How empowering middle management can benefit all your employees

Middle managers are the meat in the corporate sandwich – with the powerful and typically opposing forces of the workforce and the C-suite to satisfy. An impossible, thankless, and often unpopular job.

Our research shows that experienced leaders lack a clear sense of identity, role definition, and autonomy. The role of middle manager is still a stepping stone to the C-suite, occupying the no man’s land between workforce and executive – rather than a proud destination of its own. That proud destination is what we call the B-suite – a far cry from the pointy-headed boss of Dilbert fame.

• Managerial responsibilities have doubled compared to those of individual contributors, largely because middle managers are still doing significant amounts of individual contributor work as well as their management responsibilities – a symptom of poor role definition.
• As a result, many of them are highly paid administrators and are perceived as little more than that by those above and those below – and they hate it. One leader in our research went as far as to state, “I’m a mere go-between without enough influence.”
• Less than 10 per cent of them have control over their balance sheet, and few of them have budget delegations over $10,000 – severely limiting how commercial, or decisive, they can be.

How disempowering. No wonder one in five are considering leaving leadership behind.

Many organisations are frustrated with this narrative – they believe that they do empower their mid-level leaders but that those leaders are failing to step up and show accountability.

Well, it takes two to tango – we need to rewire both how organisations leverage their middle managers as well as how individual middle managers operate – and most organisations are focused only on the latter (if they are focused at all).

There are three telltale signs that will help you identify whether you are genuinely empowering your leaders or not:

• Strategy and priorities – Are your middle managers trained to develop their functional strategy, and are they included in setting the corporate or divisional one? If not, you are not empowering them to be strategic – and you have no chance of your workforce understanding their connection to strategy, because their leaders don’t.
• Expectations and negotiations – Are your middle managers expected merely to preside over execution, or do you expect them to negotiate priorities with their peers and their executives? If it’s the former, you’re simply breeding very efficient order-takers – not impact-makers.
• Engage and include – Middle managers are senior enough to understand what you’re trying to accomplish and can give you valuable feedback on the capacity and capability of their workforce to deliver it, so use them as your viability counsellors, not just as a channel between decision and execution.

The impact of empowering your mid-level leaders is felt at every level of your organisation:

• Frontline employees – Staff feel more connected to strategy, fully informed communications and explanations and, as a result, are more purposeful and motivated. Workload is reprioritised with clarity, and capability and capacity are more balanced.
• Top talent – With more autonomy and better perspective, mid-level leaders feel less compelled to churn and hoard their talent – and become more active, valuable talent magnets, spotters, coaches and advocates – better mitigating the talent risks facing most organisations today.
• Future leaders – Future leaders stop seeing the role of middle managers as overworked, unappreciated and underpaid. As a result of this perception (reality?), only 38 per cent of people are interested in being a people manager, and with 20 per cent of existing managers considering opting out of management, this is a huge succession planning risk for your business.
• Experts – Empowered middle managers respond more quickly and decisively to obstacles and ambiguity, allowing experts to generate faster innovations and solutions – ultimately, unblocking revenue flow and increasing innovation and adaptability.
• Executive – Many boards are concerned that the C-suite is too in the weeds and not focusing sufficiently well on a number of issues – with more functional responsibility devolved to the B-suite, the C-suite can finally focus on the things that only they can do, such as cyber security, environmental, social and governance (ESG), global forecasts. They can stop working in the business and start working on the business.

Mid-level leaders need a defined and empowered role in order to become B-suite leaders with C-suite impact, and successfully navigating that shift will benefit all aspects of your organisation.

Rebecca Houghton is the founder of BoldHR and architect of B-Suite Leaders.