Middle Management: The Importance of Being Michael Scott
Some thinkers about organizations and technology say that middle managers are dinosaurs, lumbering around and taking up space, and that technology — digitization, the Internet, Enterprise 2.0 — is the epic meteor shower that will, finally, send middle managers into extinction.
I'll admit, I was becoming one of these thinkers. I looked at the role of middle managers as people who ran their shop, summarized its performance, and connected it back to HQ and to other parts of the company. But then, businesses began digitizing in earnest and I saw the role of middle manager as being minimized by three phenomena. One, enterprise systems captured and stored the information that middle managers used to provide. If the CEO suddenly takes an interest in field service calls in the Mid-Atlantic region during Q3, she can instead fire up her business intelligence application (okay, get a staffer to fire it up) and get this data with a few keystrokes. She doesn't really need the Mid-Atlantic regional manager.
Two, ubiquitous networking carries a message, undistorted, straight from the top to everyone. Webcasts, podcasts, blogs, community forums, even email, replace the unit meeting in which the Mid-Atlantic regional manager conveys what he learned from HQ.
Three, Enterprise 2.0 overtakes the last vestige of the middle manager's value — understanding the local culture. Social media and other tools let people in other regions find helpful colleagues in the Mid-Atlantic office and make human connections much more easily than before. The Mid-Atlantic manager's institutional knowledge becomes less important and less efficient.
So middle managers are living on borrowed time, right? Wrong.
I recently came across two great pieces of research, both by veteran organizational scholars who have closely examined what middle managers really do. And their findings and conclusions convinced me that middle managers aren't going anywhere, nor should they.
MIT's Paul Osterman has been studying managers in large organizations for decades. In his most recent, invaluable book, The Truth About Middle Managers: Who They Are, How They Work, Why They Matter, he looks at the lives and work of managers in the center of large organizations. He finds their roles largely consistent, and tremendously important.
Osterman identifies several key responsibilities of middle managers: They form teams and try to help them run smoothly. They serve as ambassadors to other teams, a task that demands "significant and subtle relationship skills." They make decisions and trade-offs that "escape the attention of top management yet are central to the organization's performance." And they "act as the transmission belt between the top of the organization and the bottom."
This last finding surprised me the most. I looked at the new digital tools as exactly that transmission belt. But Osterman convincingly shows that "what has changed is that the organization itself is more complex and diffuse, but this has only increased the importance of managing in the middle." The managers he follows are always on the move, always acting and reacting, and working hard to keep a "complex and diffuse" company headed in something like the right direction. Osterman left me with the impression that middle managers are more than just valuable; they're essential. Their organizations would seize up without them.
This impression was reinforced by a June 2008 Harvard Business Review article titled "The Multiunit Enterprise" by David Garvin and Lynne Levesque. Garvin was a colleague of mine at Harvard, and I always shut up and listened whenever he started talking. He and Levesque wrote the article because they realized that the US economy was increasingly composed of "geographically dispersed organization[s] built from standard units such as branches, service centers, hotels, restaurants, and stores, which are aggregated into larger geographic groupings such as districts, regions, and divisions." They called these organizations "multiunit enterprises." My favorite example of a multiunit enterprise is Dunder Mifflin, the fictional paper company in the American version of the TV show The Office.
Garvin and Levesque examined the roles of each layer of management in multiunit enterprises (all of them have remarkably similar organizational structures). Their conclusions jibe with Osterman's, in particular at middle management level. They witnessed store and regional managers spending huge amounts of time on assembling groups that work well together, moving people around as necessary, developing talent, and dealing with human conflicts and issues. They also serve as that organizational transmission belt, both horizontally and vertically. They connect people to each other, and translate high-level directives into low-level action.
As I read their work, it's clear that the technology I thought would replace middle managers is in fact impacting their work. The managers they describe are tightly monitored by enterprise IT, and have less autonomy than they used to. It's also clear that we don't yet have the ideal IT toolkit to support the actual work of middle managers. We're getting closer, but we still have a lot of work to do develop digital tools that help these human transmission belts. Because these people aren't going anywhere. For now, middle managers remain vitally important transmitters of corporate memes. Osterman, Garvin, and their colleagues have convinced me that they'll continue to be.
I guess I shouldn't be too surprised by this. Employees at the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin might have problems with their manager Michael Scott. But they'd have even more serious problems without him. He's goofy, but he's no dinosaur.
