I see this guy \u2014 sorry, still more guys than gals \u2014 a mid-30s man, hunched over his laptop nervously scratching his head with one hand, while the other is trying to tame the mouse, simultaneously giving short answers into a headset just as his boss is entering his glass-walled office. When he briefly looks up at me, I see a brave burnout-smile before he proceeds to the next emergency. This feels like an old clich\u00e9 if it wasn’t so painfully playing out in front of my eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThe Board Room Version: The problem of middle management is in its name, literally: in the middle. Between seeing problems but unable to solve them. Analysis of data verifies this. Most important issues in a company are due to common causes, which can only be solved by changing the system, the processes, the organizational structures. Senior management is responsible for the system but KPIs and bonuses are rewarding the wrong things. In addition we have developed a fetishism for the wrong kind of leaders. The managers of chaos that has been caused by themselves. We don’t need Performance Managers as leaders but System Thinkers.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Being overburdened is not exclusive to middle managers \u2014 but add responsibility and subtract the authority to change the situation, and it becomes a formula for burnout in the case of the individual and a systemic issue for the company. But it’s just one person in a big company. What can it matter? Because it’s not just one person in a big company. It’s a symptom, not a weak link. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The issue of middle management is literally in its name. In the middle. Between senior managers and working staff, they take direction from the top but at the same time see the reality of the shop floor. Most of the time there is a disconnect between the two \u2014 and they are supposed to somehow bridge it. They will try. They all do. They improvise, patch, buffer. But the system will eventually make them fail. Because no matter how many small \u2014 operational \u2014 problems they solve, systemic and structural problems always remain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I train people in solving operational issues for a living. It\u2019s not that hard, no rocket science. Root Cause Analysis, CAPA, some simple data analysis techniques and you can fix most issues at that level. And these middle managers are good people, most of them, motivated, eager to learn. Yet it seems like there is always something big and troubling, a haunting shadow that constantly produces friction in organizations that they cannot do anything about. It’s the conflicting scorecards and slogans \u2014 more for the customer, zero defects, less waste – more value. It\u2019s the constant redrawing of org charts ending up looking like an Escher staircase, logical from the outside, maddening from within. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is when I think of W. Edwards Deming. Yes, the PDCA cycle guy. He was \u2014 beside being my personal hero if there is something like that in management theory \u2014 one of the first systems thinkers. One of those people who tried to understand organizations as a system of interacting components. Plus he was a data person. Already in the 1950s he proposed that businesses need to measure and analyze their processes to identify the source of variation – or stuff going wrong. In his experience only a few issues were created from special causes – special or uncommon issues that could be individually solved. Most issues in organizations – if you\u2019re not in a totally chaotic startup – come from what is known as common causes – a steady but less apparent flow of dysfunction built into the system itself. But people who are close enough, see it in their daily work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Deming wrote that with the front-liners in mind. In my experience this applies to middle management too. And it’s this constant stuff that keeps middle managers overburdened. Simply because they cannot solve it. It’s not their pay grade. Common causes are systemic issues. The structure is wrong, how processes interact, the organizational setup. Middle management cannot change that. They often see it \u2014 at least in their corner of the organization \u2014 but lack either the mandate to act or the political capital to name it upwards. As a group they hold the most accurate picture of their organization, yet have the least capacity to act on it. They are by design in a knowledge trap. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to Deming it’s also not their job \u2014 and more importantly, he was clear about whose job it actually is. Senior management is responsible for the system, and the system produces most of the dysfunction. He argued this throughout The New Economics. Quality, he wrote, is the responsibility of management and cannot be delegated. Only they can change the system that produces these issues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
How? What you need is knowledge was his answer. Deming called it the system of \u201cProfound Knowledge\u201d – heavy name, straightforward concept. Four components, inseparable from each other. To run an organization well you need to understand it as a system, understand variation in that system, understand how knowledge is actually built and understand the psychology of the people inside it. Four lenses. One picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To act on this kind of knowledge you need to be at the top of the organization, you need to be senior management. Leadership has both the power and the vantage point to see the whole organization, the system and its components. The problem is that senior leadership often does not really see what it is looking at \u2014 not because people are stupid, but because the system buries them in dashboards, escalations, business cases and polished narratives. All the wrong stuff that is just surface. Seeing would require exactly what Deming describes \u2014 an understanding of systems, variation, how knowledge is actually built and how people function. In short, they would have to think like theorists. And that, apparently, is asking too much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ok, now all the Luhmann fanboys and girls will go, but Luhmann said that systems can only reproduce their own logic, they are fixed, no change, why bother? True, but he was talking about society level systems – Law, Economics, Politics, not companies. Companies run on decisions, are built by them and can therefore be changed from within. So the tragedy is a choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But how does systemic change happen in an organization? It is done by senior leadership \u2014 we discussed that. But how do leaders actually work? Most businesses are managed by numbers. Hail to the KPI. Seems logical, right? I just referred to Deming who was deeply invested in data analysis. An engineer, physicist, and mathematician by study; statistician and consultant by trade. But he used numbers to understand the system, not to manage it. Management by numbers is fundamentally problematic because numbers are a tricky thing. They are one source, one lens to understand how an organization works – what it does well, what not, what generates value and what doesn\u2019t. But the moment they are used to steer a company, they become dangerous. The issue is not measurement. The issue is what the organization does to people once something is measured. I see this regularly when working through data with managers. If there is no personal stake in the numbers people are open, curious, willing to find problems. Yet when those same numbers go upstairs to senior management and can fall back on them, something shifts. Bad numbers get questioned. Good numbers get celebrated as proof of personal genius. This is entirely understandable \u2014 it is what the system of bonuses, merit ratings and rankings produces. Fear. Greed. Blindness to the real issues. Deming saw this clearly and said so. Data is a tool for those who want to understand. In the hands of those who want to manage, it becomes a weapon pointed inward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A good leader should therefore be more like a scientist than a performance manager. So do we want eggheads at the top of companies? There are those who say that would exactly be the wrong move. Experts, they say, are too far away from the reality of business, and they simply do not bear the consequences of their decisions. That absence of consequence, the argument goes, is the root cause of bad decisions. Nassim Taleb illustrates this in much more detail in his book \u201cSkin in the Game\u201d. It is an interesting argument. But in my experience it is insufficient when applied to senior leadership of operational companies \u2014 it might very much be applicable in consulting or finance where decision-makers or influencers are structurally insulated from outcomes. Senior leaders in operational companies usually have considerable skin in the game \u2014 bonuses at risk, share options, loss of reputation or career. Taleb is useful here, but insufficient. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem, as Deming would say, is these are the wrong consequences. Bonuses measure the wrong things, over the wrong timeframe. A medieval blacksmith got an immediate consequence if he made a bad sword. The knight would go medieval on him. By the time the brilliant multicolored five-year plan should bear fruit, the bonus has been paid, the slide deck has been archived, and the manager has moved on. So bonuses often don’t sharpen systemic thinking \u2014 they reward the appearance of performance. And appearances, as we have seen, can be managed \u2014 or simply faked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what we really want are system thinkers as leaders \u2014 people who see the whole and its components, understand how they interact, know their data and can use it as intended: as a tool to learn, not as a threat. Back to the eggheads, right? Not quite. We are constantly told that leaders need to be charismatic, passionate, inspiring \u2014 able to tell compelling stories and fill a room. I believed this too, because that is what we see celebrated in the media. As a longtime Mac user I am something of a Steve Jobs fanboy. And was there ever a more charismatic and passionate leader? Steve and his mock turtleneck sweater seemed to prove this theory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What changed my mind was a TEDx talk of someone who works in my corner of the globe \u2014 at the Lucerne School of Business. In 2024 Martin Gutmann asked: are we celebrating the wrong leaders? Afterwards I immediately read his book \u201cThe Unseen Leader\u201d \u2014 not least because he is a historian as well as a management professor, and I do love history. Gutmann developed this very interesting concept called \u201cAction Fallacy\u201d. We celebrate leaders for dramatic effect \u2014 their loudness and busyness, their ability to perform in a crisis. We systematically overlook the boring ones. The leaders who avoid crisis in the first place. He illustrates this with the two polar explorers Shackleton and Amundsen. Amundsen quietly achieved every polar goal without drama or loss of life. Shackleton became famous precisely because his expeditions failed spectacularly. He was exciting to talk about. The difference shows up even in the literature \u2014 26 books celebrate Shackleton’s leadership qualities. Amundsen has four. My advice, at least watch Gutmann\u2019s TEDx talk. It makes the case far better than I can summarize here and it paints a wonderful picture of what a disciplined, methodical leader can do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So perhaps not eggheads \u2014 but certainly leaders who are methodical, who have a genuine understanding of how their organization works as a system, and who use that understanding to act rather than just to report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which brings me back to that guy hunched over his laptop. I still see him everywhere. From Deming’s earliest writings to today is more than half a century of knowing what the problem is and where it originates. And yet the middle manager is still absorbing what the top is not resolving. There is something deeper than intellectual understanding at work here. Organizational behavior seems to resist exactly the changes that would be rational to make. Why is that? Is there a genuine way out? Headset on. Laptop open. Brave little burnout-smile. I guess there is more to explore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n