When performance starts to wobble, most organisations instinctively look upwards. The executive team becomes more visible. The strategy gets sharper. A new programme appears with a confident name and a launch plan. It’s a familiar pattern and it makes sense. Leadership sits at the top so that’s where attention goes.
But the lived experience of work doesn’t sit there. It sits in team meetings and one-to-ones. In the quiet conversations after the presentation has ended. It sits with middle managers. They are the point where ambition meets reality. The people who have to make the strategy workable on a Tuesday afternoon when someone’s off sick and the deadline hasn’t moved. And yet they are often the most stretched and least supported layer in the system.
Managers shape engagement more than any other factor
There’s a reason the middle matters. Gallup’s research consistently points to one thing: the manager has more influence on team engagement than any other factor. If you’ve ever worked in two teams inside the same organisation and felt the difference immediately, that’s why.
The latest State of the Global Workplace 2025 report shows that engagement among managers fell in 2024 – a sharper drop than for other employee groups. Managers shape how work is experienced day to day. When they’re stretched, it tends to show up in how clearly priorities are set, how much context gets shared and how confident teams feel.
CIPD’s review on people managers reaches a similar conclusion. Effective line management is consistently linked to better wellbeing, stronger performance and lower intention to leave.
The pattern is hard to ignore. The way managers lead shapes how work feels, how people show up and whether they choose to stick around.
The job has changed. Middle managers aren’t just overseeing delivery anymore. They’re translating strategy, handling performance conversations, supporting wellbeing, navigating hybrid teams and responding to change that rarely slows down. And most of that wasn’t in the original job description.
Teams are leaner. Expectations are higher. The volume of internal communications has increased. There’s more context to share, more questions to answer, more ambiguity to sit with. And it all lands with the person in the middle.
They’re accountable for results they didn’t set. They’re expected to represent decisions they didn’t make. They’re often the first to hear frustration from below and the first to be asked for updates from above.
When priorities shift or pressure ramps up, someone has to make it workable for a team. Most of the time, that responsibility sits with managers.
A vision can sound clear in townhalls but different in team meetings. People don’t sit there thinking about pillars or frameworks. They’re trying to work out what’s changed, what still matters and what this means for their own work. They’re listening for cues from their manager – what’s being emphasised and what’s quietly dropping down the priority list.
Research shows that employees place more trust in their direct manager than in corporate communications. That gives managers influence. When strategy is delivered by someone people trust, it’s more likely to be taken seriously and more likely to be acted on.
That’s the bit we underestimate. Managers aren’t just passing messages on. They’re working out what those messages mean in practice, deciding what to emphasise and what can wait, and helping their teams navigate the grey areas. Middle management research backs this up. Strategy doesn’t simply move through the middle unchanged. It gets interpreted there. They answer the questions people are actually asking – what does this mean for me? Is this going to stick? How should I prioritise now?
And yet many organisations spend a lot of time improving leadership communication to lay the foundations for change and far less time preparing managers to translate it for their teams.
The difference is rarely the coporate narrative. It's the person they report to.
You don’t usually notice culture being shaped. But it’s there in how a manager gives feedback when someone is still learning. In whether flexible working is genuinely supported, not just agreed in principle. In how success is recognised. In whether people feel comfortable speaking up or raising a different view. The everyday moments.
Spend time inside any organisation and you’ll see it. Two teams working under the same strategy, with the same policies, describing their experience in completely different ways. The difference is rarely the corporate narrative. It’s the person they report to. Culture lives in those daily interactions. And most of them sit with the middle.
The role we keep adding to
Most middle managers stepped into leadership because they were good at their job. Solid operators and a safe pair of hands. So when the next step came up, they were the obvious choice.
But the delivery targets didn’t disappear and the operational work didn’t go anywhere. Instead, the scope expanded. Reporting lines widened and expectations grew. Leadership responsibilities were layered on top of everything that was already there.
We assume leadership skills will develop on the job. Sometimes they do but sometimes they’re squeezed out by everything else. The organisation keeps moving and metrics keep tracking. The delivery pressure doesn’t ease because someone needs to spend more time coaching or aligning a team around change. So managers do what most of us would do. They focus on what’s urgent and visible. That’s not a personal failing but a predictable outcome of how the role is structured.
If we know managers shape strategy, engagement and culture, then the way we design their roles matters – in workload, priorities and the support they receive. We ask a lot of the middle. The question is whether we’ve made the job workable.
A vision can sound clear in townhalls but different in team meetings. People don’t sit there thinking about pillars or frameworks. They’re trying to work out what’s changed, what still matters and what this means for their own work. They’re listening for cues from their manager – what’s being emphasised and what’s quietly dropping down the priority list.
Research shows that employees place more trust in their direct manager than in corporate communications. That gives managers influence. When strategy is delivered by someone people trust, it’s more likely to be taken seriously and more likely to be acted on.
That’s the bit we underestimate. Managers aren’t just passing messages on. They’re working out what those messages mean in practice, deciding what to emphasise and what can wait, and helping their teams navigate the grey areas. Middle management research backs this up. Strategy doesn’t simply move through the middle unchanged. It gets interpreted there. They answer the questions people are actually asking – what does this mean for me? Is this going to stick? How should I prioritise now?
And yet many organisations spend a lot of time improving leadership communication to lay the foundations for change and far less time preparing managers to translate it for their teams.
Six actions to strengthen management today
If the argument makes sense, the next question is simple: what do you actually do?
Here are six places to start:
Leadership is experienced every day. It’s shaped by the people who set expectations, explain decisions and carry pressure with their teams. If that layer isn’t steady, engagement won’t be either.
We’ve invested heavily in vision at the top. The bigger opportunity now is to invest just as must in the people who translate it every day.
Because if culture lives anywhere, it lives there. If you’d like to speak to us about taking some practical steps towards strengthening the middle – drop us an email today.
Want to keep your finger on the pulse of the hottest topics in IC and EE? Check out some of our blogs and industry insights.
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