Middle Management: The Layer Boards Often Miss
This is part of a series based on my conversation with Jesper Isaksen, Partner and Head of Talent at FSN Capital.
In my experience working with and on boards, middle management is the layer that receives the least attention at the governance level. And yet it is often where transformation either gains traction or quietly stalls, well before the board can see it happening.
Boards have clear responsibilities at the top. Appointing the CEO, supervising the senior leadership team, and planning for succession. Those conversations happen regularly and with appropriate seriousness. But the second, third, and fourth layers of the organization rarely come into focus at board level, and that is where several significant risks sit without ever being named.
Middle management plays two very different roles in a transformation, and understanding both matters. The first is linked to passive resistance. Middle managers can slow transformation without ever openly opposing it. In many companies, the most profitable parts of the business have their center of gravity in that layer. The leaders who run those businesses have built their careers on what exists. If the company is being redirected toward something new, those leaders may have no visible reason to support the change. They are not sabotaging anything. They are simply continuing to protect what they know, even when the company is trying to move in a different direction. That passive drag is real, and it is very difficult to see from the board level.
The second role is very different, and in some ways more important. Middle management is also where much of the practical intelligence of the company lives. These are the people closest to customers, closest to the market, and closest to what is actually happening in the business on a daily basis. If a technological disruption is coming from the market, it is often visible at the middle management level before it reaches the top management team or the board. If customer behavior is shifting, middle managers usually sense it first. A transformation that ignores that intelligence, or overrides it, loses something that is very difficult to rebuild.
The answer to working with middle management effectively during transformation is consistent with everything else that works in governance. You have to start from the top. That means having the right CEO, the right CFO, the right HR leader, and the right C-suite in place and genuinely aligned on the strategy. The C-suite needs to explain the targets, the reason for the transformation, and the purpose behind it, and that communication has to be real, not performative. Middle managers take their cues from the leaders above them. If the C-suite is aligned and communicating clearly, that clarity flows downward. If the C-suite is divided or unclear, that confusion flows downward too, and middle management fills the gap with its own interpretation of what the company is actually trying to do.
What I found valuable in a recent conversation with Jesper Isaksen, Partner and Head of Talent at FSN Capital, was his framing of what he calls going to Gemba, which means getting out there and seeing for yourself. Are the messages from the strategy reaching the people doing the real work? Is there still a connection between what was decided at the top and what is actually happening at the shop floor level? Those questions cannot be answered from a board presentation. They require direct contact with the people who are living the transformation from the inside. Monitoring employee net promoter score across the organization is part of the same discipline. If a division or entity has a very low score, something is going on that deserves to be understood, not filed away as an HR metric.
When the work with middle management goes well, what Jesper describes as the talent flywheel begins to turn. It starts with having the right talent at the C-suite level. Those leaders work with their own management teams and make the necessary changes. Over time, the quality of leadership improves layer by layer, and eventually, people from outside start knocking on the door because they want to join. The correlation between that consistent upgrade of middle management and strong business performance is something I have observed from my own side as well, across different companies and different types of transformation.
The conclusion I draw from all of this is that boards cannot afford to treat middle management as an execution detail that belongs entirely to the CEO. It is not about managing those layers directly; that is and should remain the task of the C-suite. But it is about understanding whether the right conditions exist for middle management to support the transformation rather than quietly work against it. That means asking whether the C-suite is genuinely aligned, whether communication is reaching the people who need to act on it, and whether the organization has the right people in the right roles at the levels that matter most for execution. Middle management is where a lot of things happen, on the human capital side and on the innovation side. If boards do not look at that layer, they risk missing both the resistance and the intelligence that sit there.
Rada Rodriguez