Middle Management: The Most Underappreciated Circus Act in Corporate History

“Nobody knows what they do, but without them, everything catches fire.”

In our last post, we bravely concluded that middle management is impossible to categorize. It's not fish, it's not fowl, and it definitely isn’t tofu. But despite this identity crisis, corporations love sprinkling middle managers all over the org chart. Why? Good question.

Let’s start with the name: Middle Management—already sounds like a sandwich no one ordered. It oozes mediocrity. You’re not at the top, you’re not at the bottom—you’re the creamy filling that gets squished when the bread argues with itself.

Ask any engineering team about middle managers and they’ll tell you: “Anyone can do that job—it’s just a speed bump on our glorious road to innovation.” But is that true? Let's investigate this noble, chaotic profession.

1. Team Therapist a.k.a. Corporate Mom/Dad

As a manager, you're expected to be both Mommy and Daddy. You're the unofficial HR hotline, the emotional sponge, and the bearer of life advice you’re barely qualified to give. Junior or senior, everyone’s got complaints:

“The world is unfair.”
“Why doesn’t X like me?”
“My code got rejected and now I question my entire existence.”
“My mother-in-law is a villain straight out of a Disney movie.”

Congratulations—you’ve just entered the realm of soft skills, which is just a fancy term for absorbing everyone’s drama without screaming into a pillow (in public).

2. Budget Wars: May the Funds Be Ever in Your Favor

"Money, baby. Money."

What most employees don’t know is that in a global company, budget isn’t given—it’s won. Every year, you’re thrown into a financial Hunger Games where some team in another time zone does what you do for half the cost and twice the smiles. And guess what? You still have to keep your team employed and happy.

So yes, the middle manager you love to hate is the same person standing between you and a LinkedIn post that starts with: “After X wonderful years, I am now open to new opportunities…”

3. Bureaucracy: The Art of Drowning in Excel

You like meetings? Of course not. But as a middle manager, meetings love you. Especially the ones where someone higher up says:

“Can you tell me how many lines of code your team will write for this budget?”

(Spoiler alert: If we paid per line, every dev would be writing infinite while-loops.)

Your calendar is a graveyard of back-to-back Zooms, with PowerPoints, status updates, and a game of “guess what the director actually wants.” It’s not leadership. It’s survival.

4. Planning: Also Known as Corporate Fan Fiction

“Can you provide ten detailed plans based on variables we just made up five minutes ago?”Sure. Let me consult my crystal ball.

Middle managers are expected to make bulletproof strategies based on fairy tale assumptions. Then, when none of those assumptions come true, guess who gets blamed for not hitting the goals? That’s right: you.

You’re the scapegoat, the fall guy, the piñata at the corporate birthday party.

5. Development Roadmaps & Magical Unicorn Projects

Whether your employee is a brilliant innovator or a corporate leech who prints memes all day, they all expect exciting tasks, learning opportunities, and meaningful work. But sometimes, all you’ve got is a stack of “shitty-but-budget-approved” tasks and a forced smile.

You're not just a manager. You're a magician trying to pull career growth out of a hat that contains only JIRA tickets and mandatory compliance training.

6. The Team's Personal Assistant

“Oh, your PC broke?”

“Oh, you want me to schedule your lunch with Karen from Accounting?”

“Oh, you want to book a team dinner for 12, preferably gluten-free and vibes-only?”

You're not just a manager. You're Siri with feelings.

In Conclusion: Welcome to the Middle Zone

These tasks rarely show up on performance reviews. They’re taken for granted, ignored, or misunderstood. But here’s the thing: no matter the type—leech, lazy-smart, control freak, perfectionist, or tightrope-walker—you have to do them. If not, you're out within a year.

Middle management may not be glamorous, but without it, corporations would collapse into chaos and Teams channels full of crying emojis.

Don't believe me? Try going a few months without one. We’ll be waiting with popcorn.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below 👇 and share your own middle management horror stories! Bonus points if they involve Excel and existential dread.