Why middle management is key in uncertainty

Long seen as a burden by consultants and CEO, middle-management is how an organization remains connected to the changing reality

Middle management is the unloved part of management. For years, the literature and the press have celebrated either the ones at the top, the visionary CEO who guides the organization through disruptions, or the ones at the bottom, the creative hero, the lonely entrepreneur, who shakes the organization out of its torpor and makes it innovative. In the middle is a shapeless and anonymous mass of middle managers, whose only contribution seems to be to "resist change" through incomprehension, hostility, or lack of information. Accusing middle management of being the problem of corporate transformation is commonplace in the "enlightened" circles of top managers, consultants, and academics.

This hostility is not new. Already in the 1990s, waves of "re-engineering" and "delayering" were aimed at making organizations leaner. The elimination of intermediate levels of management, seen as bureaucratic and without added value, was for years the alpha and omega of the transformation drive. More recently, a new wave of this approach has emerged with the so-called "freedom form", “liberated” or holacratic corporation. As the term suggests, the belief here is that the intermediate levels lock individuals in, and restrict their initiative. They must be “freed” from middle managers.

What all these approaches have in common, however, is that they are based on a simplistic, even utopian vision of the organization, one which ignores its politics and complexity. Historically, if middle management levels were created, it was because they fulfilled a useful function, that of coordinating the various tasks created by the division of labor in the large company, and to do so as close to the field as possible. The key to middle management is indeed that it is a management of proximity.

In a world where uncertainty reigns, this proximity is of crucial importance. Strategy, as it is still mainly conceived, consists of top management drawing up an action plan based on an ambitious vision and clear objectives, and the rest of the organization implementing this plan. In a relatively stable world, this model works well, but in an uncertain world, there is a good chance that between the time the plan is conceived and the time it is implemented, reality has changed considerably. There is a great risk of getting stuck in options that are quickly obsolete.

In an uncertain world, there can no longer be a single vision, a single objective, starting from the top and working down to the bottom in a mechanical way. There is a multiplicity of situations whose complexity is unmanageable by top management alone.

Link to the changing reality

Only the organization has the capacity to keep a dynamic and creative link with the living and rapidly changing reality. This link must therefore be decentralized by delegating it to the intermediate layers of the organization, i.e. to middle management.

Because it exerts its action close to the field, and thus allows for the development of multiple options rather than a risky monolithic choice, middle management makes it possible to take advantage of the organization's complexity, rather than suffer from it. It enables a better response to the unexpected, as the crisis of 2020 amply demonstrated, by combining both autonomous initiative-taking and judgment, on the one hand, and the deep connection with the rest of the organization, on the other; a far cry from the solitary intrapreneur who works against the organization.

This is not to reopen the old centralized versus decentralized debate. The role of top management remains paramount. But in a world of uncertainty, seeing the organization through a Cartesian model composed of a management who thinks and an army of individuals who execute, free of intermediate levels seen as obstacles, is dangerous. It is time for senior management to realize that, if well managed, their middle management is not a burden, but rather an asset that they would be well advised to take advantage of.