Take care of middle managers in the hybrid world
axios.com
axios.com
Anyway, posted this, because I mostly disagree with it. The workplace has changed a lot in my 30 years of participation. Where resources get allocated and what titles get used, how the power dynamics work, is all an ever evolving shifting equation. Often, as things change we hear a crowd say "it's inevitable, that's the game of (work) life." Change or be changed. When that same automation gimmick turns on the unintended though, it's suddenly an evocation to be kind and have mercy.
I mostly don't understand this management game. We raise our kids to be self sufficient independent adults. It's hard to let them go, but the biggest satisfaction I've had as a parent of four is seeing them blossom on their own, even if it doesn't always maximize the wisdom and counsel I have to offer them. And yet what happens as soon as they hit the work place?
"Hi my name is Joe. I'm your middle manager. I was promoted here because of any number of reasons. It's unclear what I'm to do here, but they pay me more and give me more responsibility/stress. I don't really know how to do whatever this is... so since I'm likely your senior in age, let's revert to the relationship you know best: I'll be the parent, and you be the child."
Are there important functions that these "management" positions need to fulfill? Yes. We need mentors. We need evangelists. And risk takers, and champions. We need secretaries and clerks. People who do logistics. On and on. But for forking sake, call those people that. We can even pay them as much/more than the engineers/doers/developers/builders. Just can we please ditch the parent-child setup known as middle management?
Sorry if automation is rendering your current meaning in need of a refresh.
If you're in a 500 person company, how do 500 people provide feedback? How do you assess performance? There just has to be some kind of corporate management chart, of who reports to who. Getting the right information going up and down the chain, trying to work through mis-understandings across factions or up & down, is intensely hard work. Running large scale organizations is just hard.
It's enormously sad how little experimentation & exploration there has been of how else we might try to organize things, other than tight lines of narrow authority. Employees are almost always tighly pegged into little holes, there's huge dissonance between the on-the-ground view of how things are versus what the corporate body seems to see or recognize, there's enormous blindness to who is performing what tasks at what level. We've tried so little.
But I still have a hard time imagining. I see why we have what we have. Middle management exists because one person can only fan-out to adequately manage so many other people. Corporations live and die by how effective that deeply nesting management is, live and die by how well they can funnel up the situation accurately (always ever polluted by management's own pressure to spin the situation), and how well they can manage down (itself a function of whether or not the company appears to be run by real humans getting the obvious messages or delusional aliens from another planet). Management is so hard. I have huge respect especially in hybrid world for middle management, who have to be cyphers in both directions. It's a hard job.
If you read typical thread about employment, work-life balance, etc, there's always vocal group of people who say, that you should do bare minimum required for not getting fired. If entire team thinks like this, it will slowly drive productivity into the ground. Simplest (not necessarily most effective), solution to raise this bar is to pay someone to do it for you.
I'm not advocating for this setup, but IMO that's why companies do it and why it often feels like parent-children relation.