Googling 'middle manager'

Maybe everything you need to be a great manager can be taught by age 18.

“Do some retail, do some selling, and be a camp counselor,” advises Thomas Davenport, a specialist in human resources in the San Francisco offices of Towers Watson. “You’ll learn to deal with people who aren’t happy while maintaining decorum, how to sell and negotiate, and how to solve emotional problems from an eight year-old that misses his mom.”

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Okay, they like to hire them young in the Valley, but that’s not what he means. Davenport thinks about the lost role of the middle manager in large corporations, and has written a book on the subject. These people, denigrated as “paper pushers” when email wiped out their jobs, actually occupy a critical “zone between two ecosystems,” he says, “neither executive nor employee.”

As such, they are the unnoticed broker between the corporation and individual. This matters, as knowledge-based work makes skills increasingly portable, and companies need to fire the passion of their staff with more than money.

“The main quality a workforce needs is empathy,” he says. “People join companies for compensation and benefits, but they stay for development, asking whether this work is making them smarter and better.” Hence, the retail, selling, and nurturing skills they don’t teach at business school.

There is something to it. Job security is nowadays best found in a museum, so it only makes sense that good people should want their skills honed for whatever comes next. Even more though, companies have to deal with fast-changing ecosystems, and need to hold good people who are attuned to what is new in their field.

Yet isn’t Davenport – who is admittedly talking up his own profession by telling companies to find and hold more middle managers – also at odds with much of the Valley? Here, the ideal has for years been the fast-acting “flat” corporation, hostile to meddling and driven to solve each task as fast as possible.

Davenport says that Cisco, which kept itself flat by managing through numerous multi-discipline councils and boards, is now enabling managers to work more as player/coaches, “finding people who are being sought out for advice, and has teams that meet their goals on time,” he says. “They are headed in the right direction.”

Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, “are making a mistake just throwing money at people,” he says. “That is always the easiest lever to pull.”

Elsewhere I wrote about what it may take to succeed in the world of Freelancer.com. It is a world where you work on small, quickly assembled teams, you are judged by your portfolio more than your degrees, and the real money gets made by the talent wranglers who “move fast, and (are) the guy running things.”

That point, overextended, posits that big companies will wither away, and the world will be nothing but teams and short-term jobs. That is almost certainly not the case – supply chains, cash management, and inertia, among other things, argue against it.

But the trend to individualized work and skills is clear, as is the need to find and nurture the fulfillment the best workers really seek. Davenport has a point: This is better seen by a manager close to work than by a high-level executive.