Could mishandling middle managers be a counter-productive move?

Who’d be a middle manager in today’s increasingly complex and confusing hybrid workplace? Evidence is everywhere that suggests managers today are under pressure as never before – and under threat too.

According to Korn Ferry’s 2025 Workforce Survey, layers of middle management have been slashed in the interests of cutting costs and creating a leaner organisation that can make decisions quicker.  

But instead of liberating large firms, the opposite has happened: senior executives have been left exposed and overwhelmed by operational tasks previously done by middle managers, while junior employees have been cast adrift without the scaffolding and guidance that middle managers provide.   

Connective tissue removed  

It’s a mess. While 41% of employees say their organisations have trimmed management layers, a similar number (37%) say they feel directionless according to the Korn Ferry survey. And nearly half of senior executives and 40% of CEOs now doubt their ability to meet their responsibilities.    

A move intended to boost efficiency begins to look more like self-sabotage as the connective tissue of the organisation is ripped away. Managers perform many key tasks such as mentoring staff, aligning teams and acting as cultural anchors inside the firm. Without them, warns Fortune magazine, ‘cohesion tanks.’  

 Even when they’re still employed within the hierarchy, middle managers aren’t doing well.  They’re in meltdown according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, which tracks a worrying decline in manager wellbeing and engagement. Managers feel undertrained, overburdened and undervalued. Less than one on four (37%) feel like they are thriving. Yet this is the group that company bosses call upon to hold things together. If they go into retreat, that’s a worrying sign. 

Riding to the rescue?  

Will AI and other new technologies ride to the rescue of the managerial class by streamlining routine tasks so that managers can concentrate on higher-value work such as supporting teams and implementing strategy? Perhaps yes – but only up to a point.   

Microsoft has identified 2025 as ‘the ‘Year of the Frontier Firm’ and is advancing the idea of a new type of organisation powered by ‘hybrid’ teams of humans and AI agents. In this scenario, intelligence is ‘on tap’ and there’s a welcome move from rigid org charts to more fluid, outcome-driven work charts.  

However, AI agents also need training and managing – just like human employees. According to Microsoft’s Frontier Firm survey, more than a third (36%) of business leaders expect their teams to be managing AI agents within five years. That could add to the burden of middle managers who will be expected not only to deal with the emotional complexities of a human workforce but the growing digital intelligence of an automated one.  

What they’re missing 

There’s no easy way out of the middle manager rat trap. Finer-grain digital technology will further drive the possibilities of hybrid working and lead to ever more distributed teams. At least senior executives are beginning to recognise what they’re missing when they strip away that layer or allow it to degrade through neglect. More training, mentoring, coaching and wellbeing initiatives for managers are clearly required. 

The pioneering economist Peter Drucker, who invented the term ‘knowledge worker’, famously differentiated between leadership (‘doing the right things’) and management (‘doing things right’). In uncertain geopolitical and economic times, organisations need to do both. 

Thinking they can do the right things without the committed input of the people who make it happen is just false thinking.