Middle Managers Are Not Doing the Managing

McKinsey's work on middle managers makes an argument that is obvious once stated and widely ignored in practice: the quality of an organisation's middle management layer tracks its financial performance, and most organisations treat that layer as an administrative tier rather than a managerial one. The finding that matters for anyone running a performance process is what those managers reported spending their time on. Not developing people. Not assessing work. Administration, reporting, and individual contributor tasks they never stopped doing when they were promoted.

You can read the original at McKinsey's Investing in middle managers pays off, literally. What follows is what it implies for the performance management process specifically.

The part that gets dropped first

When a manager is short of time, the tasks that disappear are the ones with no deadline and no immediate consequence. Performance management is almost entirely made of those. Nobody chases a manager for not having had a development conversation. Nobody notices a vague objective until the year is over. The appraisal form has a deadline, so the form gets completed, which is why so many organisations have a performance process consisting of nothing but the form.

This is the mechanism behind most of the symptoms HR teams complain about. Objectives written in a hurry in January and never revisited. Appraisals assembled from memory the week they are due. Underperformance that nobody raised until it was severe enough to force itself into view. None of those are attitude problems. They are what happens when the work is real and the time is not allocated.

Why training alone does not fix it

An organisation that trains its managers in performance management and does not change what else those managers are responsible for has bought a better method and left no room to use it. The managers will know what a well-evidenced appraisal looks like and will still be writing them from memory in the last week, because the competing work has deadlines attached and this does not.

The two changes that actually create room are unglamorous. Take individual contributor work off managers deliberately rather than hoping they will stop doing it, which they will not, because it is the work they are confident at. And put the performance obligations in the calendar with the same status as anything else, so that the one-to-one is a meeting that gets moved rather than a meeting that gets cancelled.

What this means if you are the middle manager

The uncomfortable reading of the McKinsey work is that the part of your job nobody protects is the part that most determines whether you get a bigger one. Managers who develop people visibly, who have fewer unresolved performance problems and lose fewer good people, are the ones given larger teams. The administration you are currently drowning in is not what anyone will remember.

The practical move is to make the managerial work legible. Keep a short contemporaneous record of each person's performance as it happens, which takes minutes a week and removes the single worst task in the annual cycle. Raise a performance problem in month two rather than month eleven, when it is still a coaching conversation rather than a process. Those two habits account for most of the difference between managers whose performance process works and managers who dread it.