Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Middle Managers Deserve More Respect

strategy+ business, Feb. 13, 2019

by Theodore Kinni

Middle management don’t get no respect, to steal a line from Rodney Dangerfield. In popular culture, middle managers are often the butt of the joke — picture the oily sleazeball in Office Space or the pointy-haired cretin in Dilbert cartoons. Their position betwixt executives and employees has been characterized as “an impenetrable layer of suck.”

Gary Hamel of London Business School thinks middle management should be eradicated; Bob Sutton of Stanford doesn’t like it but grudgingly acknowledges its inevitability — death, taxes, and the branch manager. The New York Times isn’t publishing a “Windowless Office” column about today’s most interesting managers, nor are business book readers clamoring for bios of the manager of a Tesla store or the director who runs a portion of iTunes. None of us looks to managers for leadership lessons. But maybe we should.

Most of the leaders I knew in my short career as a full-time employee weren’t CEOs. In more than a few of those jobs, I didn’t know the CEO’s name. It turns out that I’m not unusually oblivious: A 2017 survey found that 23 percent of Americans who work at companies with more than 500 employees are unsure of the name of the CEO. Thirty-two percent aren’t sure they could pick their CEO out of a lineup — a task that they will never be called upon to perform, hopefully. But we can all reel off the names of our managers.

That’s because managers are our leaders. They direct, coach, and appraise us. They play an outsized role in the quality of our work lives and work–life balance. They provide us the opportunities to grow and advance professionally. Aside from a few self-made founders like Mark Zuckerberg and scions like Donald Trump, I’d bet that almost all CEOs of large enterprises owe their positions to managers who recognized their potential early on and encouraged them to realize it. Read the rest here.

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