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I’ve long been fascinated by middle management — and immensely critical of how most people perform at that level. Here’s the thing, though: middle management, much like the middle class itself, may be dying. Let’s walk through a little bit of why.
Middle Management: How it came about and core functionalities
If we’re being logical, companies can’t really operate on a Bell Curve with just executives and rank-and-files. Executives probably would get tired of speaking to the rank-and-files — and wouldn’t want to spend their whole day giving instructions on projects to them, either. The problem, of course, is that executives currently spend a lot of their day giving instructions to rank-and-files anyway. Let’s gloss that over for now.
Middle management came about as a way to bridge this gap and make sure that information and projects were flowing from the execution level (rank-and-files) to the big dogs (executives) and money was being made all along the process curve. Over time, ‘middle management’ took on kind of a joke designation because so many middle managers were bad at their jobs. By some measure, 82 percent of managerial hires end up being the wrong one. Go talk to your CEO if you can get some time with him. Tell him that an aspect of his business has an 82 percent failure rate. He’ll dive…
