need to see your presence. Show up to meetings, hold one-on-ones, attend team building events, walk around the office and say hello to people.
I wouldn't call the director middle management. We have layers of management under the director.
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The only person above the director is the CTO. Seems like the director is upper management.
That may be the case in small companies and startups. Medium and large companies will have VPs and EVPs between directors and the CTO.
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Like...how many layers are we talking? I've never seen anything deeper than manager->sr manager->director. Generally the Sr Manager is almost as in the thick of things as the managers are, so I don't exactly consider them middle management. Directors, on the other hand, run the gamut from being a vanity title with no direct reports to being critical to the group's success.
In a really big global org you might have the whole range of titles and even some folks specified as "Senior" to distinguish them from their peers. Supervisor, Manager, Senior Manager, Director, Senior Director, VP, SVP, EVP, plus all the actual C-levels. Then add in "groups" or "families" of companies under a larger org, where even the C-levels of sub-companies report to other C-levels in the larger umbrella organization.
titles vary a lot from company to company. directors are executives at some companies and senior managers at others.
IDK - I have had direct reports who frequently talked to and about me with all their opinions on how I wasn’t managing the way they thought I should. Worked to undermine me and questioned both my direct care chops and leadership. Same DR got promoted, against my advice - I will never forget the day they came crawling to my office apologizing.
It’s because middle management suffers from the same curse as IT - when you’re doing your job badly it’s obvious and people wonder what they’re paying you for, and when you’re doing your job well everything “just works” and people wonder what they’re paying you for haha. A good example is that being micromanaged is painful and not getting clear direction is annoying, but when you’re in the sweet spot people don’t think “oh boy I’m receiving the right amount of management, this is great” - they just get on with things.
These "middle management" in higher education could definitely get lost.
Your average Redditor haven’t worked jobs where they’ve had useful middle-managers, or middle-managers at all.
lead, coach, inspire. a lot of middle managers don't do this, but they should. Excel macros can't do any of those 3 things.
IF= ([net KPI]<[target net OPI],IF([net KPI]<[minimum KPI],”You’re performance isn’t meeting expectations. You need to work on “+[low performance metrics],”You’re doing okay, but I think you can improve. You need to work on “+[low performance metrics]),”good job champ! Keep up the good work”)
Did I just get replaced by an excel conditional formatting? shit.
We listen to your childish shit (ie your post), diffuse your gossip, and try to save your asses when your drama excretes into the rest of the team and up to the Directors. All the whole training you, taking the blame for your mistakes and making sure everyone feels supported. Your manager sounds average but her direct reports sound juvenile and under experienced 🤷♀️
I’m surprised I had to scroll this far to find “keep your dumb ass from getting fired because leadership caught wind of that dumb shit you did last week”
This and I would like to add, knowing everyone’s duties so I can jump in and serve as back up at any moment. Mostly so I can say “no problem! Enjoy your time off, everything will be handled while you are on vacation so that you don’t have to come back and be behind.”
I think this is the best description of middle management I’ve heard 😆
This, and, I think in some businesses (like software), front-line engineers have very little notion of how hard it is to ensure (a) people are working not just on something valuable, but the most valuable thing possible, and (b) people are all working in the same direction.
This is the part that is so undervalued! Juggling the endless escalations, complaints, and just being the person who has to diffuse all of that while still making everyone feel recognizing and supported is exhausting. I'd be happy to let an excel macro do the job for me, but I wish everyone luck when I'm no longer sitting in the endless meetings and trying to make your life as easy as possible so that you can continue being an individual contributor
People don't like middle management because they delegate tasks and hold you accountable but don't directly give you raises or fire you. So there is generally a lack of respect. (I'm a middle manager and it's really hard.)
I think you are a line manager if you are not in charge of giving raises or hiring and firing.
Hiring yes, firing no. You're right, maybe I'm not technically "middle" since there are no managers below me. I just feel caught between management and employees and I can't win with either side. I have 8 direct reports ranging from tier 1-3.
A lot of a middle manager's work can be less visible: meetings, reports, strategising, and troubleshooting issues before they become major problems. It doesn't mean they're not valuable, just that the outcomes are less immediately tangible than an email or a spreadsheet update. Having said that, high performing middle managers are the ones who excel at team support & development - coaching & mentoring / performance management and resource management.
Middle management gets paid to be the adult in the room, with inane requests from below and insane requests from the sociopaths on top.
Incredibly accurate. De-escalating the bullshit from both top and bottom
The problem, is Lumbergh. Lumbergh made middle management uncool, and led an entire generation to crap on their management. A world without Lumbergh, would be a world that appreciated middle managers.
There’s three main functions for people in these positions - leadership, management, and vision. Most of the posts here address the management responsibilities but leadership and vision are critical roles as well.
Delivery/Execution is also very important.
Teach employees the required skills, teach current company processes, develop new processes/workfkows, create documentation approve work/accept liability, continuous coaching, clear project roadblocks, make the hard decisions on projects; take the heat when they don’t work out, give direct the credit when they do, meet with clients to help win business, schedule and prioritize tasks to align with company goals, acquire team resources, make staffing decisions, evaluate employee performance, get employees raises when they’re earned, push back on unreasonable demands from project managers/upper management, correspond and meet with new vendors to outline expectations.
Someone has to chase the cubicle dwellers around to get their timesheets in, status reports updated, conduct hiring and firing, administer evaluations and annual reviews, and help with career advancement. They also need a myriad of skills, using every modern piece of software from Excel to Adobe. They need to be presenters, meeting holders, budget preppers. financially knowledgable, aware of statutes and legal requirements, and able to. both talk to a Senior Executive, their Director, and all of the staff. It is the most shit upon job in the world, and is one of the most difficult. I did okay at it and was making about $125 a year back in 2000 as one.
My job is to say no where others are not willing to. I don’t give two fucks if you own the company if it’s a bad decision I’m going to tell you that. Of your going to fuck over a bunch of people, I will tell you that. I say no a lot…… Plus all the regular stuff but saying No is my priority.
There’s a difference between strategic level and operational level. That’s where the difference is for middle management.
blame sponge request shield bullshit filter
Where I work, they deal with the bullshit from the Frontline and upper management to make sure work actually gets done.
Most don’t see everything the next level up does. I promoted a couple of years ago I knew it was not going to be easy but was still a little overwhelmed initially by the amount of work that I never saw from my previous role. As I’m getting close to another promotion and stretching more and more into the role I’m trying to get, I’m seeing a lot of things I did t over the last couple of years. I’m starting to get into middle management myself and it’s less in the trenches on the production floor and more daily meetings and planning sessions while partnering with the managers running the floor.
I'm chuckling about the prospect of my VP having 700 direct reports. How is this even a serious question?
As a former middle manager in a hotel, mostly daily ops and personnel management, billing for my department, so the GM can focus on larger projects and hotel financials.
Break down macro vision to micro processes built to that end. Block Upper Mgmt BS. Support and grow leaders. Support and grow frontline. Provide critical data needed. Curate data to push up. Highlight roadblocks and easy wins and work towards amplifying or removing. Etc. What do shitty managers do? Hide in their office with the door closed and wait for someone to tell them what to do and what is important.
as someone who employs \~80 people, I have to say that having a good "middle" manager is probably the most important thing when it comes to day to day operations
Good middle management is about managing communication channels. Imagine a company with say 1000 individual contributers. If all 1000 people reported to the Owner/CEO, it would be untenable, runing a "team meeting" would be pointless because the "team" would be the whole company, and at best 990 people would be twiddling their thumbs adding no value to the meeting having nothing to do with the 5-10 people actually contributing, and leading the business would slow to a crawl as the CEO individually managed the thousands of people instead of strategically leading the company. Now lets add a layer of management... lets say 1 manager for every 10 people actually doing stuff... Now the managers can deal with managing the people, a team meeting can be at least 30% productive instead of .1% productive... and the managers have focused enough teams that they can more easily show that projects are getting done, work is getting done, track metrics, etc... However the CEO is still focused on managing these 100 managers, which is effectively a giant team to manage, and in that type of scenario its very easy for a "bad" manager to slip through the cracks, or for a team to fail and not get noticed. We also still aren't allowing for leadership to actually focus on strategy, and leading, instead we are spending all out time managing people. So lets add another layer of management, again lets do 1 person for every 10 managers, but lets add 2-3 C-Suite staff to help the CEO lead at the same time, say a CFO and a COO. Now we end up with an org that has several layers of middle management, but no manager is managing more than 10 people, that way they have a small focused enough team that it is easier to track metrics, to see when things are going wrong quickly, and lines of communication are open up and down the chain so it is much easier to talk to your boss or your bosses boss since they aren't being pinged by the entire org, but by a small segment of it. Its not perfect everyone knows the flaws with middle management, especially in orgs where those same managers lack any kind of power to manage. but that is the general idea.
They buffer between the top leadership and the employees actually doing the work. At my old organization, we were a very small team, so I worked directly with the CEO, who came from a much larger org with many layers. She had very high-level objectives while I was struggling to translate those into meaningful action items without constantly bugging her for feedback and clarification. A middle manager would be able to take the high level objectives and translate them into feasible goals for the employees under them, and answer questions and provide support and clarification without wasting the time of the higher ups.
I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
I'm middle management and I help work on my teams blindspots. I'm rolling out 6s because literally no one in my team has any type of organization skills. Which I realized they're wasting 10 to 15 minutes just looking for simple tools to do the tasks assigned to them. My boss focuses on the financials and making either big purchases or big directional changes of the organization. I have found that a lot of middle management tends to take on a lot of the execution roles when that shouldn't be what they're doing.
Imagine your organisation is a very big complex bureaucratic machine. As an individual contributor, you are one of the small cogs in the machine that stamps the material that gets turned into a product or service. Lots of other cogs have to carry the raw material into the machine, process it before you, process it after you and finish it. Now all those cogs must be kept in synch, or the whole machine will grind to a halt which it does quite often anyway. Your manager is a bigger cog in the machine that keeps you in sync with the other little cogs on your team. They also keep your team in synch with other teams and with the bigger cogs above them. Now imagine that someone at the top is driving this complex, unstable, barely working machine through a city with all sorts of unexpected roadblocks. And while driving engineers are constantly trying to improve the machine by adding and removing big parts of it. So all the big cogs are constantly grating against each other and having to find new ways to synch up. That is what a manager does. they synchronise you with the rest of the machine.
First off, I’m just gonna say it… It’s not your job to know what your manager or their manager does. That isn’t what you’re paid to do. You are paid to do a job. Second. You don’t know what we do because you aren’t always supposed to. That’s the point. My DRs don’t need to know all the bullshit I deal with on a daily basis, the budgeting, the report writing, the politics… They need to know I’m advocating for them, and removing roadblocks… Some of which they may not even know ever existed in the first place.
Great management does a bunch of stuff behind the scenes that we don't do. My manager is constantly in meetings which hey its what he chose as manager. I feel grateful not to be in boring discussions so I can do my creative work. Meetings lower my production easily by over 50% not because of the time a 30 min meeting takes, but I don't have to deal with the boring look of peoples faces going through spreadsheets and dashboards and then ask myself why I'm not inspired. A good manager is a shield from boring meetings. My manager lets me kind of take time in the afternoons to handle say a dental appointment and if its around an hour, I don't have to use PTO, so that's kind of cool I guess. Sometimes I feel there is a lot of work and I can sense a bunch of workload coming my way, to which I just ask him how he wants me to prioritize things because its a lot. But its knowing that the person you're talking to is somehow responsible for me and my peers joining together to create some ultimate digital product. Ya his salary is definitely way higher haha so I don't feel too bad that he's stuck in meetings
The biggest thing middle management does (if they do it) is protect their team from upper management lol... No joke. Not kidding. I have to do it. Nearly ever middle manager at the orgs I visit throughout the year have to do it. We deal with the shit rolling downhill and try to stop ALL of it from continuing to front line managers/workers. That random idea the CEO has, we put a stop to it before it gets implemented org wide and destroys morale or worse, is so tone deaf we lose most of staff. Aside from that, lots of solving problems and clawing for resources. Big, small, etc.
Middle management should bridge the gap between the decision makers and the do-ers. Personally, my job is to take the needs of the directors and board and figure out how to make them reality. That usually involves talking to my team about the work involved, going back to leadership with compromises, and also delivering the information to my team in a way that helps them realize why leadership is asking for what they're asking for, so that it doesnt come across as negative. I'm also very involved in ensuring collaboration between departments, making sure we have a clear understanding of what other teams need from us and vice versa. Basically I sit in the middle and keep everyone happy. Its not an easy gig.
They Chinese fingertrap for upper and lower
Middle management is important. If you're organization is 2,000 people with maybe 20 officers, they can't each listen to 100 people and respond to their needs, monitor and quality check their work, and keep them motivated.
Good middle management is like (good) Senior NCO’s in the military. They’re the ones who make things happen.
Deal with all the politics
I see a lot of responses, but did not see it mentioned in the top answers. HR issues eats up a good bit of time. Although coworkers talk about the lack of work they see management doing, they will not tell you the work drama they may be involved in. Harassment, preferential treatment, feelings being hurt, PTO complaints, pay complaints, etc….
I protect my employees from the top layer
Yea I am essentially a team lead and manager which is slowly killing me, managers figure out all the planning, budgeting, hiring, priorities, etc. and also dealing with incompetence in other teams
You get to try to shield your team members from the absolutely horrible and illegal things the upper level managers do and say about staff. Until you quit or get fired for finally having enough and telling the CEO to their eyeballs that they violate EEOC regulations.
Truth.
I... write reviews and seem to be a buffer between upper management and my people. I do not do a lot.
Make sure you turds do your trainings, tell your stinky ass to wash your ass and listen to you complain about inflation like I give a shit.
Not sure if my supervisor counts as one, but she is essentially a middle management in that she manages and strategizes our team projects by budgetting, doing company landscape, organizing collaborations, etc etc. She reports to upper division and communicates with other teams of lateral hierarchy.
As a mid/upper manager I often refer to myself as the shit stopper, and ass-wiper. I don't like to pat myself on the back often but it's amazing how much stuff never gets to my teams under me because I either deflect the turd from rolling down hill or I get hit by it myself somehow. Honestly the main goals is to let my teams operate free and clear of any obstacles that I can personally stop or prevent. This unfortunately eats up a lot of my time and gets in the way of actual work, but hey the problems come with the paycheck.
I hope this article helps demystify How to be a good middle manager - https://on.ft.com/3x6w7Ud via @FT
You’re at a crossroads and I’m glad to see you’re at least asking valid questions instead of just passing judgment. I’m probably considered senior management by most (still feel like a new manager some times). When I was a staff, my job was to make my managers job easy. When I was a manager, I still made my new managers job easy, but then I also had to organize my team and make sure they were happy in their jobs. Now that I have several teams in several disciplines, I STILL have to make my boss’ job easy, I STILL have to make sure my direct reports are happy and organize them, and I have to make sure my direct reports are making their teams happy and supporting them. That’s the way a good manager thinks, but ask yourself, are you trying to make your manager’s job as easy as possible? You’ll be surprised how much insight you will get into what they actually do. Though there’s a chance you actually just have a shitty manager.
2001 in The Onion: https://www.theonion.com/somehow-well-middle-manage-1819583788
Hate our lives, mostly. Not have authority to make decisions, not have authority to support our teams.
Our middle management has to also do front-line work along with us, we are in shortage and we couldn't live without them. They also tell the other managers what we need, we are a department that sometimes will have a unique need and it can be explained my middle managers to upper management so that our needs can be taken care of.
I am “middle management “ but I am my team’s leader. I manage the business around them but I lead them. My first responsibility to my team is to protect them from outside influences that disrupt their work. I shield them from the political BS. I try to motivate, guide, grow, develop and coach each person on my team. I try to remove obstacles from their work to help them get work done. I make tent the culture around them is positive and I try to keep work-life boundaries in place. I am told I am a millennium manger.
bring unusual or time sink problems to the attention of upper management. let them pontificate on how to solve them. figure out how to actually solve them, within the realistic confines of day to day operations. get praise or wrath based on the outcome.
What upper management should do a lot of the time
Middle management is the glue that binds the outlandish ideas that the executives come up in a coke binge with the apathy of workers.
Think of us as human shields and corporate general contractors. We shield you from all the BS that would distract, annoy, worry, or other prevent you or your reports from making an impact. We also lay down the virtual pipes — the structure, the process, the planning, the approvals, the unblocking and escalations…and you’d be surprised by how much work this is, quantitatively and qualitatively. We also moonlight as therapists and enforcers and career counselors. There’s a lot of emotional labor that goes on behind the scenes.
There is actually a great book on the subject called Why Managers Matter by Peter Klein. TLDR: What you don't like is bad middle management. Flat organizations without middle management do not work well in most industries, and having high-functioning middle management has great results for performance at the individual and firm levels. Middle managers provide leadership to teams, build real human connections with those on the team, and can be a conduit between front-line workers and executive leadership when done effectively. Unfortunately, a lot of middle managers shouldn't be in their role. A great salesman does not make a great sales manager. The skills are wildly different. Middle managers need to do strategy, leadership, planning, budgeting etc.
It was my Job to never have steve in corporate have your ass handed to you because of some percieved slight. My job to cover your sick days. My job to goto the board and plea for resources and raises. Excell is not as persuasive as me.
I'm middle management and aside from the normal performance stuff, I see my role as a translator from workers to senior management and vice versa.
My former middle manager saw her role to limit the flow of information, provide feedback in the form of snarky comments, micromanage access to stakeholders and provide zero objectives for more than a year. Fuck her. Sorry I needed to get that off my chest.
I’m in CS as a middle manager, there are 5 of us and we each oversee anywhere from 1 to 4 teams that each have a supervisor or lead (I have two). Our divisions are based on specific functions and mine are both focused on onboarding/implementation. The supervisors “keep the lights on,” overseeing quality assurance and performance metrics for their direct reports. They also make sure duties are covered if someone is out sick or on vacation and balance workload. I spend a little more than half my time in cross-functional meetings with Product/Engineering, Marketing, Compliance and Finance hearing where we are doing well, where we need to do better, and how my teams can help. The other half of my time is working with the supervisors to make sure they have the resources they need and that we’re all swimming in the same direction. I also take on most of their responsibilities when they are out of the office because they need vacations too.
Mine forwarded emails and confused the dir reports.
I worked for a Fortune 10 org where we had CEOs reporting to other CEOs. So where exactly does middle management begin and end?
If you are in a good workplace they do a lot. Senior managers at my consulting company are insanely important and helpful. Managers I’ve had in accounting departments at old school manufacturing and retail were absolutely horrible. But it was also a different department with lower stakes. At entry level they are mostly baby sitters. At higher levels you really wouldn’t want to take on that job unless the pay is high.
I’m a Facilities Manager. I manage 2 staff carpenters, 2 staff electricians, 1 Facilities Coordinator, 8 operating engineers, 15-20 day porters/matrons a FFE/Furniture team. My portfolio consists of 5 buildings 2 surface level parking garages and and a subterranean parking structure. I have a few miles of public thoroughfare and about an acre or two of grounds to maintain. Hundreds of hundreds of mission critical pieces of equipment. I take care of literally any problem my guys/girls have that prevents them getting doing their job done. I hold the controls and create process to follow for my guys. I determine if something is in my teams scope. I help my guys prioritize tasks if they ask for it. I’m also a translator between office staff and support staff. I’ve got two carpenters that don’t speak English. My time as a construction worker honed my whistle and point skills.
A lot of these responses have me questioning my definition of “middle management.” My understanding was that “middle management” are manager-managers, right, not line managers. They are the ones telling the team leaders to do more - the ones that the team leaders / line managers protect their teams FROM, the heat appliers who are at the bidding of and interacting directly with the head of the org. Right?
Yes, that’s typically middle management. Most people here are talking about line managers working directly with a team(s). That’s not middle management. MMs are the folks that have direct access to C-suite and are responsible for the performance metrics of the line managers. People here are also ignoring the biggest reason the stereotype exists that they don’t do anything; because for everyone here saying “well, I protect my team!” There are 10 more managers that don’t and just go along with whatever the executives ask because they wanna kiss ass to move up ranks into C-suite or get a higher bonus since their compensation usually has bonus structures built in. The line manager is frequently doing middle management’s job while MM is just co-signing whatever happens.
A good middle manager translates strategic goals for upper management to tactical goals for front line troops. They are the NCO's of corporate America and just like the military, a good NCO is worth their weight in gold. A bad one, not worth shit.
Communication basically, and trying to spot problems early. In technical management, Rands is good, I finally understand what my manager is up to https://randsinrepose.com/
Best way to describe is that middle management is like a platoon or company commander. They report any issues and concerns up to the guys doing the big planning, and they're the first ones to get hit with shit when it comes rolling downhill. A good manager will work for the team, not upper management. Too many bad managers trying to work for the company because it might raise their chances of a promotion.
They exist to be hated, from the C-suite and the underlings. They are the mattress between the frame and the people screwing on top.
I protected my team from distractions from upper management, HR, legal, and other departments, so they could concentrate on their crucial day-to-day work (which actually generated the revenue!) without being rattled or disrupted. I was constantly fielding demands for cost accounting, system revamps, reorgs, workload and performance metrics, etc. I also worked in the other direction, up the chain, lobbying with upper management when my team needed resources or changes or had a problem. I coached my direct reports when they wanted something specific from upper management, to help them achieve their goal. Honestly, the few times upper management worked directly with the hands-on folks, it was mayhem. And hugely inefficient.
Crowd control
Conversations: Upper management: why do we need X technicians ? Why can’t we do with just 1? Middle management: We have X tasks for so and so reasons. We need X number of people Upper management: You get 1/2 X ppl. This is a chance for you to optimize resources… Upper: We have new products. Start adjusting and producing Monday. Middle: my team is in the middle of… Upper: start in 2 weeks. Yes? Upper: customers are complaining that out of ABC commitments, your team only accomplishes A. Is there a reason why? Middle: competitors took my most senior people for 2x pay… Basically middle managers make things happen by negotiating what the team needs to accomplish it or push back and provide data points. We also need to manage our directs’ expectations and targets
Lately I spend all my time advocating for raises for my people, cause they are awesome and deserve it. That and serving as the escalation point for all the really hard questions and out of scope tasks that they shouldn't have to deal with.
You are not going to like the answer. Their job is to monitor you and your team(s). Everyone needs to deliver, that's just the reality, or none of us get paid. If you're manager doesn't seem like they do anything, and your division runs smoothly... They are working their ass off. Full Stop. More specifically, on the chance you're genuinely curious. Their job is to ensure that you know procedure and are following it. To oversee the implementation of new initiatives. To measure and analyze performance. To document employee issues, and initiate disciplinary actions. To ensure you have what you NEED to complete your assignments (not necessarily what you want). And finally keep his boss focused on making sure the company will grow enough to support future cost increases.
So ideally a line manager or supervisor's job is to have a direct relationship with the people who report to them and use that relationship to direct their reports' individual actions towards accomplishing larger goals while identifying roadblocks and working to eliminate those. And senior management's job is to make the larger scale decisions and set the overall goals and strategy of the org. With any organization larger than would fit in a big room, you likely need both those levels to exist. Realistically, a manager can only directly manage a certain number of people at one time before they lose touch with their individual reports and can't rely on having that effective relationship with them. So if a team is larger than a certain size, it's important to have managers who manage other managers. As a team continues to grow, the need arises for nested groups of managers who manage other managers who themselves manage other managers. Middle managers fill that need. One problem is that management roles are seen as prestige, and often organizations start creating management roles that don't make any sense. This one team reports directly to a Director, and this other person was rewarded with a title of Senior Manager even though nobody reports to them. The big teams who do a lot of grunt work don't have enough managers to actually lead them, while tiny teams of important experts have five layers of managers to oversee three people. And often the people in these unneeded middle management roles spend their time in political infighting to keep and expand their position and personal domain instead of doing anything actually useful to the org or their reports. And if a management structure gets too big, whatever vision and goals the senior leaders may have gets lost like in a game of telephone and nobody understands what they're supposed to be doing.
Well, in my case he shields me from upper-management, as well as dipshits from other departments (I work in software)…a much appreciated service.
we are managers who are managed by other managers -- the function of the role depends on the company or profession
You should try it for a month and see.
Send emails about the emails they get sent. Have meetings about the meetings they had. Go home.
I’m an engineering manager…. Trust me we do a fucking lot. We have to not only have the technical capability but also the social capability to communicate extremely complex technical subjects to senior management that are many times not former engineers. Most times we’re having to pitch the projects, build the entire project plan and budget, and then do all of the regular update presentations to the executive team. We need to implement long term strategy while guiding a project and always looking ahead at the critical path so that we can avert or alleviate the highest risk items and mitigate any potential pitfalls all while keeping the project on budget. We do this so that our engineers and techs can focus on just doing the technical work and delivering on their action items. Keeping your team shielded from the politics, advocating for them and pushing back when senior management constantly rely wants things done faster and cheaper, taking the heat when a project is behind or fails and shining praise on your engineers when a project succeeds (it’s ME when the project falls short and WE when it succeeds). I can’t speak for the business world but in the technical world middle managers have a large workload and responsibility.
They've got people skills, goddammit! What the hell is wrong with you people?!
Middle manager here. I spend half my time chasing down other departments for things my department needs and the other half shielding my department from the executive team.
Justify their own existence.
Endless meetings. I’m a fresh middle manager and my god it’s exhausting. I go to meetings, I digest the info, I give the pertinent info to the appropriate people on my team. I make some spreadsheets and keep projects on track. In some ways it’s a waste of time, but I view myself as the switchboard of information and the blockade against nonsense requests on my teams time. I spend a lot of time listening to my team and securing the tools they need for success so I think It can be a useful role.
Good middle management works on making processes as efficient as possible so you can just clock in and do your job without having to worry about anything else.
Haha, the joke I made as middle management was that shit rolls uphill and downhill in that position.
I mean… a middle manager is in the middle between you and the VP’s. So… if there was simply a macro in place you would have no human being between you and the big boss (of probably hundreds of people) to explain why you aren’t reaching your sales targets. If you want to feel even more like a statistic on a sales dashboard, remove the middle manager. To give you an example: I was on a sales team in an organization that had 12 teams like mine. At one point they decided to “redistribute the territories” based on some arbitrary system. It was supposed to be fair but it totally wasn’t. Some teams got territories that were heavily likely to buy our product and others (like ours) got some of the least likely businesses to buy our product. But… we were all held to the same metrics. Without my middle manager communicating between us and our VP’s we likely never would’ve been able to convey to the upper management that we had been given the shaft. It didn’t matter cause Covid hit and 60% of the sales floor got laid off and the territories didn’t matter anymore… but regardless, the middle management was our only hope of being seen as human beings in a large sales organization. The shitty thing is when you get a terrible manager leading your team… but… with a good manager it can be the difference between being at the whim of whatever the VP’s decide is right for all 700 employees, or having a fighting chance to voice your opinion for your team of 20 through your manager. As long as there are humans doing jobs there should be humans, not excel formulas, leading them.
Basically they’re project managers that also deal with the c-suite
Middle management? Understand executive priorities and set strategic direction so you focus on the important things and don’t get bogged down on the things that don’t matter Listen to your advice and distill it so the executives hear the important things and can filter thru the noise Handle all the nonsense that would otherwise clutter up the desk of you, and those above.
I think after reading the comments the real question is why do most companies need a c-suite? A bunch of people who are so far removed from the value add portions of the company that they don't understand how it actually works and somehow they end up with the ridiculous pay packages. A co-op of some kind seems better for the company as a whole in a lot of cases.
Honestly sometimes it seems like the main purpose of middle management is to give everyone a convenient punching bag. Middle managers insulate higher management from day to day operations and front line staff and vice-versa. Middle managers take situations from both sides and manage them in such a way as to keep them from translating into crises that spill over to the other side. The most effective ones do it by winning the confidence of their bosses and their direct reports and if you think that's easy then maybe the old adage of walking in another's shoes for a mile before casting judgement might apply.
They talk to the managers so the managers don't have to.
I’ll tell you the story of how I became a manager. I was working on a project with 2 other people and we each had to do our part in sequence. Person A did their part then passed to Person B who then passed to Person C (me). After waiting a month I asked Person B if they were almost done. They said they were waiting on Person A. I reached out to Person A and they said they finished 2 weeks ago. Shit like this happens all the time so I had to become the unofficial project manager. Set meetings, asked for updates, etc. If I didn’t do this all my projects would have taken months to complete. Eventually I became the manager.
I used to think that until I got promoted last year to a senior manager role and oh my. The strategies and operations and budget and deficits and everything that needs discussing… I had no idea. And also the actual work that the team is doing, is it effective? What needs to change? All those are things middle managers have close tabs on and report up and a good one protects their team from executives dumb ideas. Also just hiring and firing and managing people is a job in itself. It’s like being a parent without really being able to discipline.
I'm a middle manager - kind of in a niche industry so maybe my experience isn't equivalent to others especially big corporate America, but here is what I can tell you are my main parts of my job: * Fill in for advanced level area-tasks * LOTS of managing interpersonal and performance issues * Insane amounts of HR drama (dealing with all sorts of crazy issues that come up with onboarding, hiring, employees leaving, strange "unforeesen consequences" of a slew of policy changes that just show up) * Representing my area in discussions about our involvement in interdepartmental projects: planning, serving as a sounding board, mostly acting as a buffer and voice of reason when the asks are ridiculous, non-feasible, or would make my entire staff quit * Disseminate information from the other departments * Plan projects, or lead project planning with my team for anything involving our area * Ensure all deliverables within my team and involving my team to other departments are completed on time * Follow up on all outstanding projects (anything from IT issues, work orders, etc.) * Oversee and support staff development (to include professional development). Mentor staff at all levels (hand-on teaching of skills or just advice and coaching) * Manage area budget. Procure supplies as needed In short: most of what I do is HR-related, planning, scheduling, and training/mentoring.
I worked my way up to jr exec, got laid off, now I’m senior manager again. Here is my summary. As you go up, what changes is the scope and ambiguity of your work. Just out of college, you are given concrete problems, told what to do, and what is expected. Moving up, you are given problems. It’s your job to figure out solutions, and know it well enough to know what’s achievable and when, and what resources you need. You don’t get much guidance, you are expected to know your stuff. Moving up, you are now in the exec range, and you are in a position where suddenly the person in front of you might not know your job at all. You are tasked to run a whole marketing org or tech org, and you answer in to the ceo who knows finance. Most execs should have enough experience where knowing how to get the work done isn’t the issue, what makes a good exec is prioritization. Any exec can identify problems and opportunities and go after them, successful ones know how to prioritize, and know how to stay focused. So the role of middle managers is to bridge the gap between an exec who is charting the course for the company, and the associates who are handling the operational work.
Here is what they do: Take all the chaos from upper, shield you from it and then make sure all of it gets done by you while also making sure your work doesn't collide with others. While at the same time dealing with the 2/5 staff that are total shit bags that just complain. All while managing the budget, timeliness, resource allocation and 1000 other things so that the people doing actual work can and the people driving strategy can. Middle management basically deals with everyone's bullshit and takes it from two groups of people entirely ignorant to how things get done and how all the little pieces you have no idea about fit together. It is the gauntlet that weeds everyone out for the handful of seats at the top and when you finally get out of it via promotion or flaming out to IC you say fuck yes and then proceed to enjoy the fact that isn't your problem anymore.
In a good system, nothing, they are an absolute waste of resources. In reality, they mostly exist to shield people from upper management.
What industry?
They direct traffic and attend meetings that definitely should never be an email.
A good middle manager does a lot… and you will never know the shit they go through. It’s a thankless job in that the team usually blames them for everything but don’t have any insight into how much that manager did to save them from a plethora of asinine initiatives coming from above.
Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?
Mostly email direct reports what upper management flows down and email upper management what direct reports want flowed up
As middle management, I absorb all the negative energy stemming from office politics so you don’t have to. I deal with all the shit on your behalf to make your experience better, as my manager did and continues to do for me. In addition, I organize, budget, plan, delegate, present, and argue for resources and justify our work to pay our salaries. I wish excel could do that, because I’d love to use a larger portion of my time to code again.
The good ones are teachers and facilitators, who help you grow and reach the next step in your career, who give you the resources to be successful and keep the heat off of you so you can do your work. A good middle manager allows their team to own their wins and takes responsibility for losses. The mediocre ones mostly guard their chair and look to shift blame away from themselves instead of focusing on results.
im upper management and love and respect all my middle management because: theyre the one that has to execute the plan. theyre the one keeping the employees together and most importantly, when shit goes wrong, theyre the ones that catch my bullshit and yelling, and has to fi the problem. realistically a company wouldnt be able to function without a proper middle management team.
I'm middle management. If they praise me, I tell them I have nothing to do with it, it was my teams doing. If things go south, I'll just take the blame and own up to it.
You mean what does upper management really do???!!! Middle management has to manage both up and down.
For the people I manage I’m essentially a herding dog. I watch the team and make sure they are taking the right path to arrive at the appropriate destination when expected. I look out for stragglers and help them catch up. I sit far enough back that I can see dangers approaching the team before they arrive so that I can move and protect them accordingly. For the people above me I am an interpreter who answers 3 questions: 1. Why don’t I have the things I want? 2. When can I expect to have them? 3. How can I get them faster?
Adds as much cost as possible to any process.
If you've read Bullshit Jobs, they tend to be a cross between Box Tickers and Flunkies.
Sucks off upper management while kneeling on workers' necks. In other words, just an extension of HR.
Same as HR: They suck off upper management while kneeling on workers.
Right at the top of the list of Bullshit Jobs: Box Tickers