Unmuddling the middle: How turning middle managers into coaches can transform your organisation

Once seen as cogs in the corporate machine, middle managers are stepping into a bold new role - as team coaches and champions of clarity. What happens when the people once stuck in the middle become the key to unlocking your organisation’s full potential?

Since the 1990s, the role of the middle manager has slowly become obsolete, especially as digital tools and automation streamlined many traditional managerial tasks. These tech advances meant that organisations felt that the need for human oversight and tracking was reduced.

However, in today’s hybrid and remote work environment, the absence of middle managers has created new challenges: disconnection with leaders, misalignment with organisational goals, and dips in employee engagement.  

Has the time come for organisations to resurrect and reimagine the middle manager role as the bridge between leadership and teams?

The rise of hybrid work and the engagement challenge

Hybrid and remote working models are here to stay. They offer flexibility, improved wellbeing, and work–life balance. Yet they also risk leaving employees feeling isolated and detached from both leadership and peers. Simply mandating a return to the office won’t fix it. What’s needed is human connection.

That human touch can come from reimagining the role of middle managers. Rather than micro-managing their teams, they can serve as the crucial link that glues together leadership and employees.

Recasting middle managers as coaches

A 2023 McKinsey report revealed that managers spend only 28%¹ of their time truly managing people; the rest is consumed by administrative and functional tasks. This imbalance hinders coaching, engagement, and alignment.

By restructuring roles to free managers from paperwork and meetings, we can empower them to coach, guide, and develop their teams. Imagine: managers spending more time in one-to-one conversations, helping staff define paths, clarify expectations, and connect their work to purpose. The benefits? A workforce that’s more connected, motivated, and resilient.

Leadership through the middle layer

Leaders rarely have capacity to meet everyone's personal goals or nurture engagement at scale. That’s where managers step in. They can ensure every individual:

• Understands how their role ties to broader strategy.
• Is progressing professionally and personally.
• Feels valued and seen.

This reconnection can reverse alarming recent trends. Data gathered from the Best Companies community shows that Leadership scores declined in 59% of organisations, dropping an average of -4%. Ratings for My Company (how happy and loyal employees feel towards their organisation) fell in 53% of organisations, with a -3.76% decline. It is vital that organisations find a way to turn around this trend of disengagement and fragmentation in order to continue to be successful.

Managers: The keys to ending workplace misery

Patrick Lencioni’s The Three Signs of a Miserable Job outlines how managers shape daily employee experiences. He identifies three critical drivers:

• Anonymity – Employees feel miserable when they believe their manager doesn’t know them as people. Coaching-style managers take time to understand their team members’ ambitions, strengths, and personal challenges.
• Irrelevance – People need to know their work matters. A strong manager connects daily tasks to the bigger picture and helps individuals see their contribution to the company’s success.
• Immeasurability – Without clear standards, people don’t know if they’re doing well. Coaching managers provide regular feedback and help employees understand what good looks like.

Lencioni warns: “A miserable job … drains them of their energy, their enthusiasm and their self-esteem”². His fixes include helping employees change their managers, sharing measurable goals, and fostering two-way understanding.

By becoming coaches, managers can tackle these issues head-on:

• Combat anonymity by learning about team members' lives and aspirations.
• Boost relevance by regularly communicating how individual contributions affect customers and business outcomes.
• Clarify success through jointly agreed KPIs, milestones, and frequent feedback loops.

Theories in practice: "Power to the Middle"

Furthermore, in Power to the Middle, Schaninger, Hancock, and Field explore how enabling middle managers as decision-makers and coaches drives organisational energy and effectiveness. They argue that when the middle has the power to act - rather than merely channel directives from the top - change flows faster. Coaching-oriented middle managers become multipliers of strategy and culture.

Empowered middle managers can:

• Translate executive strategy into frontline action.
• Build individual alignment through coaching conversations.
• Sustain individuals’ connection to the company culture.

Your next steps

1. Audit manager time and tasks - Identify which administrative tasks can be automated or centralised thereby freeing managers for coaching time.
2. Prioritise coaching skills - Invest in training middle managers on active listening, feedback delivery, performance coaching, and career development.
3. Embed coaching into business rhythm - Turn meetings into check-ins about growth, progress, and wellbeing - not just project updates or firefighting sessions.
4. Measure manager impact - Use tools such as Elevate to understand direct indicators like employee engagement and team alignment, rather than focusing solely on outputs like task completion.
5. Build accountability loops - Middle managers should report not only on deliverables but also on team health, development actions, and morale.

The reward

When middle managers step into coaching roles, the results are transformative:

• Employee engagement rises as individuals feel seen, understand purpose, and track progress.
• Strategic alignment increases as teams see how each role moves the needle.
• Wellbeing and retention improve as employees are supported personally and professionally.
• Leadership bandwidth expands because strategic leaders gain an advocate for the business plan who can support organisational clarity.

Conclusion: From enforcers to enablers

It’s time to unmuddle the middle. Middle managers are not a legacy role to be trimmed; they are a future force to be empowered. As organisations struggle with falling leadership trust and disconnected teams, turning managers into coaches is one of the most powerful moves you can make.

By freeing up their time, redefining their roles, and giving them the tools to lead with empathy and clarity, managers can become the cornerstone of a truly aligned and high-performing organisation.

Want to know how your managers are really performing?

Best Companies’ Elevate platform gives you deep insight into how teams feel about their managers, where improvements can be made, and data-driven coaching strategies designed to drive the success of your managers, teams, and business.

Elevate empowers your managers to build stronger, more accountable, and future-ready teams by providing  personalised dashboards and AI-assisted goal-setting tools that help translate insight into measurable actions. The platform offers a scalable solution to track progress, improve team and goal alignment, and build accountability loops thereby ensuring that leadership development becomes an ongoing, data-driven process rather than a one-off intervention. Elevate your managers today.

‍

^{1 https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/stop-wasting-your-most-precious-resource-middle-managers}

^{2 https://www.inc.com/marcel-schwantes/3-reasons-your-employees-are-miserable-at-work-and-what-to-do-about-it.html}