
The vanishing middle manager
Middle management has been under a decades-long assault—and in the COVID-19 pandemic, the crisis-driven need for speed has turned “flatter, faster, leaner” into a mantra. But what’s at stake longer term?
Management and leadership issues for global organisations. I am building a collection of research and evidence related to those issues, adding to them my insight from my professional experience in 12 organisations of different sizes across private, non-profit and public sectors.
Middle management has been under a decades-long assault—and in the COVID-19 pandemic, the crisis-driven need for speed has turned “flatter, faster, leaner” into a mantra. But what’s at stake longer term?
Leaders don’t need to be loud and confident. The Open University’s Dr Jacqueline Baxter makes the case for a quieter approach.
When it comes to employee happiness, bosses and supervisors play a bigger role than one might guess. Relationships with management are the top factor in employees’ job satisfaction, which in turn is the second most important determinant of employees’ overall well-being.
So managers have a lot more work to do in responding to the pandemic. Executives need to tailor their behaviour to individual employees’ needs. Ironically, though managers may have feared that remote working would allow employees to slack, it may be that managers have not been up to the challenge. Bosses may have spent too much time videoconferencing and not enough speaking directly with subordinates.
Henry Stewart is the found of Happy, a company in London that does computer and happiness trainings. They are also (naturally) a very happy workplace. In this speech, Henry shares…