A company’s biggest asset is its people — most of all its middle managers: Many companies see their middle managers — leaders who fall in the middle of the organizational hierarchy, with direct reports below them and senior leadership above them — trapped in a “beleaguered” role that doesn’t match what middle managers should actually be doing, according to a recent McKinsey Global Survey. Middle managers are “vital” to a company’s success, and those with strong connections with their reports can drive positive growth for an organization, including improving operations and performance, and successfully implementing organizational vision. However, the role of middle managers is often misconstrued and incorrectly applied in organizations, which results in “untapped value,” say McKinsey partners Emily Field and Bryan Hancock, and senior partner Bill Schaninger, who developed the survey.

Why is the middle of the corporate hierarchy so important? “Managers are key in two parts of what makes businesses work: one, they’re critical for delivering for their people, for coaching them, for developing them, for making sure that those people have the soft skills that are increasingly required in a world where we’re surrounded by automation and automated tools,” Hancock says. Managers are also the ones who drive creativity and value creation, as well as collaborative efforts within their organizations and with external parties, he notes.

What are the typical issues and hurdles middle managers grapple with? Middle managers reported several issues holding them back from tapping their potential, including the way their time is allocated, the existence of top-down and bottom-up pressures, a mismatch between individual and organizational understandings of value, and not receiving the types of motivation and incentives that resonate most, according to the McKinsey survey.

The biggest pain point: Spending too much time on non-managerial tasks: Middle managers typically spend too much time doing lower-value or “individual-contributor” tasks, including administrative work, than they do on more crucial functions of a manager, such as talent and people management, McKinsey says. “Nearly half of their time is devoted to nonmanagerial work—specifically, respondents say they are spending nearly one full day out of every week on administrative work, and more of their time is taken up by tasks we refer to as individual-contributor work than any other area,” according to McKinsey.

Beware the player-coach trap: A major issue that’s been cropping up with middle managers is that they are simply not well-suited — or adequately trained — to manage and train people, according to the McKinsey partners. “Over the past 20 years, managers have increasingly been asked — and increasingly valued — not for their management but for their individual-contributor work. And given the complexities of the future of work, we need to flip that around. We need to get managers back to managing,” Hancock says.

This dynamic is a result of employees typically being promoted to managerial positions as a natural reward for high-quality individual work , although this does not always translate into a successful manager. These types of managers often fall short when it comes to training their direct reports, and instead invest an inordinate portion of their time and effort doing the work they should be coaching others to do, Schaninger says.

It’s no wonder there’s so much burnout: Managers (at all levels of the hierarchy) are reporting higher levels of burnout and stress in recent years, with the trend appearing to worsen in 2020 and 2021, according to Gallup. Stress and burnout for managers are exacerbated by increasing pressure to provide employees with tailored feedback and coaching, although many managers have limited capacity to meet these demands, according to Harvard Business Review. Middle managers are also navigating the delicate balance between maximizing productivity and preventing burnout among their teams. Burnout has become increasingly prevalent as weaker global economic conditions have resulted in widespread layoffs and hiring freezes, leaving managers “with a seemingly impossible job: Motivating their teams while managing them during turbulent times,” Fortune says.

There’s AI for that: A handful of AI tools are cropping up to assist managers in providing coaching, as managers “generally want to coach their employees because they know it’s beneficial” but don’t necessarily have capacity to dedicate to providing detailed, personalized feedback, HBR notes. One company, Gong, has developed an AI platform to provide sales teams with real-time insights and advice for navigating conversations with potential clients, and creates a database of “high-quality examples of recorded sales conversations to serve as a resource for independent learning.”

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