Automation may threaten routine roles, but it cannot replace the emotional intelligence, diplomacy and people management that keep organisations running. Middle managers remain the essential conduit between boardroom vision and operational reality — the human buffer leaders still rely on to get things done, argues Dr Stephen Whitehead

LISTEN: Dr Stephen Whitehead on why middle managers still hold essential power.

If you are among the legion of middle managers around the world, then you may well be looking to the future with a grim fatalism. This isn’t surprising, given the prediction that your job is amongst those most likely to get harvested by AI,. However, I would advise you to not worry too much. Middle managers will be with us in great numbers for some time to come.

And the reason is simple: bosses cannot afford to lose you. Because if they do, it makes them personally vulnerable.

Let me explain.

A middle manager has one of the hardest jobs in the world: she is trapped in the worst of all possible situations with loads of responsibility, loads of accountability, lots of scrutiny, lots of visibility, but very little power. A leader, on the other hand, can be a lot of fun. Why? Because as leader you can employ managers to take the flack, take the weight of responsibility, shield you from the messy day-to-day running of the business, and you don’t even have to share the profits with them. As leader, the real power rests with you.

It’s true that the leader/owner of an organisation has to take risks with her/his own money, but in return they receive near total autonomy – they are accountable to no one (other, perhaps, than any shareholders). If there is profit to be had, it’s the leader/boss who gets most of it.

To put it another way, in all my working life I have never known anyone resign from a leadership position to take on a middle management position. While perhaps the majority of the managers I have known really wanted to be leaders – but lacked the money, experience, courage, or confidence to be their own boss.

During the 15 years I was MBA Director for a leading UK university, one of the key discussion points was always; ‘What is the difference between a leader and a manager?’ And the answer, as I indicate above, comes down to one word: ‘Power’. You don’t become rich or powerful as a middle manager. By way of example, Musk, Gates, Page, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Bezos, Buffet, Brin and Arnault, were never middle managers.

Managers have very little power other than that bestowed on them by organisational leadership, typically the company boss. Such power is amorphous. That is, easily taken away and just as easily lost. The organisational leadership can subject the managers to many types of performative practices, supposedly designed to improve performance and efficiency but in reality, designed to control, coerce and pressure managers – force them to get the most productivity out of the workforce. 

In other words, the leaders can be all smiling and benign with workers precisely because they are not working with them – they are many steps removed from the shop-floor. 

Managers, by contrast, have appraisal systems to implement, targets to meet, performance indicators to set, and all the difficult motivational and disciplinary people-management stuff to deal with. When the leader/boss decides to implement a new strategy the first person he calls in to handle the process is the department manager(s). The manager is the person expected to translate that strategy into performance outcomes, to ensure the workforce gets the actual job done. When things go badly the first person to get a roasting from the boss will be the manager. When things go well, the boss takes the profit and the accolades. Not that fair.

Yes, being a boss can be stressful, but then who is going to argue with you? No one. So as manager you are caught between a rock and hard place. The rock being the staff under you and the hard place being your boss, the person paying your wages. You are squeezed from all sides.

As manager you have to keep everyone happy. Because you have so little real power (e.g. to hire, fire, promote, invest in new resources, increase salaries) then what are you left with?

If you are wise then you will realise you are left with soft power: likeability, respect, good communication, emotional intelligence. Soft power is your route to influence and indispensability. Any manager who tries to act like a hard-headed leader is quickly going to get into trouble. The boss of the company may well declare ‘my way or the highway’, but no manager can say that. Well, they can but it’s not a good career move. 

The manager has to take people with her/him on the journey of organisational improvement. The manager lives or dies by the results of his/her department. Therefore, the people who keep the manager in a job are not those above but those below. What this means, in reality, is that as manager, if you lack emotional intelligence, then you are lacking the most important of all the intelligences – in which case you are heading for failure.

The boss of the company may not be loaded with emotional intelligence, but for sure he/she better recruit managers who are. If not, then the company is going to suffer badly.

Which is why I don’t see AI coming to replace the hard-done-to middle manager. Much as we are hearing a lot about AI’s ability to enhance organisational performance through ‘performance measurement tools’, we are hearing much less as to how AI will emotionally engage with and thereby motivate the workforce. And the reason for that is simple – it cannot.

Dr Stephen Whitehead is a sociologist, author and consultant internationally recognised for his work on gender, leadership and organisational culture. With more than two decades in academia, he served as Senior Lecturer in Education and Programme Director at Keele University before moving to Asia, where he has lived since 2009, building an international consultancy for schools and universities across the region. He is the author of 20 books, translated into 17 languages, including Men and Masculinities, Toxic Masculinity: Curing the Virus, Self-Love for Women and The End of Sex: The Gender Revolution and its Consequences. His concept of “Total Inclusivity” has been widely applied in workplaces, schools and universities, and his writing has helped shape global debate on identity, gender and organisational change. For more on Dr Stephen Whitehead’s take on modern organisations and their culture, see his recent book, Total Inclusivity at Work (London: Routledge).

READ MORE: ‘The end of corporate devotion? What businesses can learn from Gen Z‘. What does it mean when a generation resists “loving” the companies they work for? Dr Stephen Whitehead, our Leadership & Organisational Culture correspondent, explores why Gen Z’s scepticism is a survival strategy, and how organisations that recognise this can foster trust, resilience and sustainable engagement.

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