Middle Management's Unpopular Truths | Generated by AI
Question: What are some unpopular opinions about middle managers in large corporations?
Answer:
Middle managers in big corporations often get defended as “essential glue,” but many observers (especially from the people above and below them) hold far less charitable views. Here are some genuinely unpopular opinions that you’ll rarely hear said out loud in company all-hands:
- Most middle managers are not “stuck in the middle” — they actively choose to stay there because it’s the sweet spot of maximum pay, status symbols with minimum real accountability. They fight tooth-and-nail against flattening initiatives not for the good of the company, but because it threatens their lifestyle.
- The majority of them add negative value. Once you strip away meetings, status reports, and “alignment” activities, a shocking percentage of middle layers could disappear tomorrow and the actual work would speed up and improve.
- “Manager tools” training and leadership coaching industries exist primarily to give mediocre middle managers the illusion of progress while changing nothing fundamental about their behavior.
- Performance reviews written by middle managers are less about developing people and more about manufacturing paper trails to protect themselves from HR liability.
- The real reason companies keep bloating middle management isn’t complexity — it’s that senior executives want human shields. Every new layer diffuses responsibility and makes it harder to pinpoint who actually failed.
- Middle managers are the primary carriers of corporate bureaucracy. Individual contributors invent processes to solve problems; middle managers turn those processes into permanent fiefdoms that outlive the original problem by decades.
- Empathy training for managers has backfired: it mostly taught them to perform caring language while continuing to make self-serving decisions. The modern “I hear you, and I’m sorry you feel that way” response is peak middle-management evolution.
- In most large organizations, promoting your best engineer or salesperson into middle management is one of the most reliable ways to lose a great individual contributor and gain a mediocre manager.
- The Dunning-Kruger effect is strongest in middle management. They genuinely believe they understand both the technical work and the executive strategy, when they’re usually weak at both.
- Remote work exposed middle management’s core function in many companies: physical surveillance and presenteeism theater. That’s why so many of them fought return-to-office hardest — not for “collaboration,” but because their job becomes obviously unnecessary when they can’t walk the floor.
These opinions are unpopular because middle managers vastly outnumber both the C-suite and the individual contributors who actually feel the pain. They control budgets for off-sites, training, and surveys — so the narrative stays protective.