Why middle managers aren’t expendable
When managers become scapegoats for absent leadership, employee experience suffers.
Most senior comms leaders agree that effective middle managers are the key to employee engagement, a positive culture and thriving business productivity. But talk to enough leaders at different rungs of the corporate ladder and you’ll hear distinct perspectives on who’s to blame when employee communication falls apart.
I’ve attended enough industry events to notice two trends emerge around the topic of manager comms: Directors and senior leaders who act as de facto middle managers themselves will remind their peers that effective manager communication starts at the top, while VPs and senior executives often vent and express their frustrations with managers when the cascade is reduced to a trickle (or a drought).
When you repeatedly hear the same callous, classist language used by senior leaders to describe managers, it’s clear that culture can take a backseat to outdated, jargon-laden concepts of operational efficiency. Consider Mark Zuckerberg, who went on a podcast last week to give credit to Elon Musk for firing hundreds of middle managers at Twitter and kicking off a trend that Zuck believes has been “good for the industry.”
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