The Misery of Middle Managers: Is There Anything You Can Do? | Faith & Life

A writer shares how she found strength and hope to deal with the frustration of being caught between senior leaders and workers in her team.

Lydia Seah

Middle managers have it bad. They are often caught in between those they manage and those they report to, having to constantly switch between the role of leader to their subordinates, and the role of follower to their own supervisors.

Research by Gallup, a survey and management consulting company, shows that “managers report more stress and burnout, worse work-life balance, and worse physical well-being than the individual contributors on the teams they lead”.¹

If you are in middle management, perhaps you can identify with some of these statements:

1. You’re burdened by administrative tasks. You have so many emails to write and answer that it’s almost a wonder you can find any time to do your actual work.

You’re burdened by administrative tasks. You have so many emails to write and answer that it’s almost a wonder you can find any time to do your actual work.

2. You’re swamped by meetings. Various inter-departmental or cross-functional meetings take up most of your office hours. And that’s on top of the meetings with your team members, which you need to hold to get everyone aligned with your team’s goals and to address performance issues and interpersonal conflicts.

3. You feel caught in the middle. You need to communicate organisation goals and strategic changes to your team, but it can be challenging to get everyone on the same page. You need to handle the backlash and the pushback, but your hands are tied. You feel like you’re only a messenger, with neither the position nor authority to help top management and lower-level employees meet in the middle.

4. You have no time to develop skills outside of your current role. You feel stuck in your position, with little opportunity to move forward. You simply have no time to upgrade your skills to move on to upper management, or perhaps to even change track.

If you find yourself resonating with some or all of these statements, let me encourage you: there is hope. Here are some tips I have personally found helpful as a middle manager.

Our loving Father invites us: “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7). God cares. Not only will He listen to our cries for help, but He will also act in wisdom, love, and power.

I once served under a temperamental boss while having to ensure that morale within the team remained high. That meant that I had to cushion most of the blows, which made for a harrowing time. But concern for my subordinates and conviction for the mission of the organisation kept me going. In those times, verses like “God is our refuge and strength, always ready to help in times of trouble” (Psalm 46:1 NLT) took on a deeper meaning.

Many tears were also shed during those times. And Sunday nights were always filled with dread of the coming week. But through every trial, God walked with me. Sometimes, it came in the form of encouragement from a co-worker; sometimes, from unexpected events that led my boss away from the office. At all times—both good and bad—God was my shelter.

It’s in hindsight that I clearly see how He did not allow anything more than I could handle to come my way.

A picture of an abstract scene of smoke wisps, conveying an ominous atmosphere of fear and anxiety.

Fear & Anxiety: What the 3 Most Popular Bible Verses Say

When you are afraid, what are the passages in God’s word that instruct and comfort you?

Scripture tells us that problems and trials develop character—“suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope” (Romans 5:3–4). But how so?

When I was burdened by administrative tasks and swamped with meetings, I felt that I needed some good time management skills. During that time, I came across a wonderful book, What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done, by Matt Perman. It offered practical handles on how to overcome time-killers like procrastination, interruptions, and multitasking by turning them around and making them work for you.

The workplace became an excellent environment for me to practise these skills. And through practice, I internalised those tips and became more decisive and disciplined. One of them was ensuring that work flowed efficiently: to reduce the number of emails in my inbox to zero every day, I had to do one of these three Ds: decide, delegate, or delete.

I’m thankful that God used the harrowing period to develop my capacity not only in getting more things done, but also in getting the right things done.

While getting more things done is just about ticking off items on a checklist, getting the right things done is about prioritising things that truly matter in eternity and in God’s kingdom.

Over time, I learnt that not every battle has to be fought: it’s okay to lose some—to our supervisors as well as to our subordinates. This understanding helped me to expend my energy on the things that truly mattered, and turn mundane tasks like answering an email into meaningful opportunities to display Christlike character in my response.

Pride at Work: When the Desire to Be Seen Turns Deadly

If it’s good to take pride in our work, when does it displease God?

One of the most frustrating things about middle management is feeling that we are doing counter-productive things. Efforts to move things forward seem to be negated by resistance from either the top or the bottom.

Perhaps the wise Teacher understood this feeling, for he wrote in Ecclesiastes 3:1–8: “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build . . .”

In setting opposing activities against each other, these verses seem to suggest that there is something inherently contradictory about human activities: what one person does is often undone by another, cancelling out its effect. There appears to be much futility in human activity: our affairs are often a matter of two steps forward, one step back.

But there is another way to understand these verses. Old Testament scholar Philip Satterthwaite explains it in Journey Through Ecclesiastes: “We could equally well read today’s text as a statement of God’s providential ordering of the world He has made: see how well everything fits together! All activities, even the most contradictory-seeming, have their place in God’s dealings with His creation!”

In the seemingly conflicting activities that we are trapped in, God is at work.

He will make “everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Though we may not be able to understand what that might look like when we are in the thick of it, we can trust that it will work out, leading to the salvation of souls, the sanctification of saints, and the glorification of God’s name.

I once had to handle an underperforming subordinate who cited challenges at home as a reason for her inability to complete her tasks on time. Our colleagues tried to be compassionate and accommodating, but after a while, their patience ran dry. Some of them even began to wonder if her “family issues” were merely a disguise for laziness. They started to resent her getting away with sub-par work while they had to pick up the slack. But my hands were tied because she had the favour of my supervisor.

This went on for some time, and I felt like I was walking on a tightrope. Then, unexpectedly, my boss was transferred to another department, and I took on his position. Soon after, the underperforming subordinate resigned, too. There was subsequently a renewal in the team, and I had my dream team.

So, yes, middle managers have it bad. But God can turn it into something for our good.

Our trials may offer us an opportunity to know Him better and to experience His presence in a deeper and more intimate way.

We can pick up new skills and knowledge. We can rest in the knowledge that our suffering is not forever; there is an end. May we take heart and keep going.

¹ Jim Harter, “If Your Managers Aren’t Engaged, Your Employees Won’t Be Either”, Harvard Business Review, 6 June 2019. https://hbr.org/2019/06/if-your-managers-arent-engaged-your-employees-wont-be-either