Many people coming into a manager role for the first time can feel like they’re being “thrown into cold water,” as Karen Brandt, chief people officer at Finn, puts it. Often, middle managers haven’t been trained up ahead of taking on the role, and many can struggle with the demands of leading a team for the first time.
According to recent research from Gartner, nearly three in four middle managers feel overwhelmed at work, and 40% of new managers are looking for new jobs.
Middle managers do have a tough job: sandwiched between senior management and junior staff, they have to absorb the pressure and demands of the ranks above, while ensuring they care for and support their direct reports. Often pulled in many directions, middle managers can be the most burnt out employees in an organisation, according to McKinsey.
In our Startup Life newsletter, Karen gave her top tips for supporting middle managers to ensure they’re prepared for the role, and stay happy and engaged in it.
Identify potential middle managers early on
If you’re looking for people in your team to promote into a middle management role, look out for those who have great interpersonal skills, a proactive attitude to problem solving and an ability to solve conflict and make tough decisions. Key questions to ask potential candidates are:
- Are you up for the challenge of leading a team?
- Do you enjoy working with people?
- Will you enjoy managing people and developing them?
- Is this a role you truly see yourself in?
To become a middle manager — a job that requires confidently leading a team, problem solving, coaching employees and providing training — the intrinsic motivation to do the job has to be there.
Don’t skimp on training
Often, people are promoted into the middle manager role without having had the training necessary to lead a team. It’s important to put potential candidates through a leadership training course; we paid initially for an external company to design a course for us and guide us through it. We then trained our people experience managers to take the candidates through the course.
Our leadership training courses include four modules, which each run for half a day. We group leaders of different levels of experience together, so newer leaders can learn from more senior leaders who have managed teams before.
- The first module looks at ‘leading yourself’: understanding what your challenges are and how you want to grow. It also looks at how you build trust and empathy in your teams.
- The second covers coaching a team: this is all about how to give feedback in a constructive way and manage conflict among employees.
- The third part is on leading a high performing team and covers goal setting, prioritisation and delegation.
- The last module looks at the candidate’s performance throughout the programme, offers them feedback and helps them set goals to implement by the time they become a manager. We also discuss mental health and aim to equip people to watch out for early signs of stress or burnout and offer strategies for managing stress in a healthy way.
- Outside of the sessions, attendees are asked to do 'homework' to reflect on their leadership journey and also meet with their peers to brainstorm.
Aside from training courses, you can also give potential candidates leadership experience by allowing them to sit in on leadership meetings or offering for them to manage an intern.
Keep the role interesting
Middle managers can become disenchanted with the role if they end up doing things they haven’t signed up for. In a 2023 McKinsey survey, many middle managers reported spending nearly half of their time on administrative tasks, rather than on people management. It’s the job of senior managers to free managers from administrative tasks and delegate them to individual contributors. For example, a head of recruiting might need to spend some of their time on building talent pipelines to stay connected with the work their team is doing, but in general they should focus on managing and developing the team, making their direct reports successful and helping them out if it’s needed.
Keeping middle managers engaged is also about providing them with development opportunities. These could include giving the manager a project to manage on their own, allowing them to do a rotation in a different department for a few weeks or giving them more visibility in senior leadership team meetings, for example, by inviting them to share ideas.
Offer regular feedback
Another opportunity to help managers grow and stay engaged is to give 360 degree feedback — where a middle manager’s peers, direct reports, senior manager and other senior stakeholders have the opportunity to give constructive critique of a manager’s performance. You can decide which criteria you assess them against: we have five leadership principles which include leading with clarity and care, and empowering and giving credit to employees.
It’s helpful to share the feedback transparently, so the manager knows which feedback came from which person so that it can be discussed openly. This helps to build trust between middle managers and the various levels of the organisation they work with — people don’t have to worry about what is being said about them behind their backs as it’s all out in the open. If you have capacity, doing reviews at least twice a year can be helpful given that things can change so fast in a business and a person’s career.
Assess flight risks
To help retain middle managers, assess the people in your team who might be unhappy and may be thinking of leaving. Get your senior leaders to set up a chat with them and ask them how their career is going, what their expectations are and what is going well and not going well in their role. This is an opportunity to help them improve things in their day-to-day working lives — whether that’s taking administrative work off their plate, or helping them have more input in certain areas of the business — and renew their motivation.
On the subject of... middle managers
1. How to re-energise your middle-managers. Harvard Business Review has some top tips.
2. Help your middle managers level up. McKinsey has some advice on building better training programmes to help managers learn new skills and increase their impact in the organisation.
3. One from the Sifted archives — middle managers are the secret to innovation.
4. Middle manager life can be tough. Here’s why organisations should cut them some slack.
