In part one I explored insights that network analysis can tell us about managing teams or organisations and the impact of adding a new management tier. I gave the example of a management team that only added a director-level tier of three new posts. The heads of service feel the management burden as part of this management team, for they have to respond to all the challenges that emerge from these relationships – sighting the right people on decisions, maintaining productivity, collaborating where necessary, resolving conflicts, navigating new processes, and so on. 

But it’s more than that. They then have to do the same within their own department; a manager of 30 staff oversees a team with 435 individual 1-1 relationships, which collectively generate the team’s culture and practice – for good or ill. Now add in a few project teams, perhaps seven people on this one (21 relationships), twelve on that (66 relationships), and little wonder our middle managers feel overwhelmed.

Now we can see what’s happening in reality. You are, in effect, paid to be a buffer for the top management tiers, to nip emergent issues in the bud before they escalate into arguments, issues or grievances. It’s a management form of institutional overhead; a type of meta work, if you will, that rarely gets accounted for, that part that never appears in a JD or annual target or budget line or timesheet. The task of navigating your way through a growing or restructured institutional maze becomes significantly harder. You find yourself with more emails to respond to, disruptive relationships to address, people to collaborate with, new policies and processes to adopt, project to deliver, meetings to attend, ideas to test, and so on. 

This is the increased management overhead predicted by network theory, and it disproportionately impacts that much maligned management class, the middle manager. Often thought of as the institutional permafrost, this is generally considered to be the management tier that prevents change and where ideas go to die. Yet it’s the management tier that has to look in all three hierarchical directions: up, down and sideways. 

This management overhead also forms one of the organisational paradoxes: the higher up the hierarchy you climb, the less time you find you are able to devote to the very thing you were great at and that got you promoted in the first place. So you have a choice to make: how do you balance the need to play the resulting management game with the desire to leverage your technical skills and make a difference? 

Perhaps you learn to successfully play this middle-management game: appearing to both compliantly fit in and fulfil the technical aspects of your role.  Perhaps you find it almost impossible to consistently strike the right balance. One thing’s for sure – you don’t have the time to do it all well. As a result, perhaps something we missed or ignored comes back to bite us – a staff grievance or customer complaint. Is it incompetence? Almost certainly not, it’s a product of being a middle manager operating across a set of complex systems or teams. But the institution response might be to unfairly label us as requiring improvement, perhaps sent on a training course or, worse still, taken through a competencies process. Then a new organisational restructure is mooted and you realise your precarity more than ever. 

And yet your circumstances, bearing the management overhead of a middle manager, make it almost inevitable.  As Deming taught, and as I so frequently quote, individual performance is almost completely a result of the systems they are working within. Change the systems, change performance. Otherwise, as we have seen, all too often our intended solutions – however well-intentioned – can have adverse effects. Systems thinkers know this as the fixes-that-fail archetype. 

How might we use a network and a systems lens to think differently about organisational development and change? I’ll next explore the critical role of social capital before concluding this series with some practical ways forward.