Good morning everyone! Paolo here, filling in for Amber.
Meta, Twitter, and Alphabet all targeted middle managers in recent layoffs. In an effort to “flatten” its organizational structure, Meta went as far as to ask some managers to accept roles as individual contributors or leave the company—a demotion of sorts.
It's a tough time for middle managers, who are held responsible for their team's performance yet have no real self-derived power. And when it comes to performance reviews, the often-maligned middle manager is usually evaluated on how well they execute functional duties—like coding or developing a marketing plan—rather than their leadership capabilities.
“Let's evaluate leaders on how they lead,” says Bill Schaninger, McKinsey senior partner and coauthor of the forthcoming book Power to the Middle: Why Managers Hold the Keys to the Future of Work. “We've had [middle managers] doing everything but that.”
Strong leadership among middle management is especially crucial because an employee’s relationship with their boss affects their engagement, motivation, and ability to deliver on required goals at work. In its absence, companies risk losing out on their human capital investment. Namely, the financial value employees add to the company through productivity, innovative thinking, and the like. “The conduit for that is not the senior most leaders. It's the person [employees] work for,” Schaninger says.
A straightforward way to assess a middle manager's leadership ability is by how well they develop top performers on their team. Middle managers who gain a reputation as talent factories within an organization create a ripple effect throughout the company as their former direct reports become influential leaders in their own right. To do this, the best middle managers make a concerted effort to step away from supervising the minutia of their subordinates’ work and instead ensure they’re getting new experiences, says Joseph Fuller, a management professor at Harvard Business School.
Enabling the development of reports requires middle managers to be fast learners who stay abreast of organizational changes and priorities and pivot accordingly.
Middle managers must also exercise keen judgment on what to elevate to higher-ups. It’s precisely that judgment that defines their value, according to Fuller. “There's a pretty fine distinction between someone who is able to discern when something's an exception they should kick upstairs versus someone who's maybe being a little bit risk-averse or indecisive,” he says.
Companies that fail to give managers the room to lead, and assess their ability and willingness to do so, could make the mistake of laying them off or see self-motivated managers depart the company, taking institutional knowledge with them. “In the absence of adequate leadership in the middle, you have what we have now, which is hemorrhaging good, quality employees,” Schaninger says.
Paolo Confino
paolo.confino@fortune.com
@paolo1000_
