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Elon Musk, like other tech peers, is wary of middle managers.

Growing up, I watched my dad cycle through several careers, from being a distributor of polyvinyl flooring to an independent bookseller. He called himself a salesman but Ive always thought his greatest job skill was managing a sales team, which he did for several global carpet companies. On car trips, wed listen to him reassure Helena, joke with Bob, debate tactics with Stan, and quote Winston Churchill to cheer up Mel. Textile tycoon Roger Milliken was celebrated as the boss whod tried to best Des Brady in a quote battle. At night, Id fall asleep to the sound of him telling my mom stories about the quirks and characters of office life.

With his dry Scottish wit and vague distrust of authority, my father wasnt what youd call a Company Man. The words private beach were practically marching orders to trespass. But his curiosity, competitive spirit and desire to help people get where they wanted to go made him a great manager.

Middle management is a tough place to be these days. Long before the pandemic even started, they were the unhappiest employees in most companies. Now, they have to deal with layoffs, tighter budgets, and pressure to meet their numbers while attending to the emotional wellbeing of people who may still be working from their bedrooms. Oh, and their boss thinks a bot could do their job.

I believe in the value of the middle manager, as do management thinkers like McKinseys Bill Schaninger, who believes theyre critical in driving large-scale organizational change. He is co-authoring a new book on the topic that will be out this summer and will be speaking at our upcoming Future of Work Summit on June 1st the day after hell be retiring from McKinsey to start his new adventure. In a recent article, Schaninger and colleagues argue that middle managers are less a symptom of bureaucracy than victims of it.

Managers are an especially vulnerable species in Silicon Valley, where startups often fumble from Lord-of-the-Flies-like chaos to plush seating and a plethora of cool new titles once the money comes in. (Time Ninja, youll be across the hall from our Dream Alchemist and Chief Happiness Engineer.) When the headwinds come, those who measure excellence in lines of code might look at that middle layer as a cost center to cut.

Exhibit A is Metas Mark Zuckerberg, who declared 2023 to be a Year of Efficiency a telling signal when the parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp already laid off 11,000 people the year before. Indeed, the company plans to close 5,000 open roles this year and lay off an additional 10,000 people, possibly starting today.

In a Q&A with employees earlier this year, reported in Command Line, Zuckerberg said, "I don't think you want a management structure that's just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work."

That sounds like a Dystopian nightmare, or a sign that the Meta CEO may not be clear on what a number of his people actually do. Then again, this is a leader who equates being well understood with complacency, which cant have helped morale.

The same could be said of Elon Musk, who came into Twitter, tweeting that there seem to be 10 people managing for every one person coding.

Was the new Twitter CEO confusing functions like sales or, say, compliance with management? Possibly. He tends to recognize excellence in a form that reminds him of himself, which may explain why he says its hard to find people to delegate to. Musk also believes every manager should have the technical skills of the people they manage, even though studies suggest training in leadership skills may be more important. Certainly, middle managers are not to blame for the outages, misinformation, eroding value and general chaos at Twitter in recent months. If anything, the platform could use more good managers.

Instead, at Twitter and elsewhere, their numbers are likely to dwindle. Salesforce, Google and Amazon have also targeted middle management as areas to cut. In some ways, that makes sense. But lets distinguish between those who manage people and administrators whose functions add layers of bureaucracy. (Senior contributor William Baldwin lays out the compelling case to slash the ranks of administrators at Harvard.)

Great middle managers are the carriers of culture, the motivators of people, the agents of change. People tend to quit their boss, not their job, which makes nurturing better bosses a meaningful factor in a company's success.

During the last chapter of my dads career, he managed an independent bookstore with one employee and some occasional interns. He loved books but not that much. He seemed happiest when showing my son how to repair old books, dispensing life advice to the young woman working the cash register, or marching as Mr. Pickwick in the town parade. Like a lot of great middle managers, he was a teacher, a mentor and a coach. We could all use more of those right now, especially as technology transforms how we work.

Read the rest here:

Why Mark Zuckerberg And Elon Musk Fire Their Most Valuable People - Forbes