Stop Flogging The Middle

Middle management is expensive. That’s not a criticism, but a commercial reality. ‘The Middle’ is the layer organisations pay to translate strategy into execution, to hold teams accountable, to make the day-to-day work. The ROI expectation on this layer is real.

So when performance in the middle stalls - when delivery slows, teams disengage, or problems keep resurfacing - organisations respond the way they've been conditioned to respond. They invest. They invest in workshops, resilience training. Productivity and leadership programs dressed up as development initiatives.

Middle managers are already the meat in the sandwich.  They absorb mandates from above they didn't design and manage teams below they can't always adequately support. Adding more training to that load doesn't address the squeeze. It equips people to tolerate the pressure with greater competency. The pressure itself remains unchanged.

The assumption underneath the spend is that performance problems in the middle are skill problems. Train people to prioritise better, communicate better, lead through ambiguity in the hope output improves.

It rarely does. Not sustainably. Not because middle managers aren't capable. Most are highly capable people working hard. The problem is that organisations keep applying individual solutions to structural problems, and the return never materialises the way everyone anticipates.

Good Training, Zero Traction

Think about the last significant leadership program your organisation ran for this layer. You probably measured it. Feedback scores, pre and post assessments, a follow-up check-in a few months out. The numbers looked reasonable. People said they found it valuable.

Then they went back to work.

The same escalations landed in the same inboxes. The same bottlenecks appeared in the same places. The same conversations about competing demands, unclear priorities, and stalling projects started again. The capable, well-intentioned people your organisation invested in walked back into the same architecture - and the architecture won.

Most Heads of People have sat in this exact debrief. Some more than once. The training wasn't bad. The people weren't resistant. The conditions they returned to were identical. Shifting those conditions is the only thing that moves behaviour at scale. Individual development inside an unchanged system produces individuals who are marginally better at tolerating a system that shouldn't be tolerated.

That isn't a result. It's a more expensive version of the original problem.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Structural friction can sound abstract. It isn't. It shows up the same way, in organisation after organisation.

A manager's authority to move a decision sits somewhere between three senior stakeholders with competing views. The tension is never named. Every call becomes a quiet negotiation, and the manager learns quickly that escalating is safer than deciding. They stop deciding. Soon their team stops bringing matters to their attention. The workshop said, "empower your team." The structure says something else entirely.

A team is told their priority is reducing response time. The processes required to move that metric sit inside a different function, with different KPIs and a different reporting line. The training teaches the manager to "influence without authority." The underlying problem is that accountability and authority have been systematically separated. Nobody is fixing that.

An engagement survey resurfaces the same themes it surfaced two years ago. Communication. Recognition. Clarity of direction. The findings go into a presentation to the executive team. Actions get assigned. Initiatives get launched. By the time the next survey runs, the scores shift marginally if at all, half the actions are incomplete, and the people who raised the original concerns have either left or stopped raising them. Not because the leaders responsible didn't care. Because the actions were designed to respond to feedback, not address causes.

The most corrosive dynamic runs from the top down. The behaviours being modelled at the executive level quietly contradict everything being trained in the middle. The program teaches psychological safety. The leadership team makes it clear, in practice, that bad news is unwelcome. No amount of workshop content closes that gap. People watch what leaders do, not what the training deck says.

These aren't outliers. They are reality in most mid-to-large organisations. No investment in individual capability resolves them, because they are not capability problems.

Why the Cycle Keeps Repeating

Training is visible. It can be scheduled, delivered, and reported on. Budget can be assigned to it and activity tracked against it. In an environment where demonstrating investment in people is part of the employer value proposition, a leadership program feels like meaningful action.

Structural diagnosis is harder. It requires interrogating decisions that have already been made. Decisions about how the organisation is designed, where accountability sits, and what behaviours are being reinforced from the top. It asks uncomfortable questions of leaders who are often not the ones being sent on workshops.

So, organisations keep running programs. The programs produce their outputs. The structural problems remain. The cycle repeats, often with a different vendor, but always the same results.

Counting the Wrong Things

I spent years as a CFO looking at numbers most consultants never get to see. The real costs - the ones sitting inside lost opportunities, overtime, rework, avoidable turnover, delayed decisions, and disengaged teams - almost never traced back to incompetent people. They pointed directly to the conditions those people were working inside.

Most organisations spend between two and five percent of payroll annually on learning and development. A significant portion sits in management and leadership programs. The return - measured in sustained performance improvement rather than satisfaction scores or completion rates - is rarely tracked with any discipline. Organisations measure what they can count easily: attendance, feedback ratings, modules completed. Connecting the spend to actual outcome is harder, so it rarely happens.

Meanwhile those unexamined costs quietly accumulate - decision latency slowing every project that touches the middle, capable people pulling back their effort once they realise the system won't reward it, and a productivity drain that typically runs well above the training budget.

Where to Invest for the Greatest Impact

The answer isn't to stop investing in people. It's to start with a deep insight into what driving the drag before allocating a dollar to development.

This is why I developed the Culture Compass™. Not another framework for developing your people. The Culture Compass™ is a diagnostic that functions like an MRI for your organisation. It surfaces where friction lives, what's causing it, and what it's costing you. The biggest impact is that it articulates your culture in your words - the language and values already embedded in your organisation. Not who needs to attend a workshop, but what needs to change in the architecture of your operations so the people inside it can perform.

The middle isn't the problem. The system the middle is trying to operate inside usually is.

Fix that, and you won't need to keep flogging the people running it.

If this resonates, or you're curious how other organisations have removed the drag and freed their middle layer to deliver, let's grab a coffee.