“I’d rather meet with my team member than meet a deadline.”
That’s what the senior leader of a Boston-based consulting firm told me when I asked her how she manages to deal with so many competing priorities on any given day.
Not all managers can easily make that choice, given the headwinds they’re constantly facing. At the same time they’re being squeezed by (rapidly shifting) executive directives and the pressure to meet (often unrealistic) KPIs, they’ve also had to navigate their teams from a co-located office space to an all-virtual workplace, to a hybrid environment, and now back to the office.
Add to that, many are struggling to retain their best employees while targeting others for layoffs in industries beset by economic uncertainty. All of this while struggling to complete their own projects at the same time.
And then there’s the advent of AI, which they fear may reduce or eliminate their roles altogether. In fact, Gartner predicts that by next year, 20% of organizations will use AI to eliminate more than half of their current middle management positions.
It’s no wonder that when it comes to engagement, managers have experienced the sharpest decline. A new Gallup survey showed that managers’ engagement scores dropped from 30% to 27%, while individual contributors’ scores remained flat at 18%. Engagement by managers under 35 and female managers showed the most precipitous drops.
So rather than eliminate middle managers, how can organizations elevate and enable middle managers to play a meaningful role as true agents of change?
Middle manager as change agent
⭐️ Middle managers help translate strategic shifts to actions on the ground. They help inspire, influence, inform and encourage employees to adapt to change. C-level emails and town hall meetings do relatively little to motivate and galvanize employees, especially when difficult decisions or big changes are on the horizon.
⭐️ Opportunities for career growth and professional development are consistently cited as a key factor when it comes to employee retention. Managers are a vital conduit, recommending and connecting employees to opportunities for learning and development, such as training, job shadowing, skip-level meetings, conference attendance, stretch assignments, and job rotation.
⭐️ Pervasive disengagement across the workforce has a corresponding impact on productivity and profitability. If managers aren’t meaningfully engaged, their employees will catch on and follow suit. And when that happens, everyone’s work suffers.
⭐️ Managers help ease transitions for their employees, whether it’s a mandated move back to the office, the adoption of new technologies or processes, embracing new strategies, or acquiring new skills. By acting as coaches and mentors, they can help employees adapt to evolving roles.
⭐️ When it comes to the use of AI, managers can act as key intermediaries in rethinking, supervising and interpreting tasks that can be done by AI, engaging their employees along the way. Instead of being replaced by AI, managers are in a unique position to discover how and where AI can best be used, relieving themselves and their employees of tedious tasks so they can focus on more value-added work.
Actionable steps for evolving roles
- Revisit which roles, responsibilities and tasks are really needed by managers in your organization today. Many current job descriptions were written decades ago. Which are outdated? Which responsibilities can be delegated, automated, outsourced or dropped altogether? Focus especially on time-consuming, tedious tasks that can be done more efficiently by AI or by reimagining your current business processes.
- Rethink your management metrics, which often ignore the value of mentoring, coaching, strategic thinking and cross-functional collaboration. Engage your managers in the conversation, with the goal of creating metrics that reflect the real value managers can deliver.
- Give managers more autonomy to determine how they and their employees can best achieve their shared goals, including the choice of when and where to work, who to collaborate or partner with, and how they communicate across the team and with stakeholder groups.
- Allow managers the time and opportunity to cultivate new skills or hone existing ones. This might mean taking something off their plates or asking them to temporarily assign an acting manager to free up their minds to absorb and apply new skills. Learning new skills should never be a luxury.
- Trust managers to communicate important news directly to their employees before they hear it from the CEO in an email or worse, in an industry blog. Direct supervisors are usually considered to be the most credible communication source; accord them the respect they’re due.
- Strengthen bonds across manager peer groups. Encourage managers to meet regularly with their peers to exchange ideas, discuss shared challenges and issues, recap lessons learned, brainstorm ideas, recommend resources, provide new learning opportunities, and offer mutual support.
New roles call for new skills
The manager’s role is shifting from oversight and monitoring to facilitation and capability-building. They need new skills to meet the moment. Here are a few.
- Empathy – If it doesn’t come naturally, this can be a tough skill to learn. Generous listening, genuine curiosity, asking relevant questions, and providing positive affirmation are all signs of an empathetic leader.
- Facilitation – The need for effective facilitation goes well beyond leading meetings. Managers need to be able to guide free and informed conversations that help people connect, collaborate, make decisions, resolve issues, share knowledge, generate innovative ideas and more. Facilitation can take many forms, including through team portals, Slack channels, emails, and meetings, whether 1:1, as a team, or cross-functional conversations.
- Coaching – While this is especially important for newer employees and younger generations, all employees benefit when their managers take the time to coach them, whether in 1:1 meetings, in the moment, or as part of a team conversation. Effective leaders understand the value of coaching not only to help improve performance right now, but also to make it possible for employees to achieve their career goals.
- Digital dexterity – Managers need to act as role models when it comes to using the core technologies embraced by the organization and helping their employees become comfortable and confident in using the same tools.
- Analytical – Managers don’t necessarily need to know how to create data queries, but they do need to understand how to translate data into meaningful insights that will enable them to make well-informed decisions and take action.
- Written communications – Clear and compelling writing has never been needed more. (And try as some people might to have AI do all of their writing for them, managers still need to be clear on their messaging and intentions as they write their first draft.) Writing isn’t just about finding the right words; it’s also about creating a context and striking the right tone.
- Verbal communications – We can make or break a first impression in the first few seconds by our tone, words, gestures, facial expressions and timing. Especially in a remote/hybrid world when communications are mediated by technology, managers need to pay close attention to how they come across in team meetings, 1:1 meetings, presentations, or during business gatherings.
Beyond new skills, certain attributes are important for managers acting as change agents during periods of intense transformation, such as emotional intelligence, courage, curiosity, a growth mindset, ability think strategically, and cultural sensitivity.
As organizations face continued uncertainties and unremitting change, middle managers can play a vital role in helping their organizations make a smooth transition. Their roles, responsibilities and metrics should reflect this evolving role.
After all, it’s the managers who help their teams interpret and align with the company’s strategy, reset priorities and reallocate resources. One of managers’ most valuable roles, from their team’s perspectives: Acting as a buffer between their employees and senior leaders, who are often too far removed from the day-to-day work to understand the real impact of their decisions.
Links
Past Communiques from Guided Insights:
- What Today’s Managers Really Need to Succeed in a Hybrid World
- Costly Missteps that Destroy Trust During Times of Change
- Tips for Earning Trust During Times of Change
- Tips for Conquering the Whiplash of Change
- What? So What? Now What? – Today’s Workplace Trends and Why They Matter
- Global Engagement Falls for the Second Time Since 2009
- State of the Global Workplace Report – Gallup
- What’s the Future of Middle Management? – Harvard Business Review
- Middle Managers Should Drive Your Business Transformation – Harvard Business Review
- Don’t Eliminate Your Middle Managers – Harvard Business Review
- The future of middle management | McKinsey – Podcast and transcript
