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As the economy reverts back from the 2021 hiring boom, companies are increasingly removing middle managers in favor of one leader for very large teams. For example, as opposed to marketing being led by one middle manager, outside sales by another manager, customer support by another manager and customer success by another manager, many companies are opting to remove the layer of middle management and have one leader in charge of all of those functions without any leaders in between.
This has led to a major need for companies to increase their focus on helping their employees effectively communicate and collaborate across functions to achieve desired business outcomes. While they might have been viewed as redundant, those middle managers handled a lot of information that is now the responsibility of the employee.
Why have companies opted to remove middle managers in the first place? The simple answer is lack of perceived value.
The logic behind creating a layer of middle management is the belief that a manager of a smaller team will take more ownership and be more fully accountable for the team’s outcomes than would be a higher-level manager overseeing multiple functions within the organization.
For example, let’s say we are a recruiting company in 2021 and the market is hot. All the outside sales team needs is a pulse to close deals. The company has a process that the middle manager leading outside sales followed to maintain a base level of competence, but because sales are coming in from everywhere, bad habits are overlooked.
Fast forward to 2023. The market has dried up, and the outside sales team is really struggling to meet its goals. The CEO is begging and pleading for the company to close more deals. The outside sales team blames the economy and other factors for why the numbers are down. But in reality, the middle manager in charge of the outside sales team hasn’t been holding her team accountable to the standard business development process that are tried and true. And now she is out of practice at holding her team accountable, and the team is out of practice taking hard advice from a manager. This is a recipe for failure.
The CEO then asks the middle managers in other departments to help pick up the slack in sales. He implores his customer success team to focus on upselling current customers. The customer success middle manager says that she is up for the task. She and her team have devised a plan for trying to turn open support tickets and queries into opportunities for upselling.
The plan looks great, but they run into a brick wall with customer support. The customer support middle manager is incentivized to close support tickets as quickly as possible, and this clashes with the overarching business goals of upselling to current clients. To resolve this, the customer success manager has a one-on-one with the customer support manager. The customer support manager knows that closing support tickets hurts the customer success manager’s goal of upselling the existing customers and closing more deals but mentions that “his hands are tied” because in order for him to achieve his end-of-year bonus, he needs his time-to-closed ticket ratio to be under a certain level. The managers are at an impasse.
The outside sales manager isn’t effectively holding her team accountable, the customer support manager is only focused on metrics that affect his his end-of-year bonus and the customer success manager is stressed out because her team is putting in overtime to try to pick up the slack for the outside sales team but keeps running into hurdles from the support team.
Executive teams look at this situation and say: Screw it! Let’s remove middle managers and have one overarching manager over a wide group of people so there’s one manager who can adjust incentives effectively and ensure everyone is rowing in the same direction. The executive team can’t guarantee that this new model will be any more effective, but the leaders can guarantee that it will cost a whole lot less to not have all of these middle managers than to have them.
Their logic is that if it the system doesn’t work with middle managers right now, why keep paying for them?
But individually managed teams can achieve effective cross-functional communication and collaboration. To do so, there needs to be:
1. Clear accountability as to who owns what functional unit.
2. Training for the leaders of those functional units on how to effectively delegate, how to have effective one-on-one meetings, how to give feedback and how to develop skills and competencies.
3. Incentives that focus on overall business outcomes and a clear process for challenging and adjusting individual team incentives if unintended consequences develop from those incentives.
4. Regular (at minimum, monthly) opportunities for middle managers and functional leaders to meet, share challenges and collaborate—and the executive team needs to give them grace on their individual expectations so they have the time to do this.
If companies cannot effectively achieve all four of these points, they will continue to struggle to achieve effective cross-functional communication and collaboration.•
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Mintz is founder of Ambition in Motion, a firm that helps companies increase employee engagement and collaboration by implementing corporate mentor programs.
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