The rock, the hard place and the middle manager: A survival guide

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Abstract

The pressures of the modern workplace are placing almost intolerable burdens on middle managers.

Change management consultant Jonathan Steffen explains how by understanding the changing nature of the demands made of them, middle managers can successfully adapt to their new operating environment and significantly reduce their stress levels.

Imagine a rock - a good, solid, rocky sort of rock. A cold, rough, knobbly sort of rock, with all kinds of unpleasant projections in unexpected places. Not the sort of rock you would care to rub shoulders with. Not the kind of rock you would care to have anything to do with at all, in fact. Let’s call it your senior management.

And now imagine a hard place - a smooth, blank, unforgiving kind of place, shiny with contempt, steely with rejection. A place so hostile, so innately opposed to you, that you would not wish it on your worst enemy. Let’s call it your staff.

That leaves you in the middle. Which is appropriate, for you are a middle manager and your function is to act as an intermediary or go-between. The trouble is that it is extremely hard to mediate between a rock and a hard place, and you are squeezed so tight from both directions that there is really nowhere to go between, anyway.

If the position sounds familiar, then take comfort: there are thousands, indeed, millions, of people like you in organisations all over the world. Middle managers caught between a rock and a hard place, between the expectations of their senior management and the expectations of their staff. Middle managers who get to work earlier and earlier every morning and stay later and later every evening in the attempt to gain control of their unmanageable situation. Middle managers who come into work at the weekend to do the things they could not get done during the week. Middle managers who cannot sleep at night, who are smoking and drinking and eating too much, whose marriages are breaking up under the relentless pressure of the workplace. Middle managers whose sole motivation for continuing is the desire to avoid the disgrace of becoming former middle managers. Redundant middle managers. Middle managers with no-one to manage.

Perhaps that is not too comforting, on reflection. But do not despair. If your case is hard, it is not hopeless. And where others extricated themselves from that untenable position between the rock and the hard place, you can do the same.

The key to escape is the realisation that as a middle manager, your role is no longer in the middle. Let me explain.

Traditionally, the role of the middle manager has been to act as a miniature version of the senior managers to whom he or she reports. Less powerful, of course, less well paid, and with a smaller office, desk and car, the middle manager was the lieutenant of the world’s industrial armies, implementing instructions passed down from the brass hats on high. In the hierarchical corporations of the high industrial age, strategy was formulated at the top, instructions were disseminated by the middle management, and the hard graft was done by the foot-sloggers at the bottom of the scale. Safe within the intricate hierarchical structures that had been designed for stability and permanence, middle managers knew the limits of their powers, knew the undeniable benefits of their position, and also knew how to gradually amass considerable influence within the organisation, creating mini-fiefdoms for themselves in imitation of the maxi-fiefdoms over which their bosses ruled.

Then something terrible happened. The personal computer was unleashed upon the workplace. Looking back on it, we can see it as a species of devastating organisational virus, destroying all in its path. Tasks which had formerly taken hours, days or even weeks to perform could suddenly be carried out in a matter of seconds. Complex processes of information selection, analysis and dissemination, which had previously involved the deep and jealously guarded mysteries of company memos, departmental requisition forms and official purchasing authorisations, could be performed at the touch of a button. The labyrinthine internal information systems in which middle managers had occupied a central gatekeeping role were undermined at a stroke.

But worse was to happen. For the corporate armies of the IT age found they liked computers. After an initial phase of scepticism and resistance they found they liked them so much, in fact, that they even started purchasing them for home use. And in the process of loading them with computer games and home accounting programmes, the rank and file of the industrial world rapidly amassed computing skills that were far in advance of those boasted by their managers, who had initially seen the PC as little more than a sophisticated form of typewriter and thus far beneath their managerial dignity.

The traditional middle manager became technologically illiterate overnight.

At the same time, computers made it possible to generate more information at greater speed than ever before. For middle managers, whose role was traditionally to control the flow of information within their section of the organisation, this was a death-blow; for computers could produce more information than any human being could ever analyse using traditional methods. At the top end of the organisation, senior managers who understood the implications of the IT revolution set about delayering their companies, replacing people with technology in order to drive down their fixed costs and offer their services and products at lower prices. At the bottom end of the organisation, staff were quietly empowering themselves by upgrading their computers, sending emails to their cousins in Chigaco and Sydney, and surfing the Internet. For people employed on account of their technical facility, these developments came far more naturally than they did for many middle managers - which made the middle manager’s misery complete.

Fig. 1 - The middle manager between a rock and a hard place

Figure 1 shows the traditional middle manager caught between the rock and the hard place of modern working life. Perceived as an obstacle by senior management and junior employees alike, the traditional middle manager clings on to an increasingly uncomfortable position even as the very things that made that position worthwhile - company benefits, pension rights, and job security - are axed one by one. He or she is regularly slated in the boardroom and ridiculed on the shop floor and in the back office. And management consultants in particular love pillorying this unfortunate breed of corporate dinosaur, parading it in all its ineffectualness only to encourage senior management to put it out of its misery once and for all by dealing it the corporate coup de grace.

Let us imagine, however, a company which - like all companies that stay in business - is evolving with the times. Flexible working hours of some sort have been introduced, certain key functions have been outsourced, and a percentage of staff work from home on a regular basis. We need not envisage the most revolutionary, technology-driven organisation in the world: we merely have to think of a company in which the personnel department is drafting recommendations for a possible teleworking programme while the IT department is setting up a long overdue intranet. A company in which many staff regularly use email, have mobile phones, and spend a certain part of their leisure hours sitting at a computer. A normal company of the late twentieth century, that is to say.

Fig. 2 - Creating the vital spark: The dynamic role of the facilitating manager

In such a company, the traditional role of the middle manager is, rightly, untenable. As Figure 2 shows, however, there is still a key role for the middle manager as a facilitator. As in the past, the middle manager occupies a key role in the communication process here, but the role is key rather than central - a crucial distinction. Instead of being an obstacle to the flow of information within the company, the facilitating middle manager is the vital link which allows it to flow. That link is a moveable one, however. The facilitating middle manager is part coach, part trouble-shooter, part diplomat. He or she knows the company and its products well, understands the market in which the company operates, and comprehends the relation between effective internal operation and successful operating results. This new breed of middle manager also understands the complex interrelation of human beings and information technology, and the way people and computing power have to function in harmony if the company’s goals are to be achieved.

So what does one need to fill this new role successfully? The key attributes of the facilitating middle manager may be summarised as follows:

• An ability to understand the needs and interests of people in all levels of the company, as well as of the company’s partners and suppliers
• Good face-to-face skills, complemented by an assured telephone technique and solid writing skills
• A thorough grasp of relevant information technologies and an interest in IT developments
• An understanding of the relation between traditional and high-tech channels of communication
• A desire to help other people to solve their problems for themselves

This last point is arguably the most important. To survive in the highly demanding modern workplace, the middle manager cannot attempt to personally solve every problem that lands on his or her desk. The role of the facilitating middle manager is to know how to help the people for whom he or she has responsibility - and, equally, to know when to stop helping them. This is no easy task, for sure, and the position remains a challenging one - but it is certainly easier than clinging on against all hope to that agonising situation between the rock and the hard place.

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