| name | value |
| date | 2025-02-12 |
| location | New York City, USA |
| author | Anton |
I have this theory that you can be an above-average middle manager if you do close to nothing. Maybe run some weekly meetings, a few superficial one-on-ones and some quarterly checkins for formality. Nothing more.
By not doing things you can be better than majority of other middle managers that do things that end up being detrimental - micromanagement, being vocal about your own ideas, making presentations where you would misplace credit and piss off half of your team.
There is so much room to make it worse - and make your team unproductive and demotivated - that in my opinion it’s easier and more optimal just to do nothing and let the team work.
It can be an unspoken contract between two parties. You don’t interfere into your team’s work and they do their best and both share credit for successful execution.
In my experience such setup is low drama and quite effective.
Of course things can be better and middle managers can be helpful, but in my opinion that is very rare with 5-10% chance.
Is there an explanation for this? Are middle managers bad or stupid? No, not at all. I think the setup is screwed. And the game for middle managers differs from both the ICs(individual contributors) and C-suite (including founders).
Middle management is stuck in between places where things happen and that are interesting and productive.
As an IC you can easily imagine that you are contributing something. The output of your work is tangible. After the day of work it often feels that something was achieved - some bug was fixed, some problem was solved, some insight was acquired and product or process became better and that would impact customers or your coworkers.
C-suite is different too because you have tons of responsibilities and you have actually quantitative KPIs to really see how your decisions impact business, company, employees, customers etc.
Middle management is not like that. You spend time in meetings. Maybe you had one-on-one today. Best case it was productive and you helped IC. But that help is hard to measure. It might be unlocked way later and even then it would be not clear in quantitative terms how important was your advice. Worst case you said something stupid, because you’ve misread situation and now you lost a bit more respect from your colleague.
I have a belief that most middle managers have a real problem feeling that they have an impact on a company, their teams etc.
Here is a story that happened almost 5 years ago. I was on a team and we got a new manager. He was over 45 years old, very experienced with a great CV. For 6 months it felt that he did nothing - vacations, performative one-on-ones etc. I don’t even remember that much about him. It was very unremarkable and I think most of my teammates would have the same feeling.
Then one day we had a technical incident and the whole team spent like 12 hours on a call trying to solve the issue. Our manager was there and I think he got involved with helping to coordinate the incident. Next day he was rejuvenated - he smiled and was joking how happy he was to get that “bonding experience”. He even said that maybe we should have more incidents - that is how much he loved it.
That is where my belief comes from - most people want to be involved and actually do something, help the customers, help teammates etc. Because then your work doesn’t feel pointless. It can give you energy instead of taking it. And I don’t think middle managers in many modern tech companies have a setup that allows them to have an impact and contribute. In my opinion because they don’t have that outlet many got bored and switch to two other things that they can do - 1) micromanagement to try to feel busy and useful 2) climbing the ladder, which often involves nasty things that make you even more isolated.
Reflections:
- feeling useful is important. It makes work enjoyable instead of miserable.
- for some professions it’s way harder to find the purpose and meaning of your work.
- incentives and processes are good things to look when trying to understand some systematic things(don’t blame the people, blame the game).