No, You Can't Just Fire Your Middle Managers

It seems to have become a popular idea lately that we should fire all the useless middle managers and have our top leadership and individual contributors get things done themselves.

Honestly, I get where this idea comes from. If you tried to look inside a firm to see where most useless people hide, it would be middle management. That is not because middle management is useless; it’s because it is the easiest place to hide.

I do think that most firms could go far by asking for a much higher bar from their middle managers. We are far too forgiving in thinking that merely falling asleep in most meetings and seeming angry all the time is a full-time position. You need to assist your teams in producing value to justify your worth.

That higher bar may include layoffs. I won’t shed a tear. There’s a class of middle managers who seem to think the whole point of earning the title was so they could slack off. They’ve “earned” it now.

So, if all this is true, why can’t we eliminate the position?

Because we know how that looks - and it’s gotten about half a million Russians killed in Ukraine.

Russia has a very top-down command structure—lots of generals and privates, very few sergeants or lieutenants, and little “middle management.”

Russia’s military has proven itself incredibly slow to learn, rigid in its actions, predictable, and wasteful. Generals and other high-ranking positions are given out as political favors without a sizeable junior officer corps to draw from. Without an NCO corps, there is no way to capture lessons learned or grow individual contributors.

These phenomena are all just as true inside a firm as they are inside any organization. You’re giving up these abilities when you try to hollow out “middle management.”

What’s interesting is that you can actually see a bit of this argument play out in this video—a worthless officer (the kind of middle manager you want to get rid of) ranting about how worthless other kinds of officers are.

In other words, you can see both arguments that middle management is useless when you think middle management is the tweet author. This narcissistic windbag of an officer seems to think that their mere existence in a chair is all their followers need to be inspired. They probably fall asleep in meetings.

At the same time, the YouTube author offers a rallying cry for the value of good NCOs and junior officers.

Part of Guildmaster’s whole schtick is to build better senior and middle managers - so many of them are worthless.

But the 80/20 rule applies - if you see your firm and think, any random middle manager I follow around seems to do nothing, maybe they all do nothing, you are probably not following around the handful of middle managers that keep the whole place together.

It’s worth your time to review each of your managers and ask that the low performers rise to the same bar that you’ll find your high performers meeting. And, if and when they don’t, we can talk layoffs.