Managing Up and Managing Down

Managing Up and Managing Down are essential management strategies that focus on communication and relationship-building within an organizational hierarchy. Managing Up involves effectively communicating with and influencing one's superiors or leaders to foster a productive working relationship. This can include understanding their goals, preferences, and communication styles to align one’s work with their expectations. On the other hand, Managing Down refers to the approach of guiding and supporting subordinates to enhance their performance and engagement, ensuring that team members feel valued and understood.

Both strategies require emotional intelligence, adaptability, and strong interpersonal skills. They are crucial for creating a harmonious workplace where both leaders and employees can thrive. By mastering these techniques, individuals can help to promote a positive organizational culture, improve team dynamics, and drive overall success. Understanding the nuances of Managing Up and Managing Down can empower professionals at all levels to navigate their work environments more effectively, fostering collaboration and productivity across the board.

Published in: 2021

By: Joseph Dewey, PhD

Subject Terms

Managing Up and Managing Down

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

Although much has been written about the challenges and responsibilities of the workplace and of the upper management echelon, little attention has been accorded to middle management staff. However, middle management is a critical element in the smooth operation of any organization. These mid-range executives—project managers, division directors, department executives, team leaders—actually drive a company, and they must learn the critical balance between leadership and fellowship and at the same time learn how to keep two entirely different constituencies—upper management and staff—feeling both productive and empowered.

Overview

Conventional wisdom concerning the architecture of any network organization long held that the middle echelon is not a destination but rather a point along a necessarily grander professional career pathway. Getting promoted to middle management was seen as a way into senior management and ultimately to executive leadership. Perform well in the middle and expect to be moved upward; perform poorly and expect to be returned to the staff level or simply left stranded in the middle. Middle management was synonymous with career frustration, long-term anxiety, and ultimately career-killing monotony.

Further, middle management was perceived to be a tricky balancing act that recalled the Greek mythological strait that wary sailors needed to maneuver between to avoid either Scylla the raging sea monster or Charybdis, a great sucking whirlpool. The twin challenge was to keep upper management happy without becoming sycophantic while keeping lower echelon workers happy without becoming a patronizing or abusive task master.

For those who moved into middle management, the perception was clear: Middle management must deal with all the problems of executing a task or completing a project or maintaining network operations and productivity at a consistent and measurable rate. Failure comes with consequences, but, should that operation be smooth, expect to realize few of the executive benefits. The salary for middle management is, by definition, mid-range; the hours are more demanding than staff because of additional duties but without the time off enjoyed by senior management. All the problems, few of the perks; all of the challenges, few of the rewards; all of the task details, but little of the recognition.

The Peter Principle. The examination of middle management as a complex power structure began earnestly in the late 1970s in response to a single book. In the wake of the groundbreaking and highly controversial business organization critique first put forward in the early 1970s by Laurence J. Peter, a Canadian academic then in Southern California working with emotionally disturbed children, middle management underwent additional diminution. The so-called Peter Principle proposed that within any business hierarchy a person tended to be promoted until that person exceeded their own expertise and competencies—that is, that middle management was almost by definition rife with over-promoted incompetents, who could have provided far more productivity to the company had they not been promoted out of the ranks. Middle management became a convenient punch line—the Dilbert Complex. However, the implications of the Peter Principle raised thorny questions about the true complexity of middle management.

The theory over the next two decades came to be more and more challenged as middle management came to be seen as a competency level unto itself, that certain personnel simply, easily thrived within that complicated middle zone and, more important, that whatever productivity, whatever creativity, whatever evolution the company might be able to harness was essentially and necessarily first promoted and recognized by middle management.

Hence, middle management—that is, those responsible for the tricky operation of simultaneously managing up (keeping senior staff informed and satisfied) and managing down (keeping staffers on task and energized) drive company success. As early as 1992, Floyd and Wooldridge described middle management as part of a critical network linkage: “a superior in one group…a subordinate in the next.” To manage both up and down required finding solutions to problems before they became too big, anticipating confusion really before it descended, and making both staff and executives, so-called direct reports, appear productive, competent, and empowered. Middle managers direct rather than do the work. That, as it turned out, was work.

Applications

Contemporary definitions of mid-management success agree as a first premise that middle management itself cannot be defined, that every network, every business, every organization, whatever the size and whether it produces a good, provides a service, or facilitates a process is unique and even prides itself on being different. Every organization maintains its own flow chart of productivity and its own chain of network command. In addition, network chains of command can be influenced by personalities and personality conflicts, by staff temperament, by the larger business environment itself and its often unpredictable boom and bust cycles.

Despite those realities, despite the volatile conditions under which any network operates, and despite the inherently individual nature of any organization, those companies who actually specialize in corporate talent management and development isolate three principal talents that define a successful mid-manager. These three core virtues are in addition to those competencies and acumen assumed in place because the person has been promoted into mid-management itself. The middle manager is presumed to be competent in the network’s operations and familiar with its staffing and is therefore confident in the level of expertise required for success in the field whether medicine, engineering, accountancy, teaching, or banking. The middle manager comes in knowing the business—indeed, often middle management positions are created on the fly by a company trying to direct a new project or a new endeavor or to fill a vacancy. Middle managers are often thrust into the position.

Unlike lower echelon workers and executives, both classes often brought in through hiring processes, middle managers are most often promoted from within and thus have been with the company and are familiar with its dynamics and, at least theoretically, ready to both continue and improve that dynamic. In any event, middle management has emerged as a critical element of network success. “Mid-level administrators are managers, and the tasks they perform are essential and beneficial to the operation of an organization” (Johansen & Hawes, 2016).

Communication. It may seem obvious but middle managers need to understand their new position. The transition from rank and file to manager is not always easy, requiring adjustments in relationships, administrative skills, and perspective (Lipman, 2016). The dynamics of managing up and managing down requires, first, communication skills. The middle manager must be able to both direct those in their charge—to explain clearly and convey expectations to subordinates—and to report to the upper level management on the progress of the operations. Middle management cannot afford to simply itemize problems. Rather, successful managing up and managing down requires assessing conditions and sharing solutions. Middle management needs to be able to provide useful procedures to minimize disruptions and maximize productivity. Staff and upper management have the luxury to complain; but middle managing demands solutions. How to achieve this requires more than articulation skills.

Communication is a feedback dynamic, a two-way complex. Indeed, critical to communication skills, corporate talent management experts advocate, is the ability not only to direct clearly and report effectively but also to be able to listen. Managing up involves hearing what upper-level management expects, and managing down means listening to staff—their discontent, their confusion, their issues and questions. A listening manager gives staff a feeling of belonging within the work process. Setting clear expectations and listening to where those expectations are falling short—that is the essential dynamic of authentic communication and the key to empowerment. That, corporate talent specialists argue, is a rare combination and marks the importance of an effective middle manager.

Organization. In addition to communication skills, managing up and managing down requires organization—that is, the vision to perceive often massive (and messy) operations in clear stages and to see the on-site staff, whatever its size and whatever its individual makeup, as elements of a single process and, in turn, to envision strategies and protocols for making those elements cohere and work together toward a clear and specific goal. Organization, then, is manifested in the ability to recognize individual strengths and weaknesses; to prioritize goals; to broker staff conflicts; to accept as inevitable that any process will face challenges and that personnel, even the most qualified and dedicated, will make mistakes; to define individual responsibilities and set clear expectations; to respect individuals both those under their direction and those to whom they answer.

Middle management is no longer perceived as merely a testing ground for promotion to the top ranks, but has rather been redefined as an essential business skill unto itself. The middle management position, far being from a temporary stopping-off point on the way to the top or a stay against demotion back, is an opportunity to inherit network operations, to evaluate where conditions—either by neglect or mismanaged talent or simple institution inertia—have disintegrated into problems, and then to revamp operations, with either modest tweaking or bold wholesale overhauling. Organization is that rare ability to see the order lurking in apparent chaos, to see the network world itself as a single organic system rather than as pieces, competing departments or isolated divisions, or self-contained and self-directed teams.

Finally experts in managing up and managing down strategy suggest that authenticity is the most valuable commodity for managers. Too often a mid-level manager can seem distracted, either too busy mastering expertise they should have known or too busy strategizing opportunities for advancement, which, if driven by ambition rather than by the real needs of the organization, can result in counterproductive and needless tinkering. If a middle manager can perceive the significance and the opportunities (and challenges) of the position, then middle managers will come across to both staff and to executives as authentic, as sincerely interested in doing what middle management does: facilitate the network operations on a day to day basis. If not, distrust from both directions will set in, affecting the entire network and resulting in lost opportunities for advancement (Verdult, 2011).

Managers who do not attempt to burnish their resumes by bullying staff or to position themselves for upward mobility by straining to sound more accomplished, knowledgeable, or authoritative than they are, but who strive to meet the expectations of the position, are viewed as authentic. In turn, that authenticity helps to generate positive emotions within the staff—workers are willing to contribute because they have a sense that their contributions are both recognized and appreciated—and within the upper management as company goals are met, day to day problems are addressed, and long-term productivity is ensured.

Viewpoints

It is difficult to see why anyone would object to devising strategies for successful mid-management. After all, advocates of reassessing middle management cite the positive rewards of perceiving that very management position as an integral part of a network, a critical element that is not, in the end, above anybody or below anybody, is not in fact in the middle of anything. Rather managing up and managing down perceives business as a complex recursive dynamic movement.

Middle managers cannot afford conventional perceptions of their organizational level as a vast limbo or their role as either fleeting or dead-end. By either looking down or staring up, advocates argue, middle managers inevitably experience frustration, and then middle managing becomes a problem. However, some theoreticians of organizational structure, see creating middle management as a career goal unto itself. Creating about that mid-range position a sense of achievement will ultimately destroy what has long been the compelling drive in the carrot-and-stick model for promotion within a network. A company need not create the double-edged incentive of promotion into upper management or demotion back into the workforce if managing up and managing down becomes itself appreciated as an essential component of an efficient business model.

Conventional wisdom currently holds that networks are simply too complicated and too hierarchical to dismiss out of hand the value of maintaining a core middle management team that is both efficient and productive. Middle managers are, supremely, the fixers. In the phrase of Black (2016), companies who transform the middle manager from “heretic to hero” stand to realize increases in productivity and staff morale. By creating about middle management respect and trust, middle managers can add value to a company’s goods or services. The focus, then, stays on the company not on its employees. In fact, given the tendency of senior management to maintain a more hands-off approach to day to day operations and given that the staff is itself dedicated to the ongoing processes of the company, only the middle management holds the critical holistic perspective that can both see the goals of a company and devise the best and most effective protocols for achieving those ends.

Terms & Concepts

Carrot-and-Stick Model: A traditional psychological model of encouragement that suggests an employee can be motivated to better performance only by promising some lucrative and specific reward for meeting expectations while threatening some punitive action for failure.

Dilbert Complex: The feeling, based on a popular single-frame newspaper cartoon of the 1980s, of incompetence and indifference in middle management.

Direct Reports: Those in higher up positions in a business hierarchy, who receive regular feedback on business operations.

Dynamic: A complex between two parties.

Feedback: Regular and targeted critique.

Holistic: That which concerns an entire organization or body.

Sycophant: A person who follows a superior unquestioningly in the expectation of receiving some sort of benefit.

Bibliography

Black, O. (2016). The return of the manager: Heroes not zeros. Management Today, (6), 50–53. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=116354157&site=ehost-live

Floyd, S., & Wooldridge, B. (1992). Middle management involvement in strategy and its association with strategic type: A research note. Strategic Management Journal, 13, 153–167. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=12571655&site=ehost-live

Gregory, G. M. (2015). Managing up, down, and sideways. (cover story). Information Today, 32(6), 20. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=103578344&site=ehost-live

Johansen, M., & Hawes, D. (2016). The effects of the tasks middle managers perform on organizational performance. Public Administration Quarterly, 40 (3), 589–616. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=119972790&site=ehost-live

Lipman, V. (2016). Why do we spend so much developing senior leaders and so little training new managers? Harvard Business Review Digital Articles, 2–4. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=118683732&site=ehost-live

Mindak, M. P., Sen, P. K., & Stephan, J. (2016). Beating threshold targets with earnings management. Review of Accounting & Finance, 15(2), 198–221. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=115825847&site=ehost-live

The outstanding middle manager. (2016). People Management, 55. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=119050550&site=ehost-live

Verdult, J. (2011). How to manage your boss. Management Today, 27. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=60099479&site=ehost-live

Managing Up and Managing Down

On this Page

Subject Terms

Managing Up and Managing Down

Abstract

Overview

Applications

Viewpoints

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

Suggested Reading