The death of middle management?

Freed From Desire

The Guardian called it ‘Conscious unbossing’, the lack of interest amongst younger workers to become a boss.

According to research by recruitment company Robert Walters, 52% of Gen Z professionals do not want to take on a middle management position in their career.

Now, why would that be, I wonder?

Is it that hardly anyone gets training to be a manager?

You can’t change a light bulb or put a poster up on the wall without having ladder training but being responsible for the work and wellbeing of fellow humans - just go for it! You’ll figure it out and hopefully not damage too many of them. Or you won’t, and you’ll be one of the 50-odd percent of bosses who they’d take a paycut to escape from.

Is it that you have expectations placed on you from above and below? Your bosses give you ‘stretch’ targets whilst your staff come to you with demands for their pay and rations or better working conditions.

Is it that you have to translate between the gobbledygook that passes for strategy that passed down from on high and things you can tell your people to do that you hope will deliver the results you’ve been asked to produce?

Is that you have to do all this management stuff and still do your own job?

Is it that you don’t have anyone you can complain to and feel rather isolated?

Is it because 75% of middle managers say they feel “overwhelmed, stressed or burnt out”?

I’ve written about ‘the squeezed middle’ before and how middle managers are set up to fail. The current confusion as organisations stagger towards new ways of working makes things worse, because ‘hybrid’ is this ill-defined stop-gap that middle managers have to figure out on the fly and make work.

For no thanks and not much more money. Just a flashier title and an earlier ulcer.

69% of those surveyed said being a middle manager was “too high stress, low reward”. They’re not stupid, these kids.

And they’ve seen what it’s done to their parents.

Red Alert

A director at Robert Walters did admit that this ‘could spell trouble for employers later down the line”.

I’ll say.

Middle management is essential to how most organisations work today. It is the connective issue between the ‘brain’ and the ‘body’ of the organisation, between the ‘thinking’ at the top of the pyramid and the ‘doing’ at the bottom. (I use these terms very loosely. If I could type sarcastically, I would have it turned up full here.)

In the command-and-control hierarchies that still dominate the organisational landscape today, middle management has to translate between top and bottom, turning the high-faulting language of corporate directives into things people can actually do, and reporting back the experience and gripes from the ‘workface’ in a way that is palatable to senior management. Without them, these vast edifices of ordered efficiency would simply be unable to function. Top and bottom would be screaming at each other in mutually incomprehensible languages.

Of course, there’s some bloat in middle-management, there are empire-builders and obsessive bureaucrats who inflate the number of middle managers. However, a lot of the growth is a response to the growing complexity of making a rigid and inflexible system work in an increasingly dynamic environment. It’s not a very effective response but adding management is about the only one they’ve got.

At the same time, there are rolling initiatives to ‘thin out’ middle management (see Amazon’s Return To Office policy that I covered last week). Senior Leaders always think there’s slack but still they seem to need more and more middle managers.

The whole system relies on a steady supply of employees who move up through the ranks, replacing those who have burnt out, left, been sacked or, increasingly rarely, retired. If that supply is now reducing by 50%, that’s going to “spell trouble for employers later down the line”.

The question is how much trouble?

And how soon?

Ray Of Light

Is this the thing that will force change on organisations and make them move to more modern, agile and sustainable structures?

Not the overwhelming body of evidence that points in this direction but a shortage of middle management ‘cannon fodder’ that causes the system to collapse from within?

It’s often the case that change happens for mundane and unexpected reasons. It’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It’s a single raindrop that causes the lake to overtop the dam. Unintended consequences of seeemingly small actions.

In this case, it’s the refusal to adapt and an over-reliance on the ‘coping’ mechanism of the middle management layer, leading to a shortage of candidates to be middle managers.

Shortages drive innovation and adoption of more modern practices.

Let’s hope that’s the case here.

Why Does It Always Rain On Me?

Now, you may be thinking to yourself that a shortage of middle managers shouldn’t be a problem if organisations are continually trying to reduce the number of middle managers. It should be just what they want.

We need to examine why they think they need fewer middle managers and how they are going about reducing their number.

Many organisational leaders see middle managers as a cost overhead, a sign of inefficiency, bureaucracy and stodge. They believe middle managers stifle innovation and are a barrier to getting their brilliant ideas implemented properly. As an example, Amazon’s Andy Jassy states that they need to reduce the number of managers to get back to operating more like a start-up.

These leaders feel like they pull a lever, then a lot later something happens that is a bit like what they wanted but too small, or too cautious, or too confused or just bad. Sometimes they pull the lever and they feel like nothing happens at all. They see the lever is not directly connected to the ‘action end’ of things but is connected through this box called middle management.

They conclude the problem must be in the box, that middle management must be getting in the way. A bit of tinkering about in there (thinning out) will solve the problem and all their brilliant ideas will be brilliantly implemented in super-double-quick time.

Their assumption is that middle management takes away from what they are doing, that it absorbs the energy they give through pulling the lever and that’s why the outcome at the other end is so weak.

It never occurs to them that middle management is actually additive to what they are doing, that it does a heroic job of turning a random and confusing yank of an undefined lever into something that actually happens that is vaguely in line with what they said they wanted. It never occurs to them that the box of middle management actually is the connection. Without it, the lever does nothing.

Following their false diagnosis, they decide to reduce numbers but they don’t actually change anything else, so the remaining managers just have to shoulder an increased workload. They stagger on for a while but then begin to fall over, either burnt out or checked out, or driven out to a competitor. Performance starts to nose-dive so they have to go and find some more managers to run the various recovery programmes and, 18 months to two year later, they find themselves back at square one.

By which time, they have a new CEO who decides there’s too many managers …

This Is How We Do It

The good news is that when these organisations start to cast around for some ideas, they’ll find there are plenty of companies out there who have created more modern, responsive and successful ways of organising and working.

However, there won’t be a nice simple model that they can adopt, and their favourite BigCon won’t have the answers. They’ll have to figure out their own solution for themselves, and implement it themselves too, because being able to self-correct and adapt is part of the capability they need for the future.

Having said that there isn’t a single model, it’s my view that the future structure of organisations will be diversified and autonomous groups, connected through networked applications and shared core functions, pursuing common but broadly expressed objectives. There will be more self-management of work, more asynchronous work, more distributed and diverse teams, greater transparency and access to information on demand. More leading and coaching and less managing and directing.

Whatever the organisation cooks up, I think it will include more of these ingredients.

And it will be more evenly shared out between everyone.

Some organisations will refuse to do this (especially the last point), whist others will simply not be able to pull it off. That’s why I’m expecting some big names to fail.