Do We Over-Index on Top Leaders?

A black-and-white 1999 Super Bowl XXXIII ad for the job listing site Monster.com features children looking at the camera and saying things like, "When I grow up, I want to file all day," or "I want to be a yes man." The ad became an instant classic partly because it included many common stereotypes of dull jobs. The ad aimed to get viewers thinking about their jobs and imagining that something better could exist (and could be found in the Monster.com listings). One of the memorable quotes was this one voiced by a boy: "When I grow up, I want to claw my way up to middle management."  

Middle management and its role in organizations rarely shows up as an aspiration. Rather, its reviled status in the work world is often the premise for jokes and comedy sketches. The idea is that not only are the jobs dull, but they do (and sometimes create) meaningless work—work that seems to exist merely to justify the existence of the middle managers themselves. 

We think this is both unfair and inaccurate. When we do focus groups with faculty, students, and parents in universities, independent schools in the USA, and international schools, we often hear about the middle managers of the education world: deans, department chairs, vice provosts, directors of various types, and more. It is these leaders, more than presidents and heads of school, that affect the work lives of most school staff. As Aki Ito, writing for the Business Insider website, puts it: 

"[S}tudy after study [finds] that when middle managers do their jobs right, they bolster performance more than either top executives or ground-level employees. Supervisors do real work. They motivate. They mentor. They communicate critical information to and from different parts of the company. They smooth out glitches and spot opportunities. They're the ones who keep the trains running." 

Ito makes the above point while reporting that global business is in the throes of a "flattening" wave—a trend toward eliminating more and more middle management jobs in the name of efficiency and cost containment (see her article here for the data). We see signs of this, too, in education, where fewer administrators seem to be supervising more people. Who will be left to do the important--but not directly remunerated--things that Ito lists? A better approach would be to engineer middle management in education away from drudgery and toward the motivating, mentoring, communicating, and smoothing that most affect employee and customer experiences.