Hi all,
There have been far too many posts lately about the New England Patriots and their (apparently) imminent decline. The conclusion reached on TOA was that the only way to know for sure would be if the head coach, Belichick, left for some reason. I thought I would take a moment today to weigh in and extend the thinking to how middle managers in general serve the same function for signaling the imminent decline of their organizations.
As it was pointed out in those posts, the relationship dynamic is the key. The middle manager (or the head coach) is the common denominator in the important relationships within an organization whenever those who run the organization and those who do the day-to-day work do not interact. Therefore, if management (ownership) or the employees (the players) determine the organization is in decline, each group is most likely to put pressure on the middle manager (the head coach) since this is the only part of the organization that each part interacts with.
The key question here is – why don’t the top and bottom of the organization interact? If they did, the middle manager would go extinct and the organization would save a lot of money. I think the answer is actually pretty simple – the middle manager exists because the way employees see market opportunity is vastly different from how management sees market opportunity. This creates a lot of tension within an organization that the middle manager must resolve.
The employee’s relationship to the market is always defined in terms of workload – there is too much work, there is too little work, there is just enough work. If an employee has too much work for a prolonged stretch of time, it becomes a source of stress and resentment. For a regular employee, a good market opportunity is usually a problem because it means more work for the same pay (or overwork for never-quite-enough overtime pay).
By contrast, management’s relationship to the market is defined in more abstract terms. For management, market opportunity is to be seized. If current organizational capacity is insufficient to meet demand, it will be added, eventually, but for now everyone should just work harder for the good of the company.
The tension I refer to results from how management generally responds positively to the market presenting a good opportunity while the employee generally feels like a good market opportunity is a punishment manifesting in more work to do. It is in this tense space that the middle manager earns a living – the job is to help align the employee’s motivations with the organization’s goals. The tension curses while it blesses – it is what makes the job so difficult yet also the source of great satisfaction when the job is done well. When managers describe their work as an art form, what they are describing is the task of resolving the tension between the practical experiences of the day-to-day worker with the abstract concepts used by management to direct the organization.
Signed,
The Business Bro
