Key Takeaways
Middle management is not disappearing but transforming from operational oversight to human-centric leadership.
AI, hybrid work and systemic volatility redefine the value creation role of managers.
Removing this layer without redesign raises burnout, fragmentation, and cultural erosion.
Future skills shift from authority to connection, translation, and adaptive leadership.
Core Message
Middle managers remain mission-critical, but their value shifts from supervision to strategic translation, human coherence, cultural stability and adaptive meaning-making.
Who hasn’t heard the old stories about the paralyzing layer of the enterprise? Not a cost-cutting exercise goes by without the brake-pedal pushers and naysayers on the middle floors being targeted. The criticism became more pronounced when everyone was talking about agility and breaking down hierarchies. This phase has now come to an end, or at least has taken a long pause, as times have become more uncertain, and fears of recession have returned. As a result, many management teams are no longer in the mood for participatory experiments but expect everyone to roll up their sleeves and do more to increase productivity.
It is still a little unclear what middle management, which until recently stood in the way of the desired reduction in hierarchy, should do now. First, they are expected to help increase productivity; second, they are expected to provide guidance in a time of general uncertainty; and third, they are expected to drive digitization. All this under enormous cost pressure.
You can try to ask middle management to do all this, but they won’t want to and won’t be able to if the song of the paralyzing layer continues to be sung. We desperately need an appreciation initiative for middle management, and I don’t mean just praise, but an appreciation of the value of these leaders.
This does not mean a return to the old, transactional, command-and-control approaches to management. No company has ever become more competitive through more control and more power. What we need is a new definition of the role of leaders in the tension between strategic goals and the need of employees to find orientation in a general sense of uncertainty.
A general sense of uncertainty, as we are currently experiencing in many areas, usually leads to collective exhaustion, and there are already clear signs of this. Before this exhaustion becomes even more pronounced, we need a leadership team that does not allow itself to be infected by the tendency toward exhaustion, but instead takes on a strong, new leadership role in which it leads not from the front, as in the past, but from the back. It is a leadership in which excellence and humility are not contradictory, and in which the demands on oneself are always at least as high as those on others.
To achieve this, we must understand the value of such leadership and, above all, adjust the rules of promotion. As long as we talk about social skills but still favour those with the greatest technical expertise when it comes to promotions, we will not make the breakthrough. We need managers who, before setting out on a difficult mountain hike with their insecure employees, can give them a sense of what it is like to stand at the summit and have the effort of the climb pay off. If they can only define, measure and control performance goals, they will hardly reach the summit with their employees, and certainly not over and over again.
How do scholars and other experts look at the future of Middle Management?
1.1. What’s the Future of Middle Management?
(Gretchen Gavett & Vasundhara Sawhney, Harvard Business Review, April 2025)
Despite recurring predictions of its demise, middle management remains sizable and vital. The article notes that the share of middle managers in the U.S. workforce grew from ~9.2 % in 1983 to ~13 % in 2022. It argues that technology and flatter structures are forcing a redefinition, not elimination, of the role. Middle managers are increasingly acting as translators of strategy, cultural anchors, and human connectors. As routine tasks get automated, their value lies in sense-making, facilitating change, and amplifying human judgment.
Middle management isn’t disappearing, it’s evolving. The transformation requires new competencies (e.g. digital fluency, coaching, interpretive leadership) rather than just cost cutting.
1.2. Is there still value in the role of managers?
(Deloitte Insights, April 2025)
Deloitte questions both extremes, wholly eliminating managers or keeping them unchanged, and proposes reinventing the role. They argue that AI and other support systems can offload the administrative burden, freeing managers to focus on:
- developing, coaching, motivating and nurturing their people
- redesigning work and optimizing human–machine interaction
- enabling agility, strategic problem solving, and innovation
However, they warn that radical flattening (“unbossing”) can introduce ambiguities in decision rights, new bureaucracies, or shadow leadership dynamics. Future middle management must pivot away from control tasks toward relational, strategic, and design-oriented roles.
1.3. Burnout By Design: How Cutting Middle Management Affects Company Culture
(Tracy Lawrence, Forbes, April 2025)
This article explores the unintended cultural and operational consequences of removing layers of middle management. Among the effects:
- Rising burnout, because remaining managers absorb more work and pressure
- Loss of coaching, feedback, and mentorship that middle managers often provide
- Weaker communication, morale decline, and increased strain on employees and leadership
Cutting middle management “in design” rather than transforming it may backfire. Use it to balance enthusiasm for flattening with the human risks involved.
1.4. Middle Managers: The Overlooked Leaders Who Hold Organizations Together
(Dr. Cynthia J. Young, Forbes, September 2025)
This more recent article highlights how middle managers serve as stabilizers, connecting strategy to execution, holding teams accountable, and influencing engagement. It argues that organizations that fail to recognize and support this layer risk losing alignment, agility, and coherence.
Middle managers often do the work of “making things run” in organizations, even when they’re not visible.
1.5. The Middle Manager of the Future: More Coaching, Less Commanding
(Ben Rand, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, February 2024)
Analysis of job postings (35 million) reveals increasing demand for midlevel managers with coaching, facilitation, and change skillsrather than traditional command-and-control attributes. The article suggests that managerial success will increasingly depend on enabling team performance, removing obstacles, and dynamically reconfiguring work.
Future middle managers will require less directive, more enabling profiles and training.
1.6. The Future of Middle Management
(Brian Hancock, Lucia Rahilly, Bill Schaninger, McKinsey, August 2023)
McKinsey emphasizes that middle managers continue to be “the single biggest determinant of employee satisfaction, performance, and perceptions of well-being.” Yet, much of their time is still consumed by administrative burden (roughly 25 % is said to be “admin work”). In the context of increasing complexity, volatility, and AI augmentation, McKinsey (and affiliated authors) argue the role should shift toward coaching, strategy translation, and enabling autonomy.
Both the importance of middle managers and the need to free them (through redesign and support) from administrative overload is important.
1.7. Middle Management Is the Key to Sustainability
(Andrew Winston, Paul Polman & Jeff Seabright, Harvard Business Review, Nov/Dec 2023)
This article positions middle managers as critical levers in embedding sustainability into the core operations of HR, procurement, marketing, finance, R&D, etc. Because they operate close to execution, they have the influence to integrate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices in daily decisions.
Beyond digital and application of AI, middle managers can also drive sustainability, making them pivotal not just in performance but also in ethical, long-term transformations.
