Stop Bashing The Middle Management
By: Matthias Mölleney
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.
