As organizations invest time and effort into rethinking their operating models and building healthier structures, McKinsey research has found that 44 percent of middle managers see organizational bureaucracy as the main cause of negative experiences in the role. Unclear decision rights, lack of empowerment, and overwhelming administrative work are part of middle managers’ day to day.
The middle manager role has been set up for failure, and this needs to change.
What managers can do
Changing the role starts by looking at how you as a manager are spending your time today and structurally reducing time spent in certain areas. This is an opportunity to reduce transactional tasks so you can focus on value-added responsibilities that only you can own. Try asking yourself:
- How can I make time spent on strategizing more productive?
- Reduce the number of meetings, emails, and presentations with unclear objectives. Ways to do this include implementing clearer decision rights and roles during meetings or setting limits on time spent on specific priorities.
- Consider translating strategic plans into monthly, weekly, and daily priorities that have clear owners. Make a “don’t do list” for anything that does not align with these priorities and incorporate a mechanism to hold each owner accountable.
- Reduce email traffic while improving collaboration across departments and business units. For example, some companies have introduced email analysis as a tool to show whether email recipients are the right ones to favor collaboration and to leave off people who do not need to be involved.
- How can I focus more on people development and coaching?
- Coach direct reports to execute tasks by providing actionable feedback and celebrating accomplishments through ongoing conversations. Use regular feedback to drive clarity around what is going well and what can be improved.
- Hold career conversations with team members. These conversations can be more meaningful by understanding individuals’ goals and strengths.
- Create opportunities for team members based on strengths and developmental objectives. Feel empowered to create an environment of trust where team members are encouraged to take calculated risks, learn, and improve.
- How can I simplify or eliminate administrative tasks and transactional individual contributor work?
- Push to eliminate work related to transactional tasks. For example, explore simplifying authorization for travel and corporate credit cards. Also, more carefully select meetings to attend if there are over 15 participants or an unclear agenda and roles, or monthly reports to prepare that have not been accessed in a quarter.
- Automate tasks by leveraging technology. Coordinate with other departments to automatically approve expenses within set thresholds or automate dashboards for reports. For instance, managers in some organizations use software to scan candidates’ resumes for open positions, helping to ensure that objective criteria are satisfied.
- Delegate work to other team members to lighten the load while contributing to their development. For instance, assign specific tasks like preparing meeting agendas, capturing action items, or putting together presentations to address the progress of department priorities.
As a manager, you may face complexities executing on the above, from cultural norms that dictate that meeting attendance is required by default, to mindsets that prevent delegation or automation (e.g., “only I can be good enough”), to lack of experience in providing feedback that makes it harder to have difficult conversations. Involve senior leaders to help you overcome these challenges.
What senior leaders can do
Ultimately, managers’ work should be organized in a new way to fulfill a dual purpose—to capture efficiencies from a reduction in responsibilities and to ensure resources are properly invested to improve how everyone works. To deliver on this dual purpose, support middle managers by:
- Reimagining manager roles to reduce bureaucracy and increase time spent leading people. Take a hard look at the “bureaucratic workload”—including administrative tasks and decision rights—and address root-cause drivers, including policies, level of supporting technologies, and decision-making culture. Examining these drivers may reveal opportunities to “rebundle” manager work to increase time spent leading people and driving critical initiatives. These rebundling efforts may also result in fewer layers with more appropriate spans—while also increasing manager effectiveness in a way that would not be achieved by eliminating a layer.
- Empowering managers to address changes to organizational context within their teams—while holding them accountable for results. The impacts of economic change, geopolitical disruption, technological transformation, and shifting employee expectations affect the way managers and their teams get work done. Empower managers to effectively navigate this environment, support them with targeted tools and training (e.g., how to leverage artificial intelligence with teams, how to manage in a hybrid environment), and hold them accountable for the quality of the team’s outputs.
- Treating management as a profession. Create ways to develop and promote those who want to excel in managing people. Establish a systematic way to improve managerial skills in the organization, from intentionally selecting people for managerial roles, to developing actionable people leader scorecards, to offering targeted managerial development opportunities. Also, continue to develop individual contributor career paths to provide growth avenues outside of management for those without the desire to manage.
The single most important determinant of employee outcomes, from performance to satisfaction, is managers. Additionally, organizations with top-quartile managerial behaviors see 21 times larger returns. For further guidance to shape the infrastructure of the manager role for success, check out our “Power to the Middle” research.