If you are a middle manager, you probably know this question from your everyday life. Perhaps you have heard your employees ask it, and maybe to such an extent that you sometimes find yourself thinking: "Why should so many decisions actually go through me?"And perhaps you have also asked the question upwards in your organization to ensure that you are on track with the leadership's KPIs and expectations.
Because that's often the reality of being a middle manager today – and if you are a middle manager, you have my deepest respect.
As the everyday heroes, right in the midst of it all, caught in the crossfire from below, above, from the side, and from the outside, in the classic organizational structure, we have made it the middle manager's task to pull the threads together, navigate paradoxes, create well-being, motivation, progress, coherence, meaning, to be the eyes and ears of top management, the advocate for employees, and much, much more.
Yes, just the thought of it can be exhausting!
Fundamentally, there is a tendency for us to place completely inhumane demands on our passionate, diligent, and dutiful middle managers – we simply squeeze the lemons unreasonably. But it doesn't have to be that way.
We all have a "lemon-squeezing limit" – even middle managers.
If you just look into recent studies, they also indicate the downside of the pressure we subject our passionate middle managers to – actually, our leaders, middle managers, and employees in general.
Take a look here:
- 26 percent of private leaders with sole leadership responsibility for others (personnel managers) feel stressed "often" or "always" (LEDERNE, 2022).
- 40 percent of public leaders have had more employees to lead in the last five years, and one-fifth believe they have too many employees to exercise good leadership (Fagbevægelsens Hovedorganisation, 2022).
- 40 percent of public leaders across sectors lack resources that enable their unit to prioritize the citizen in task execution (Komponent, 2022).
- 6 out of 10 leaders feel that they are being exploited. They feel used and that unreasonable demands are made (Krifa, 2022).
- 39 percent of employees with stress perceive their leader as "always stressed." Stress in leaders affects employees.
Free both middle managers and employees
In my opinion, there is every reason to look at alternatives to the classical and hierarchical organizational forms, which tend to lock our organizations and maintain dissatisfaction among our middle managers and employees. They are more encouraged to look upward and ask "are we allowed to...?" rather than taking action and using their expertise in the present, with the core task at the center. This is precisely what is needed in a changing world, where challenges are so complex and the pressure for change is so great that it calls for proactive, collaborative, and innovative employees who can lead themselves.
For over twenty years, I have advocated moving towards more self-organization and more facilitating leadership, where the primary leadership purpose is to make it easy for employees to unfold their professional expertise. This includes structural freedom to organize work in a way that creates coherence, meaning, and well-being for themselves, citizens, and customers.
This implies, above all, an organizational future where goal setting, documentation, control, bureaucracy, surveillance, and "bottlenecks" created by hierarchical organizational boundaries are permanently benched – in other words, everything that contributes to unreasonable pressure on our middle managers, dissatisfaction among employees, and inertia in our organizations.
Let's learn from those who break free in a good way!
Fortunately, there are more and more organizations that are breaking free in a good way these days, and we can be inspired by them. Organizations that have taken the first practical steps from an organization to an organism, from traditional leadership to a more facilitating and serving leadership, and towards a more leadership-free, self-organizing, and self-determining organization.
One of several strong examples is Regionshospitalet in Horsens, where the chief physician of Gynecology and Obstetrics, Marie Storkholm, together with her department, has worked purposefully over the past five years to promote work joy—among other things by breaking down hierarchies, nurturing a strong sense of community, removing bureaucracy and unnecessary functions, and challenging the prevailing “permission” culture.
Marie has a clear mission to wean employees off the habit of asking for permission about everything. Everyone—regardless of rank or seniority—is meant to have significant influence over how everyday work and the future are shaped. The results are so strong that they almost sound too good to be true—especially in a strained healthcare sector. Together with her dedicated team, Marie has created a department where there is no shortage of staff, where recruitment is not a challenge, and where sick leave was reduced by 40 percent in just one year.
JAC and the 90 percent leadership-free method
Another really strong example is the competence center JAC in Gentofte, which has now won the award for Public Workplace of the Year for the fourth year in a row. Here, the recipe is what JAC and Center Manager Ann-Christiana Matzen Andreasen call the 90 percent leadership-free method. The method is based on the premise that “we think best together,” and that the professionals who are closest to the citizens are the ones who hold the real gold.
That is why JAC’s employees themselves are responsible for hiring new colleagues, managing finances, developing new services for citizens, allocating salary funds, and more. The role of the leadership team is to facilitate the framework that employees can then fill, drawing on their professional expertise and decision-making authority.
At JAC, the focus is on developing employees who are co-creating and self-leading—with all the benefits this brings for both citizens and the employees themselves. One of the many very tangible gains at JAC is a sick leave rate that is 30 percent lower than in comparable organizations within the social sector, along with a very low level of stress-related absenteeism.
An organizational liberation process
Horsens Regionshospital and JAC are two examples of best practices, places we can look to and be inspired by.
This does not mean that their methods and models necessarily can and should be implemented everywhere. But it means that there is valuable inspiration to be found in both of them when it comes to building sustainable organizations with proactive and innovative employees who thrive, where the core service is prioritized – and where far fewer leaders and middle managers end up as stressed "bottlenecks" on important decisions.
If you’d like to learn even more about how we—as leaders and employees together—can pave the way for more coherent, synchronous, and leadership-light organizations through facilitative leadership, then take a look at my one-day course in facilitative leadership, or explore my keynotes: “Starling Flock Leadership – When Co-Creation Takes Wing”, “Hey, the Future Workplace Is Right Here—and We Are the Culture”, and/or sign up for my newsletter, where I regularly share my latest blog posts filled with practical, hands-on advice on creating greater coherence, well-being, and meaning.
Danish