How senior leaders can unlock the power of middle managers

Executive overview

Middle managers are treated as a waystation on the way to executive leadership — a permafrost layer that blocks good ideas. That framing is wrong and costly. About 70–75% of an individual employee's satisfaction is determined by their direct manager.

Middle managers hold the organisation's knowledge, relationships, and talent — ignoring them is not a neutral choice, it is a strategic failure.

The player-coach trap

• Managers spend roughly 1.5 days per week on individual contributor tasks.
• The problem is not doing IC work — it is doing the wrong IC work: tasks their team should own.
• Managers are rational: they focus on what is rewarded, and organisations reward deliverables, not people outcomes.
• Until people leadership is measured and incentivised, it will remain an afterthought.
• Do not outsource people leadership to HR — feedback and development are the manager's responsibility.

Why the wrong people become managers

• Organisations default to promoting top individual contributors into management roles.
• When asked if they want to manage, most people say no or they are unsure.
• When asked if management is the only path to advancement, almost everyone says yes.
• The result: people who do not want to manage pursue it anyway because there is no alternative track.
• Fix requires creating genuine career paths for rockstar ICs alongside a distinct path for people-focused managers.

The destination-role mindset shift

• Management is framed as a pass-through, not a destination — this drives out the best managers.
• Promoting a great people manager into an executive role removes their impact from where it matters most.
• Instead: reward high-performing managers with larger scope, harder challenges, and better compensation — without requiring them to leave the role.
• Senior leaders must define clearly what they want managers doing. This clarity typically exists at the top and at the front line but breaks down in the middle.

Re-bundling jobs and redistributing talent

• Re-bundling jobs means examining the tasks that make up a role and reassembling them to drive better outcomes — especially relevant as gen AI automates 10–20% of many knowledge tasks.
• This is not a one-time exercise; it requires always-on sensing of what work is best done by people versus machines.
• Managers closest to the work are best placed to lead this re-bundling — but are almost never involved.
• Example: a grocery retailer rethinking cashier roles as technology changes the checkout experience — insight came from managers, not executives.
• Example: oil rig executives spent significant money on retention bonuses and surveys to address high attrition. The fix turned out to be larger freezers for home-cooked meals. Managers knew; no one asked.

What senior leaders must change

• Start by walking the leadership team through the lived experience of a manager — the plight of the manager.
• Changing mindset is not enough; the system must change. Do not add more to a manager's plate — restructure what is on it.
• Decision-hoarding at the top is a common failure mode. Delegating decisions is not a one-time act; it collapses under pressure unless the system supports it.
• The return-to-office debate is a live example: mandating days from the top ignores what managers and teams actually know about when in-person time adds value.

Structuring hybrid work through managers

• Rather than dictating office days, define the work: when does the team need to co-create, touch physical product, or ideate together?
• Managers can re-bundle the week: collaborative and coaching work in person, asynchronous and heads-down work remotely.
• Flexibility at the fringes — variable start times, leaving early for a child's event, catching up later — is the top retention driver for Gen Z and the second for millennials.
• Accountability should be to outcomes, not presence. Managers are the right level to set and enforce that accountability.

Developing managers

• Approximately 90% of employees roll up to a manager, making managers the primary change agents in any organisation.
• Most training spend goes to onboarding, compliance, and product rollouts — management development is severely underfunded.
• Development cannot be a one-time event or a promotion gift. It must be continuous, embedded in the flow of work.
• Managers also need equity awareness: people are less likely to give development feedback to those who do not look like them, which systematically disadvantages women and people of colour.
• Building promotion parity and equitable development requires explicit capability-building, not good intentions.