By Danielle Rocheleau
Middle management has a reputation. Too much pressure from above, not enough authority below, caught in the middle of decisions you didn’t make and can’t fully explain. It’s the role people describe with a sympathetic wince.
In a recent session with participants in one of our management development programs, we asked a simple question: what is it actually like to be a middle manager right now?
What followed was one of those conversations that stays with you. People spoke honestly about the pressure they were carrying — from leadership above, from staff below, and from their own sense of whether they were getting it right. One participant described a “sinking feeling” that had started to creep in. “Is this the place for me? Am I still in this with everyone else? Are they still in it with me?”
But as the conversation went on, something else emerged alongside the frustration. A clearer picture of what the role actually requires, and how much it matters. One word kept coming up to describe it. A dance.
That word has stayed with us. And we think it points to something worth saying more clearly — which is what this post is about.
What We Heard: Themes from the Conversation
The weight of the middle
Middle managers occupy a position that sounds straightforward on paper: you sit between senior leadership and frontline staff, and your job is to connect them.
In practice, that connection work is anything but simple. You are translating decisions that weren’t always yours to make, supporting your team through change while still figuring out what that change means yourself, and holding the emotional undercurrent of the people around you — often quietly, and without much acknowledgment.
Several participants spoke about feeling like they were swimming upstream, carrying pressure from multiple directions without always feeling the support, or even the permission, to slow down and work through it. That image stuck with us, because we hear it often. The pressure is real, and it rarely gets named as such.
The dance: constant shifting, constant judgment
There is no formula for middle management. The role asks you to constantly adjust:
- When to prioritize organizational direction versus immediate team needs?
- How much information to share, and when?
- How to represent decisions you may not have fully shaped?
- How to stay credible to leadership while staying grounded in the day-to-day realities of your staff?
In our work with managers, we talk about developing judgment around which context you are showing up in and which needs you are prioritizing, not as a formula to apply, but as an ongoing practice. The balance shifts depending on the situation, and woven through all of it is something that rarely appears in a job posting: the ability to operate without full certainty, and keep moving anyway.
The translation gap
Communication came up again and again, but not as a complaint about information overload. The challenge participants described was more specific: the gap between what they know, what they’re expected to share, and what actually lands with their teams.
“I sometimes don’t have the larger picture,” one participant said. “So I’m struggling with how to influence staff so it aligns with everybody else consistently — and it’s not too much or too little.”
This is the translation work that middle managers do every day. They are not simply passing along information from above; they are shaping it into something that makes sense for their teams, that connects organizational direction to the work people are actually doing.
When managers are doing that work without a clear picture themselves, and without a shared framework with their peers, the result is inconsistency across the organization — even when everyone is genuinely trying to get it right.
The loneliness of the role, and what happens when that changes
One of the most striking moments came when the group started naming something they had apparently never said out loud before. “Managers don’t meet together,” one participant observed. The recognition seemed to land on the group all at once
Senior leadership has its meetings. Directors have theirs. But the managers responsible for bringing strategy to life — the ones holding the most direct relationships with frontline staff — often have no consistent space to connect, compare notes, or align on approach.
From there, the conversation shifted quickly. People got energized about what it could look like:
- Sharing how each manager communicates with their teams
- Aligning messaging across departments
- Learning from each other’s approaches
- Reducing the duplication that comes from everyone improvising independently.
As one participant put it, the solution seemed almost obvious once they named the problem. “What a simple fix — let’s just have a meeting together.”
Connection is not just a morale issue. When middle managers are aligned with each other, the whole organization moves more coherently.
Leading in two directions
The session also surfaced a shift in expectations that many managers are navigating without much explicit support. Increasingly, the role asks them to lead upward as well as downward — to bring forward what’s actually happening on the ground, to influence decisions before they’re fully formed, and to frame challenges in ways that leadership can act on.
We’d add one more layer to this: the growing expectation that managers build a financial and operational case for what they bring forward. Understanding the cost and impact of a proposal, not just its human or strategic rationale, is becoming part of what it means to influence upward effectively. Managers who think in those terms signal to leadership that they are considering the full picture — which strengthens both the case they’re making and their standing as a management team.
What Organizations Can Do
If middle management is a dance, then organizations have a responsibility to create conditions where people can move with some confidence.
The complexity of the role is not something to eliminate — it comes with the territory. But there is a lot that organizations can do to make sure managers are not navigating it entirely on their own. Here is what we have seen make a real difference.
1. Bring the middle into the conversation
What it looks like: Regularly creating space for management-level perspectives in leadership conversations, not just as a reporting mechanism, but as genuine input into decisions. This might mean:
- Including a standing agenda item for managers to surface what they’re hearing from staff
- Bringing managers into planning conversations earlier in the process
Why it matters: The people closest to frontline work often have the clearest view of what’s working and what isn’t. When that perspective informs decisions rather than just implementing them, the quality of both strategy and execution improves. It also reinforces to managers that they are contributors to the organization’s direction, not just the people responsible for carrying it out.
Create a management community of practice
What it looks like: Regular time — quarterly is a good starting point — for managers across the organization to gather, share what they’re seeing, and work through common challenges together. The agenda doesn’t have to be elaborate:
- What are you putting in your team meetings right now?
- How are you talking about this new initiative?
- What’s coming up that you’re not sure how to handle?
Why it matters: The disconnection this group named is not unique to them. We hear it from managers across many organizations. And as this session showed, it’s solvable. Shared language, aligned approaches, and the simple reassurance that others are navigating similar terrain — these things matter more than they might seem.
Make the messaging explicit
What it looks like: When significant communications go out, providing managers with clear guidance alongside them:
- Here’s what’s important for you to understand
- Here’s what’s meant to be shared with your teams
- Here are the questions likely to come up
Making this a standard part of organizational communication planning rather than an afterthought.
Why it matters: Right now, many managers are left to figure this out on their own — which takes time, produces inconsistency, and leaves people less confident than they should be. As one participant put it, the ask is simple: “here’s what you need to know, here’s what you need to share” — rather than guessing. That kind of clarity is a straightforward investment with an outsized return.
Build cross-organizational understanding
What it looks like: Intentionally involving managers in cross-functional projects, working groups, or initiatives outside their immediate area. Even informal connections across departments — a brief cross-team check-in, a shared problem-solving session — can make a difference.
Why it matters: Many managers described limited visibility into what was happening in other parts of their organization. That gap makes it harder to communicate with their own teams, harder to connect the dots between departments, and harder to act as the integrators the role increasingly requires. Organizational literacy doesn’t develop on its own — it needs to be built deliberately.
Invest in shared learning
What it looks like: Development programs where managers learn together, rather than in isolation. Cohort-based training, peer learning groups, or even structured opportunities to debrief shared experiences all count, like in Laridae’s Management Training Program and Coach Training Program.
Why it matters: Shared learning does two things at once: it builds skill, and it builds community. The relationships formed through learning together often become the informal network managers draw on when they need to think something through or check their instincts. They also signal something important to the people in them — that the organization takes the complexity of this work seriously.
Make space for reflection and coaching
What it looks like: Providing access to coaching, mentorship, or structured reflection — dedicated time to step back from the day-to-day and think about how you’re doing the work, not just what you’re getting done.
Why it matters: One participant described the coaching component of her program as “absolutely invaluable.” That’s worth pausing on. Middle managers are making judgment calls constantly, in fast-moving environments, with limited time to recalibrate. Having a space to do that — regularly, with support — is not a luxury. It’s what sustains effectiveness over time.
A final thought
Middle managers are often described as being “in the middle” — as though that is a position of limitation, or an awkward place to be stuck.
But that framing misses what the role actually is. The managers in that session weren’t describing a “limitation”. They were describing some of the most consequential work in their organizations — the place where strategy either takes root or it doesn’t, where people feel supported or they don’t, where the gap between what an organization says it values and how it actually operates becomes visible every single day.
The dance is demanding. But it is also where a lot of the most important things happen.
If you are a middle manager, we hope this resonates. And if you lead an organization, we hope it offers a useful prompt to look at what you have in place to support the people doing this work.You can learn more about how we support managers and organizations through our Management Training Program, or get in touch to talk about what might make sense for your team.