ACT II: THE MACHINE — How the system works (or doesn't)
To talk about this topic I could turn to specialists or great HR theorists, but I don't think it's necessary. In essence, as in so many other aspects of business, workers, and life, it's already been written—and I'm not a scholar of the subject to be quoting them.
That said, I must say it's quite common in companies for middle managers to be everything they're supposed to be, but without everything they need to be what they're expected to be (huh?).
Generally, middle managers are people who have responsibility over the workers' actions. However, it's very common for them to not have sufficient authority to choose the members of their teams, sanction them, reward them, or let them go.
Perhaps this is because their very definition is somewhat confusing and/or incongruent.
According to the RAE, the term "middle" means:
"That which is between two extremes, in the centre of something or between two things."
This fits perfectly in work environments since organisational structures have created the need to have someone "halfway," "mediating" between Management and the operation (by the latter I mean operational workers and Clients).
Someone who has enough connection to the reality lived in operations (the daily problems inherent to work) and at the same time enough distance from it to dedicate part of their day to monitoring and tracking results.
This "halfway" or "in the middle" situation has separated them from decisions considered "sensitive" and "important," like sanctioning, rewarding, letting go. These are so important that they must be made by a "superior" entity.
In short, whoever has the authority to make certain decisions ends up being someone "removed" or not as close to the reality of daily work.
So how do organisations expect middle managers to control, generate, or modify workers' habits?
Most companies resort to "training" in "Leadership," "Coaching" and other anglicisms, which seek to promote work behaviours through motivational practices with the same degree of subjectivity as faith or any other vague, diffuse, and undefined thing. The result of these trainings is usually a "fart cloud effect" that lasts no more than a month, until "real life" makes contact with operations again.
Conclusions? (Are they necessary?)
Let's redefine "middle management."
If they can decide who works on their team, who gets rewarded, who gets sanctioned, then they're a manager. Let's remove the "middle" from the title—they're not halfway to anything if they can make these decisions.
If on the contrary they only inform, delegate, observe—they're a middle… they have no authority, they have no command.
Or better yet, if they can do both propositions, then… Eureka! (Huh?)… we've defined the middle manager.
Note: Explaining the reasons why these situations are commonplace in companies is not the purpose of this post. To summarise those possible explanations, click here.
The Taleb Connection
The middle manager is a contradiction wearing a name tag. Responsibility without authority. Accountability for outcomes they can't choose, can't hire for, can't fire for, can't reward.
"Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game (2018), Prologue
Read from the middle, the construction is inverted. The decisions stay upstream, where authority lives. The consequences flow downstream, where the manager is. The manager isn't separated from consequences — they're pinned to consequences they have no levers to influence. The structure that protects executives from the cost of their decisions is the same structure that traps middle managers in the cost of decisions that aren't theirs.
The "leadership training" answer is the predictable response: instead of fixing the structure, the company teaches people to cope. The fix isn't coaching. It's alignment. If someone is responsible for outcomes, they need authority over them. Otherwise, you're not managing — you're staffing the blame.
This article was translated from the 2012 Spanish original and revised in 2026 through human-AI collaboration — clarifying transitions and adding connections to Nassim Taleb's framework.