Middle Manager · Sandwich Manager
Middle Manager
What is a middle manager?
- The translation layer squeezed from above and below
- Early access to information and decision authority are the key supports
- Get stuck here, and change never reaches the front line
Setting up middle managers properly is not about adding one more reporting line. It is about creating a place in the organization that absorbs ambiguity. Directives from above are always less specific than they need to be. An instruction like 'improve profitability in the second half' moves no one on its own. It becomes work only when a team lead turns it into 'starting this month, I personally review any quote with a margin under 12%.' What is needed here is not communication skill but the authority to decide what to drop. Without that authority, team leads copy the instructions they receive and pass them straight down, and the team is left with ten top priorities.
In practice, team lead roles split broadly into player-coach and pure management types. Most mid-sized Korean companies fall into the former, so team leads rarely spend more than 20–30% of their week on management and coordination. Once direct reports exceed 8, the 1:1 meeting cycle slips beyond a month, and those meetings soon turn into performance check-ins. That is why a diagnosis must first separate “skill gaps” from “structural overload”. Coaching-skills training solves only the former; the latter is a design problem, calling for adjusting span of control or reassigning work.
The most common misconception is designing a middle-manager program as an attitude-correction program. A one-day workshop that demands ownership and accountability becomes a third source of pressure for people already squeezed from both sides. Breaking the information sequence does the same. When a team lead first hears the news at the company-wide announcement, they have no choice but to tell their team “I just heard it too,” and with that one sentence, the team’s ability to execute is finished for the day. After this happens two or three times, people begin avoiding team lead roles. When promotion candidates start saying “I’d rather just stay a team member,” the organization has already lost its pipeline of future managers.
Sungmin JooExpert in diagnostic-based coaching leadership, entrepreneurship education, and design thinking
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum ConsultingThe discussion took off in the restructuring era of the 1980s and 90s, when “downsizing middle management” was in vogue and the function was reassessed. Since then, change-management research has repeatedly shown it to be both a bottleneck and a lever for strategy execution.
Let’s look at a hypothetical case. Company A, an auto parts manufacturer with 640 employees and KRW 120 billion (≈ US$89,780,000) in revenue, was preparing a reorganization to merge two business units into one. In a reorganization of the same scale three years earlier, 34 team leaders heard the news only on the day of the company-wide announcement, and 9 people resigned voluntarily over the following two months. This time, HR decided to prepare the team-leader layer first.
- Three weeks before the announcement, the head of HR seated the 34 team leads in groups of six and began by explaining why the merger was happening now. The first question was “Will my position remain?” The head of HR opened the retained-headcount chart on the spot and showed them.
- The team leads collected 47 questions they expected from their teams and drafted answers. Of these, 12 had no decision from senior management yet. So they made “We haven’t decided yet; we’ll tell you at the end of March” the official answer.
- During the restructuring, they fixed the scope of what team leads could decide on their own (reallocating work within the team, approving spending up to KRW 300,000, (≈ US$225) and approving one remote-work day a week) and handed it out on a single A4 page.
- The business unit head joined the role-play personally, playing a team lead who says “I opposed it, but I was told to do it from above.” They swapped roles to hear how that one sentence lands with team members.
- Over the three months after the reorganization, the team-lead learning group met every other week for 90 minutes. Attendance held at 82% through session six, voluntary resignations over two months fell from 9 to 2, and team-lead engagement scores rose from 3.1 to 3.8 (out of 5).