The Middle Management Syndrome

Globally, the shine of middle management is fading fast for all bad reasons. Irrespective of numerous management perspectives about the middle management by different schools of thought, the real problem of middle management is more inward than outward. In any organization, the real success story is not engineered by the middle management. Here lies the twist of the story. Take, for example, the meteoritic fall of Enron. Although what happened to the company is history now, still business schools take it as a classic case study of how the middle management failed to diagnose the dire consequence of irregularities of the company, and the entire episode was sandwiched between false notions and ineptness of middle managers. Rather than triggering a transparent approach to the issue, the managers tried hard to hide the facts both from the employees and different stakeholders, which ultimately slapped on the face of top management. In most organizations, the top management blindly rely on the hijacked conduits of fact representation by the middle management. This inherent attitude of of the top management worsens any situation, and the sad part is that the top management has to pay heavily for the misadventure of the middle management. Why does this happen in any organization? Primarily, the camaraderie among middle managers in any organization oozes the greatest woes for the organization. Apparently, all middle managers invariable believe in passing the buck either to the lower strata of the organization or to the top management thereby escaping from the responsibilities. This creates a vicious circle in the integrity of information from one level to another level. As the junior management and the executive strata of any organization don't have any channel to push the fact to the top management, the middle management plays a bad game. Moreover, the limitations of middle management are that they don't execute any task directly rather than facilitation. And more over the planning is done by the middle managers without considering the views of junior managers and executives, which impacts the success of any project. Also, sometimes, the middle managers are not competent enough to analyze the risks in the optimum way, and this hits them back hard. In a fast changing open economy, the middle managers need to keep them abreast of the changes happening around and also they should improvise their skill sets to live up to the expectations of their juniors. Transparency, integrity, core competency, and a great attitude could only help this band from this professional roadblock.