Middle managers as change agents: unlocking organizational agility and sustaining high performance from the middle out

At the end of 2024, US and Canadian businesses, including big players such as Amazon, Tesla, CitiGroup, and Microsoft, made sweeping job cuts. The same was true on the other side of the Atlantic: nearly a quarter of UK businesses cut jobs in response to pressure on their finances from the latest government budget.

With less money and fewer people, businesses must improve their efficiency and productivity to remain competitive. However, with global employee engagement at an all-time low—Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2024 report shows that only 23% of employees are engaged in their work globally (a miserable 10% in the UK)—many businesses are struggling to create a thriving workplace culture that will generate the high performance needed.

Employee engagement is a crucial factor for business success. Low employee engagement costs the global economy a staggering 8.8 trillion U.S. dollars, or 9% of global GDP. When businesses get this right, it has a massive impact: businesses with high employee engagement benefit from 23% more profitability.

So, how can businesses improve engagement and performance in this harsh economic climate with decreased access to financial and human capital? The key lies with middle managers.

Why middle managers matter 

Middle managers play a vital role in improving and sustaining engagement and performance in organisations. Over the past eighteen years, Professor John van Reenen from LSE has established that at least a third of the variance in productivity between countries and companies is due to poor management alone. Management behaviour also accounts for 70% of the variance in employee engagement levels.

With eye-watering statistics like these (yes, I’m crying), it’s now critical that we shift our organisational focus away from our moribund performance management approach towards a radical improvement in management performance instead.

The problem lies in the way that most middle managers are trained. Many people end up as accidental managers—they’re promoted because of their technical ability rather than for their people-management skills—with one study showing that 82% of managers receive no training for their role. Gallup’s research shows that the majority of managers in the US receive little feedback on how effectively they manage their team, with less than half of employees saying they’ve had the chance to provide formal feedback on their manager. How can you be an effective manager if you’ve not received proper training or proper feedback?

The impact of poor management skills 

So what happens when middle managers haven’t been trained properly? In the absence of any mental model for quite how they’re supposed to perform in their new management role, they default to doing what they know best (and probably what got them promoted)—fixing problems. What this means in practice is that they inadvertently favor more of a command-and-control approach towards their team, directing and telling them what to do. Yet when managers constantly step into the problems brought to them, they inevitably stifle growth. Lacking the opportunity to think for themselves, team members can quickly lose interest in retaining ownership of their work, and ultimately, staff become demotivated and disengaged.

This management style is not only bad for employees but also the manager, as coming to be relied upon for everything by the team can quickly lead to overwhelm and burnout. Continually stepping in to solve other people’s problems means that managers have less time to focus on the higher-value aspects of their role, which ultimately impacts their engagement and productivity and seriously compromises their potential for advancement. Stepping down to do other people’s work for them might give poorly trained managers a sense of making a valuable contribution, but the reality is that employees are being marginalized by this micro-management approach, and managers aren’t growing their ability to step up.

 A shift to an enquiry-led style of management – Operational Coaching® 

To truly transform the quality of middle management, our managers need to learn modern communication and engagement skills that pull people towards them, not push them away.  A new approach known as Operational Coaching® teaches managers to employ a more purposeful and engaging enquiry-led style that generates more powerful outcomes.

As opposed to clunky and more formal executive coaching skills training that many managers are exposed to (learning which is quickly neglected), this new approach moves away from the transactional coaching session to focus instead on adopting coaching-related behaviours. Learning to ditch the default command-and-control approach helps managers stop firefighting and instead adapt their management style in a way that engages their team, acknowledges their capabilities and invites greater collaboration.

Asking powerful questions that can positively stimulate other people’s thinking is a management and leadership superpower, albeit one that’s under-utilized because managers have never been taught how to use purposeful enquiry as a skill. Managers learn to stop asking diagnostic questions to fix everyone’s problems and instead develop their awareness of coachable moments throughout the day, where asking a powerful question might drive a better outcome from a team member’s query than simply solving their problem outright. A well-intentioned question from a manager invites employees to wrestle with the issue themselves and develop insights which foster learning.

This opens them up to a wealth of skills development, helps them prioritize their tasks more efficiently, and builds their confidence in decision-making, leading to a more profound sense of purpose in their work. It ultimately benefits the whole organization, as employees are enabled, organizational agility is created, and managers regain valuable time to invest in the higher-value aspects of their roles and the team’s continued development.

More importantly, research has shown that this enquiry-led management approach really does work. In a large-scale randomized control trial conducted by the London School of Economics (LSE), managers learning how to adopt an Operational Coaching® style of management improved their capabilities across all nine competencies measured. Almost half (48%) of the successes reported were related to increased engagement and productivity, which together generated a whopping average 74x return on investment per manager undertaking the program.

If businesses are to succeed in this challenging economic climate, it’s time to unleash the power of middle managers by investing in their development to become skillful enablers of other people’s talents. Equipping them with the modern and respectful communication skills they need to tap into the massive potential of the disengaged majority will transform organizational cultures into engaging, productive, inclusive and collaborative environments where everyone can flourish, and performance can advance.  –

Written by Laura Ashley-Timms and Dominic Ashley-Timms.
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