How I Work With a Layer of Middle Managers, Not Just the Executive Team
- Jonno White
- Aug 3
- 11 min read
Updated: Aug 5
By Jonno White
Last updated: July 2026
If you have already invested in your executive team and the change still is not landing, the missing piece is usually not another executive session. It is the layer directly beneath it. Working with middle managers is not a follow-on phase you run once the executive work is finished, and treating it that way is how most of the value of the executive work quietly leaks away. As of July 2026, the evidence on that layer is unusually stark: Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found managers are more engaged than the people they lead, and simultaneously more stressed, angrier and more likely to think it is a good time to leave.
My argument in this piece is that the executive team is where decisions get made, and the layer below it is where decisions get translated, and translation is a separate skill that no amount of executive alignment produces on its own. By the end you will be able to decide whether extending this work one layer down is worth doing in your organisation, and what it should actually involve if you do.
In this article
Key Takeaways
The problem that looks like poor communication from the executive team is often an untrained and unsupported translation layer, because managers are being asked to convert a decision they were not part of into daily trade-offs they personally have to defend.
Gallup's 2026 data shows the managers in the middle are simultaneously the most bought-in group and the most strained one, which is a combination that resolves itself through resignation rather than through resilience.
Extending leadership work one layer down is not about repeating the executive content at a lower level, because the middle layer faces a genuinely different problem: holding two sets of expectations at once without a mandate to change either.
The work only pays off when the executive team is willing to have its own decisions questioned by the layer below, and if that is not on the table, this is not the right investment yet.
The executive team decides, the layer below translates
Executive team work is worth doing, and I am not arguing against it. The trouble is what happens next. A leadership team leaves an offsite genuinely aligned, and then that alignment has to travel through a group of people who were not in the room, did not hear the debate, did not see which options were rejected, and now have to explain the outcome to their own teams as though they believe it.
That is a translation job, and it is a harder one than it looks. A middle manager is not simply relaying a message. They are converting a strategic intent into a set of specific, local, unglamorous decisions about who does what, what gets dropped, and which promise to a colleague is about to be broken. Every one of those decisions has to be defended personally, usually without the context that would make it defensible.
This is why I treat the middle layer as a distinct piece of work rather than an audience for a cascade. A cascade assumes the content is right and only the delivery is missing. In my view the more common failure is that the layer doing the delivering has never been developed for the specific job of holding two sets of expectations at once.
What working with middle managers actually looks like
Working with middle managers, in the way I mean it here, is a facilitated block of work with the managers who report to your executives, run their own teams, and sit between the two. It is not a training course delivered downwards. It is a structured conversation among peers about the real trade-offs they are each making, run with the executive sponsor present for the parts that need them and absent for the parts that need honesty.
The shape I use is deliberately plain. There is no proprietary model here, and I would rather say that openly than dress a sensible sequence up as intellectual property. The sequence runs in four moves: surface what this group is actually being asked to hold, test whether the executive intent survived the trip down, decide what this layer is genuinely authorised to change, and agree what gets escalated rather than absorbed.
The fourth move is the one that most often gets skipped, and it is the one that changes behaviour. Without it, a management group leaves the room more aware of the strain and no more able to do anything about it, which is worse than not running the session at all.
Why the translation layer is under more strain than the executive layer
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, which covers 2025 data, found that 45 per cent of managers experienced a lot of stress during a lot of the previous day, against 39 per cent of individual contributors. Managers also reported more daily anger, 25 per cent against 21 per cent. On the face of it, that is the price of the job.
The number that should worry an executive team is a different one. In the same dataset, 57 per cent of managers said it was a good time to find a job, against 49 per cent of individual contributors, and manager engagement sat at 22 per cent against 19 per cent for individual contributors. That combination is unusual and it is unstable. This is the group most invested in the organisation and most likely to be looking, and my read is that those two facts are causally linked rather than coincidental: people who care are the ones who feel the gap between intent and reality most sharply.
Gallup's own analysis published on 7 April 2026 puts it more directly, reporting that lower engagement among managers accounts for much of the downturn in overall engagement since 2023, and that managers' engagement levels are getting closer to those of the people they lead. Gallup also notes that recent research on team size finds manager engagement can decline with larger spans of control. Globally, Gallup reported employee engagement at 20 per cent in 2025, a second consecutive annual decline, with the associated productivity loss estimated at approximately 10 trillion US dollars, or 9 per cent of GDP.
There is an older finding that still explains the mechanism better than anything more recent I could find. McKinsey's 2023 survey of 706 middle managers, fielded in 2022, found they spent nearly half their working time on non-managerial work, including close to a full day each week on administration. In the same survey, only 20 per cent strongly agreed their organisation helped them be successful people managers, while 42 per cent either disagreed or were unsure. I am citing a figure that is now several years old, so treat it as directional rather than current, but the shape it describes matches what the newer Gallup data implies: this layer is being asked to do the most consequential translation work in the organisation, in the time left over after everything else.
The four moves, and what each one is for
One, surface what this group is actually being asked to hold
The first session is not about strategy. It is about listing, out loud and in front of each other, the competing expectations each manager is currently carrying, including the ones they have never said to their executive.
The reason to do this first is that most middle managers assume their situation is personal rather than structural. The moment a peer describes the same bind, the conversation stops being a confession and starts being data. That shift is the point of doing it as a group rather than through individual coaching.
Two, test whether the executive intent survived the trip down
Here I ask each manager to write down, independently and before anyone speaks, what they believe the organisation's top two priorities are for the next six months, and what they believe they are meant to stop doing to make room for them.
The spread of answers is the diagnostic. A tight spread means the executive work landed and the issue is capacity. A wide spread means the issue is translation, and no amount of encouragement to the middle layer will fix a message that arrived in fragments.
Three, decide what this layer is genuinely authorised to change
This is where the executive sponsor needs to be in the room, because it is the only move that cannot be delegated. The group names the decisions it believes it owns, and the sponsor confirms, expands or corrects that list on the spot.
Ambiguous authority is the most expensive condition a middle manager can work in, and it is cheap to fix in a single conversation. It is also the point where an executive team discovers how much it has been unintentionally holding.
Four, agree what gets escalated rather than absorbed
The last move is a commitment about what this group will stop quietly absorbing. Bad news softened on the way up and pressure absorbed on the way down are both acts of loyalty, and both leave the executive team making decisions on a curated picture of reality.
I ask for one specific thing each manager will escalate rather than absorb in the next month, and one commitment from the sponsor about how they will respond when it arrives. Without the second half, the first half does not happen twice.
Where Working Genius and Step Up or Step Out fit
I am a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, certified through Patrick Lencioni's Table Group, and Working Genius is Lencioni's model rather than mine. With a middle management group I find it earns its place for a specific reason rather than as a generic team-building exercise: it gives peers a shared, non-judgemental language for why the same task is energising for one manager and depleting for another, which is far more useful across a peer group than inside a single team.
Step Up or Step Out, my own framework for difficult conversations, does different work here. The middle layer is where the hardest conversations in an organisation actually live, upwards to an executive who does not want to hear it and downwards to a team that will be affected by it, and a manager who avoids both is not underperforming so much as under-equipped.
Neither model is the point of the work. They are tools I reach for when the group's own diagnosis says they are needed, and I would rather bring nothing than run a framework the room does not require.
What this costs, and when not to do it
The strongest objection to everything above is a budget argument, and it is a fair one. If you can only fund one layer, funding the executive team is defensible, because a misaligned executive team makes everything below it harder and no amount of middle management development compensates for genuine disagreement at the top. I would not argue with that sequencing. My argument is about what happens after the executive work, not instead of it.
There are three situations where I would tell you not to do this. The first is when the executive team is not genuinely willing to have its decisions questioned by the layer below, because the third move above then becomes theatre and the group will read it correctly as such. The second is when the real problem is structural, such as spans of control that no facilitation can fix, in which case you are asking a conversation to solve a headcount decision. The third is when a restructure is imminent and undisclosed, because the trust cost of running this work and then announcing changes is significant and lasting.
I should also be honest about the limits of the evidence in this piece. Everything I have cited is public research about managers in general, not about your organisation, and none of it establishes that facilitated peer work with a middle layer produces a measurable performance improvement. I have not included client data or outcome measures here, because I do not have first-party evidence prepared for publication on this specific question, and I would rather say that plainly than imply a track record the page cannot show. What the research does establish is that the strain on this layer is real, growing and expensive, which makes it a reasonable place to look, not a proven fix.
How to tell whether your middle layer needs this
Try the second move on your own, this week, at no cost. Ask each of your direct reports' managers to write down the organisation's top two priorities for the next six months and what they think they should stop doing to make room. Do it independently and in writing, before anyone speaks.
If the answers converge, your translation layer is working and your problem is capacity, which is a different and more structural conversation. If they diverge, you have just measured the gap between what the executive team decided and what the organisation heard, and you did it in under ten minutes.
That test is deliberately something you can run without me. If it comes back tight, you have saved yourself an engagement. If it comes back wide, at least you now know which problem you are solving.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does working with middle managers involve that executive team work does not? It centres on translation rather than decision-making, so the content is about competing expectations, authority boundaries and escalation, rather than strategy, alignment or the executive team's own dynamics. The middle layer's core problem is holding two sets of expectations at once without a mandate to change either.
Should the executive sponsor be in the room? Partly. The sponsor needs to be present for the conversation about what the group is authorised to decide, because only they can settle it, and absent for the earlier conversation where managers describe the binds they are carrying honestly.
How is this different from a management training course? A course teaches skills to individuals and assumes the constraints are fixed. This work treats the constraints themselves as the subject, which means some of the output is a decision for the executive team rather than a development goal for the managers.
How many managers should be involved at once? Small enough that everyone speaks and the peer dynamic stays real, which in practice means one intact management layer reporting to the same executive rather than a mixed cohort drawn from across the organisation. A mixed cohort produces good conversation and no shared decisions.
Final Thoughts
The case for working one layer down is not that middle managers are neglected, though the evidence suggests they are. It is that the middle layer is where an organisation's decisions become real, and an organisation that invests only at the top is buying alignment it has no mechanism to convert.
The honest version of this argument includes its limits. Executive work still comes first when the two are in competition. Facilitation cannot fix a structural problem, and a management group that leaves a session more aware of the strain and no more authorised to act on it has been made worse off, not better. The test in the section above will tell you which situation you are in more cheaply and more quickly than any proposal I could write.
If you have already done the executive work and something still is not travelling, I would look down one layer before I looked at the strategy again.
If this is the bind you are in with your own management layer, it is the kind of work I do, and if that is you, reach out and I would be glad to help. You can reach me at jonno@consultclarity.org.
About me
I am a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, certified through Patrick Lencioni's Table Group, and the author of Step Up or Step Out. I work with schools, corporates and nonprofits around the world, and I host The Leadership Conversations Podcast, which has listeners in more than 150 countries.
Sources
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026 Report, global data summary, covering 2025 data: manager and individual contributor figures for engagement, daily stress, daily anger and job market perception. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/697904/state-of-the-global-workplace-global-data.aspx
Jim Harter and Ryan Pendell, Global Employee Engagement Continues Decline, Gallup, 7 April 2026: global engagement at 20 per cent in 2025, manager engagement driving the decline, span of control finding and the estimated 10 trillion US dollar productivity cost. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/708071/global-employee-engagement-continues-decline.aspx
Emily Field, Bryan Hancock, Marino Mugayar-Baldocchi and Bill Schaninger, Stop wasting your most precious resource: Middle managers, McKinsey and Company, 10 March 2023: time allocation and organisational support figures from a survey of 706 middle managers. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/stop-wasting-your-most-precious-resource-middle-managers
Next Read
If you want the diagnostic version of this, 12 Honest Signs It's Time for a Middle Management Team Health Check scores the same layer sign by sign. For the executive half of the picture, Executive Offsite Follow Through: Why It Fades in 2 Weeks covers what happens after the decisions are made, and Leadership Team Offsite Readiness covers whether the executive work is worth running yet. If you would like to talk about the work itself, the team offsite enquiry page is the fastest route.