Evolving Role of Middle Managers – More Coaching – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #998

Evolving Role of Middle Managers – More Coaching – Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #998

Dear Colleagues! This is Asrar Qureshi’s Blog Post #998 for Pharma Veterans. Pharma Veterans Blogs are published by Asrar Qureshi on its dedicated site https://pharmaveterans.com. Please email to aq.pharmaveterans@gmail.com for publishing your contributions here.

Credit: Annushka Ahuja

Credit: Antoni Shkraba

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This blogpost is inspired by HBS Working Knowledge article by Ben Rand, which is based on research by Letian Zhang, Assistant Professor of Business Administration. Most content is my own. Link to the article at the end.

Hierarchies have become inflated and multilayered, and it has become difficult to identify if someone is a senior manager or a middle manager.

When I joined pharma industry, the line management was a two-tier structure. There were the first line managers, and the national managers. The regional managers had different titles, district manager, zonal manager, regional manager, field manager, district field manager and so on. The first line manager was a middle manager without doubt.

Then the local industry exploded, and they needed to accommodate people from MNCs, and adjust people from within, so, they created many more layers which defied all rules of management structure. For example, I interviewed a gentleman who had title of National Sales Manager and was managing only two stations. This is not a laughing matter; it is an insult to the position. 

Presently, medium to large size pharma companies have somewhat this kind of management structure. Let us say there will be a field manager, whose boss will be a zonal manager, whose boss will be a business manager, whose boss will be a business unit manager, whose boss will be marketing manager/ marketing director/ marketing & sales director etc. Who should now be nominated as ‘middle manager’? 

By definition, middle manager is the one who acts as a bridge between the field force/ staff and the management. Therefore, the first line manager is still the middle manager, though other managers are also trying to work directly with staff. 

Most middle managers were tilted towards their teams, because they understood how they worked, what kept them going, and how to motivate them to do their best. There were few bossy, arrogant, commanding type middle managers here and there, but they were always hated, not just by their teams, but counterparts also. 

Middle managers came under intense fire and pressure in pharma industry during the last twenty years or so. It might have been the same in other industries, but I know pharma industry inside out, hence this reference. The bosses of middle managers raised hell that the middle managers were not putting enough stress on their team and did not extract the desired performance by force. Middle managers had their own arguments. I believe most firing was first done at the first line managers, and then the second line managers. Somewhere along the line, the mistake was understood and corrected in some companies, but not universally.

Zhang says that during the 1980s and 1990s, middle managers became prime targets of large-scale downsizing at the behest of shareholder activists, but the middle managers managed to avoid extinction and started thriving again. Our story is the same.

The crux of the research by Zhang is that ‘to support more autonomous, creative workers, organizations want managers to act less as army commanders and more as basketball coaches’. My good, old friend Javed Akhtar, who is a Cambridge-certified coach, has been promoting the same concept in his training programs.

What does a coach do? And why the middle manager must be a coach? To understand this, we need to see what a coach does and why it is important.

A coach teaches and drills down ‘skills’ in his team. In the domain of sports, coaches are quite often more recognized than the team, the team is referred to as ‘Mr. X’s team’, and the credit and discredit is heaped upon the coach, and then the manager. The coach works only in the field and with the team. He does not give them lectures in the classroom or sermons in the ground, he gets the practical done. The long history of coaching shows that teams developed a very strong bond with their coaches and accepted them as their mentors wholeheartedly. 

Few insights from Zhang research which involved linguistic analysis of 34 million online job postings for managerial opening in the US between 2007 and 2021, 1 million newspaper job postings, 6 million manager resumes, and 430,000 indeed.com job reviews. [Quote]

• Managerial job postings that required collaborative skills and experience increased by three times between 2007 and 2021. By contrast, job postings that included supervisory capabilities decreased by 23 percent.

• The use of collaborative phrases in newspaper job postings grew 15 percent between 1980 and 2000. Prior to 1980, references to collaboration were scarce.

• The number of managerial resumes listing supervisory experience decreased by 8 percent between 1985 and 2015, while those highlighting collaboration increased by 37 percent.

• References to supervisory duties in Indeed.com reviews decreased by 22 percent, while mentions of collaborative/teamwork skills grew by 28 percent.

[Unquote]

The emphasis is on collaboration and teamwork, and away from command and control. We are still struggling in this area.

Sum Up

Managers at all levels must relinquish conservative (read decayed) ideas about management through bossism, coercion, humiliation, and rapid fire. They must change and adopt current thinking and practice. Women are already winning hands down in management owing to their natural ability for collaboration; men should take cue and learn. Middle managers have no choice except to act more as a coach, so that they and their teams do not just strive but thrive and achieve great results.

Concluded.

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For most blogs, I research from several sources which are open to public. Their links are mentioned under references. There is no intent to infringe upon anyone’s copyrights. If, however, it happens unintentionally, I offer my sincere regrets.

References:

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-middle-manager-of-the-future-more-coaching-less-commanding