In praise of middle management

They’re often people who’ve been around awhile. They can seem “stuck in their ways”, but they’re also repositories of organisational memory and tacit intelligence, by which I mean wisdom gained from experience that can’t easily be codified and transferred.

They know what to do, how to do it, and why it ought to be done. The processes they guard are often mechanisms evolved over time to uphold standards, and to prevent us having to work out everything from first principles, thereby avoiding unnecessary mistakes.

Stripping out bureaucracy and having visionary leaders rallying frontline troops to meet tough performance targets can seem appealing, but it often backfires.

Think of the hospital scandals that erupted when ambitious performance targets were imposed along with deep cuts, including middle management, and often in nursing.

Middle managers may welcome the chance to be deployed in new ways that dust off their wisdom and put it to new uses, which is where deep and deliberate delegation comes in.