PT
EN
Amid the cult of self-organization, radical horizontality, and “boss-free” environments, an uncomfortable question keeps surfacing:
“What is the role of the middle manager in today’s organizations?”
This figure, once central to the corporate machine, seems to have been pushed into a place of uncertainty. Not senior leadership, not a technical executor. Not fully autonomous, yet not blindly following commands. Above all, a mediator — and perhaps that is precisely where their strategic importance lies.
The Difference Between Directing and Absorbing
Senior leadership does not suffer from existential crises. Their role is clear: define directions, take risks, and provoke disruption. They need to “let go.”
The middle manager, on the other hand, is called to something more subtle — and perhaps more difficult. They need to receive pressure from above, decode it, emotionally process it, and pass it on to the team with regulation, clarity, and balance.
It is not about being a “buffer” or “shielding” the team, but about exercising emotional and discursive leadership intelligently.
Leading Requires Dealing with Your Own Shadow Side
This task requires what Jordan Peterson would call the capacity to integrate the “dark side” of one’s personality. Middle managers who do not know their own derailment factors end up passing tensions downward — and losing the team’s trust.
In the 2000s, development programs such as those proposed by Jim Collins or Abilio Diniz included real introspective journeys, genuine “self-awareness safaris.” Today, those spaces have been replaced by generic coaching talk and positivity.
But real leadership does not emerge from a comfort zone. It emerges from internal confrontation.
Candor: The Forgotten Virtue in Middle Leadership
English has an almost untranslatable word: candor. It is not just “frankness.” It is the art of saying difficult things in a constructive, firm, and respectful way.
This should be the tone of the middle manager: neither authoritarian nor permissive. Neither repressive nor complicit. Someone who can navigate grey zones without losing integrity or the capacity for action.
Forces That Weaken Middle Leadership
Unfortunately, many forces work against this profile:
- Contemporary culture that romanticizes “hierarchy-free” environments — but forgets collective responsibility.
- The facilitator mindset, which sometimes confuses empathy with omission. Tools like Liberating Structures can help the middle manager facilitate with more intention and less improvisation.
- The fragility of organizational structures, which shift power to technical specialists without preparing leaders to sustain decisions.
- Low process maturity and neglect of knowledge management.
Without structure, the middle manager is hollowed out. And when that happens, the vacuum is filled by improvisation, conflict, and chaos.
Empowering the Leader Is a Sign of Maturity, Not Regression
Companies that want to evolve toward a more solid, more productive, and less reactive culture will need, at some point, to recover the strategic value of middle leadership.
This starts by restoring to this role trust, autonomy, and clarity of mission.
I recall an old principle from Amazon’s culture:
“The leader is right, and very right.” Not out of arrogance, but because the environment was prepared so that they had the tools, context, and responsibility to be right.
Who Has the Courage to Lead from the Middle?
Leading from the middle is hard. It means dealing with contradictory pressures, ambiguity, and the constant temptation to disengage. But it is also the space where the most resilient, most complete, and most human leaders are formed.
If we do not reclaim the value of the middle manager, we risk building organizations where everyone talks — but no one leads. One of the greatest challenges of this role is leading technical teams with credibility — a topic addressed in Leading Agile Teams: Does It Require Technical Knowledge?. And the space the middle manager occupies is largely defined by the organization’s culture — which makes the debate around Cultural Fit directly relevant.