During the pandemic, much has been written about the middle manager — though, to be frank, not a lot of it has been positive. Middle managers are frequently misunderstood. Their value is often relegated to helping senior managers reduce their team responsibilities, obediently passing down messages from the top, or they are treated with the persistent belief that they take up resources but add little value. Not only are these beliefs incorrect, but they also waste the opportunity to empower the very people who are turning company goals and mission statements into real shareholder value.

I’m here to defend the much-maligned middle manager.

If you’ve been more than an individual contributor, then you’ve been a middle manager and, while no one else may know it, you and I know it’s the hardest job in the company. You have a tremendous responsibility yet little direct power, leaving you to rely on your ability to influence decisions and negotiate outcomes.

When I worked at Autodesk, the idea of a “customer-first” company was novel. At the time, many companies nationwide decided to shift their mindsets to execute customer-first experiences — a great idea in theory but incredibly hard in execution. My team was responsible for the websites, and so we did a deep-dive evaluation into all the ways the website was not customer-first. For the most part, the website was the company’s opinion of what information customers should know without deeply understanding what the customer actually wanted and how to meet their needs with excellence.

While my team of middle managers and I were doing the hard work of understanding customers’ needs and proposing changes to the website, the pushback we received from some senior leaders who were equally accountable for the new directive was disconcerting. Our proposed changes meant they had to rethink what benefited their department goals and make the hard decision to give in the short term or gain in the long term. My middle managers bemoaned the spot that gave them their name: stuck in the middle between leaders who often have their own agendas and the individual contributors who were responsible for executing the work in service to the company goals.

But their persistence paid off; in implementing just one of our proposed changes, download success rates on one page went up 300 percent, customer satisfaction scores for the page increased by 30 percent, and organic page traffic grew by 20 percent. (Read more about this project here.) This project reinforced that middle managers must understand the intent of directives, make decisions on how to implement them, and influence related decisions, all the while knowing to some degree that they are on their own to make it happen.

In another example, my client Headspace went through a major merger with on-demand mental healthcare company Ginger. Staying on task to meet each business’s revenue goals while also charting a new course means that the bulk of the work falls on middle managers and their teams. By the work I mean:

• marketing and driving to company goals;
• running a team and managing changes in leadership;
• addressing employee fears about their roles and the morale issues that come with ambiguity and the unknown;
• taking on extra projects required of the merger;
• and the emotional toll of carrying it all on their shoulders.

And during the course of this merger, I saw up close how the middle managers stepped up to take on the immense leadership required to get things done.

Throughout my career, I have seen how individual contributors can lean on their managers for support and direction, executives can lean on their managers to drive change and initiatives, but who can middle managers lean on? I have found over the decades we lean on each other for sanity checks, sounding boards, and support. So in every way, middle managers are carrying the load from below and above. Without them, there would be chaos and failed objectives. While executives are referred to as “leaders,” the title doesn’t always guarantee leader-ship, and in its absence, middle managers often fill the void.

“whether you realize it or not, you, too, are a middle manager.”

So next time you make a wisecrack about middle managers, remember: whether you realize it or not, you, too, are a middle manager. Even the CEO reports to the board, the board is in service of the shareholder, and shareholders have their own bosses in one form or another. We are all serving those above us and guiding those below us, and we are all champions of customer value and actors in the larger machinations of business.