Is middle management as we know it obsolete? There are more and more signs that this might indeed be the case. Among them:

  • Corporations need to react quickly to changes in their environment. To be respond swiftly, top management needs to be alerted to treats and opportunities arising at the interface between the organisation and its environment as they arise. A traditional role of middle managers was to filter and gather this data from the people at the edges and bottom of the organisation and interpret it for top management to devise appropriate strategic responses. At the same time, top management relied on middle management to interpret strategy so that it guided operational decisions at the front line. All of this takes time – yet that is the resource the organisation has increasingly little of.
  • The resource pool of middle managers is drying up. Gen Z (define) A recent survey of Gen Zers by Robert Walters North[1] found that, while 89% of employers thought that middle managers had an important role to play, 72% of Gen-Z would choose an individual route to progression over managing others. More than half of Gen Z had no interest in becoming middle managers and 69% of them saw middle management as a high stress and low reward role.

Taking middle management out of the picture is not a solution for large organisations. It would slow things down even more for top management to immerse itself in the day to day, nitty-gritty of operations. Equally, pushing more decision-making to the bottom of the organisation would lead to uncoordinated responses to challenges – and hence even more headaches for them!

A logical conclusion is that we have to redefine middle management so that it speeds up rather than slows down data collation and decision-making; and so that it becomes a role that the next generation of potential middle managers sees as fulfilling and rewarding. Here are some of the considerations that might help us to achieve this radical shift:

  • Shifting the emphasis from span of control to span of influence. In the complex, adaptive system of a large organisation in today’s world, middle managers must learn to create the conversations that provide clarity of purpose at all levels in the chain of individual, team, function and organisation. Leadership is less about making things happen than enabling things to happen. In the starling analogy, every bird aligns instinctively to the same direction of travel. A key mental shift for middle managers is from telling (directing) to listening; from making sense of what they hear, to enabling the system to make sense of what is happening in and around it. We can describe this as curating the learning of the system.
  • Curating the team of teams. It is only in recent years that AI has enabled us to understand how a flock of starlings can all change direction at the same time, while staying in close proximity to each other, without collisions. Now we can use some of those insights to promote rapid, coordinated responses within organisational structures of interdependent teams and/or functions. One of the helpful concepts is “streams of connectedness” – horizontal, semi-formal and constantly adjusting networks between teams that spread ideas, raise awareness of threats and opportunities, and enable creative, intuitive realignment of resources without explicit permission from the hierarchy. The role of middle management in future requires as much attention to the space between teams, as to what is happening within teams. In the starling analogy, every bird reacts instantly to maintain a consistent distance between those above, below and in front of them. In a team of teams, we can heighten similar contextual awareness by, for example, including in each team’s KPIs how they contribute to the success of the teams nearest to them in the structure.

Barry Oshry’s classic book, Seeing Systems, describes the different views of the world that come from top, bottom and middle in a traditional hierarchy. The more complex the operating environment and the more rapidly change occurs, the greater the potential for top, middle and bottom all to be moving in different directions. The body corporate is increasingly at war with itself, with immune systems often attacking what they should be protecting. (For example, resistance to innovation.)

If middle management is to remain relevant, a radical overhaul is required. Instead of being an impermeable layer between above and below, it needs to step out of the hierarchy and become the lubricant in the organisational system. Instead of providing heavy duty linking pins between one hierarchical layer and the next, it must find its role in the myriad of cracks in the corporate edifice, enabling the structure to flex and adjust to the external and internal pressures upon it.

Will this make Gen Z more enthusiastic towards middle management roles? Certainly, the challenges of working in this way should appeal to their creativity and sense of adventure. The lack of hierarchy should also be an attraction. A major challenge, however, is how organisations can prepare people for this very different kind of middle management role, when current structures provide few opportunities to develop the necessary skills? Waiting for Gen Z to mature enough to be ready to step into middle management roles is potentially leaving it too late.

[1] https://www.robertwalters.co.uk/insights/news/blog//conscious-unbossing.html

© David Clutterbuck 2025