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Letter 7: In Praise of the Middle Manager

9 February 2015

Dear K.,

One of the pleasures of reading your letters is seeing your wonderment at the new tasks and challenges you encounter in your office, which never fails to flag up a distant first experience in my memory. In your last letter you told of suddenly finding yourself managing people, endorsing leave applications and writing appraisals. Yes, you are a manager, even if your immediately prior role is that of a graduand.

Management is a travail, an art, and its entry point fits the classical billing: in media res (in the middle of things). Many young men and women are hired as management trainees each year, and many of them go on to become veteran administrators who would in turn mentor their own trainees. But the word management in the job title is adjectival at best. Once you start off, you are manager. No apology.

But a middle manager can be a misnomer. She doesn't manage the middle. She's in the middle, sandwiched between people under her and above. In the words of the freelance journalist Michael Kinsley who found himself employed as a manager in a software company in the late '90s: 'There are superiors to impress and subordinates to maneuver (or the other way around). Being a middle manager is performance art. And the show must go on.'

Like other forms of performance art, middle management is rewarding in itself, though not always thankful. You might have to do a nasty job once in a very long while, but never invited to ribbon-cutting. You would be asked to draft a speech, as you were last month, but never to give one.

You wondered if, since your disposition is not of the control-freak type, you might perhaps do better as a manager by erring on the hands-on or micromanaging side. Well, there are as many management styles as the glasses people wear. Don't take your tutorials from books like The Zen of Management or The Tao of Leadership. (There is a Zen or a Tao in everything, isn't there?) Use your common sense, lest it become uncommon, and develop it into good sense. Look at the people around you. Hear what they say and, more importantly, see how they say it. The last things a middle manager needs are a low-decibel ear and a muddled head.

All things in the midst or middle of a system ensure the system run, and run well too. The cogs and wheels cohere and direct, without seeming to be doing it. They are the commas, periods and semi-colons in a cogently argued essay. Readers normally don't pay attention to them, but should any segment be mis-punctuated or unconventionally punctuated, the road to comprehension, to Knowledge and Truth, becomes bumpy. Pico Iyer likens punctuation to 'a civic prop, a pillar that holds society upright. (A run-on sentence, its phrases piling up without division, is as unsightly as a sink piled high with dirty dishes.)' Our job is of course not to wash dishes, but to run an office smoothly is actually not much different from keeping a kitchen going and in order.

The career span of a middle manager is enormous. Theoretically, from the new suit on the block to the second-in-command in an organization, all fall within the class of middle managers. One never gets out of it unless one gets to the top—president, CEO, vice-chancellor. Loyalty and egalitarianism define membership in this class.

I have had the pleasure of managing and being managed by some very interesting and genial persons in my university days. The pleasure is yours now.

Yours sincerely,

H.

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