Leading From the Middle

For the longest time, middle management has been seen either as a problem to be solved or as comic relief. “Eliminate the middleman,” “between a rock and a hard place,” and “middle-child syndrome” all suggest that being in the middle is less than ideal.

In terms of pop culture, it is the realm of The Office’s Michael Scott, of Office Space’s Bill Lumbergh, both perfect comic characters not because they wield too much power but because they attempt to personify authority they don’t fully possess.

In terms of management, the “middle” is a symbol of the ills of bureaucracy. It’s seen as a place where careers go to die. You’d be hard-pressed to find LinkedIn posts offering advice on how to rise to the middle. Attention goes mostly to those in the C-suite or to those at the bottom, trudging through the workweek filing TPS reports.

And yet universities continue to function, day after day, through the middle.

These tensions became abundantly clear to me when I became a department chair. Academic department chairs are unlike any other form of management: We have great responsibility, hold less power than you think and are forced to triangulate between those above us and those under our supervision. As chair, there’s not much formal power. Beyond control of the summer school schedule—where faculty can earn extra income—most of my authority came from persuasion, attention and empathy. What mattered far more was attention: attention to people, to timing, to what could be asked of a department at a particular moment without breaking something that couldn’t easily be repaired.

Much of my work as chair consisted of translation, not decision-making. Strategic priorities arrived from above already abstracted from reality. They had to be enacted in specific conditions that senior leadership didn’t see. Faculty concerns rose from below. My job was to act as a sort of United Nations interpreter, translating administrative-speak into a language faculty could understand and expressing faculty concerns in a language administrators understood (primarily dollars and cents).

From the outside, this doesn’t look like take-charge leadership. It’s slow. It’s contextual. It’s often invisible. Much of my job involved judgments about which conflicts to absorb, which colleagues to protect, which initiatives to let go so another could survive. My greatest skill was being able to discern which administrative initiative was bound for failure and to shield the faculty from it so as not to burden them more than they already were. There is no manual for this type of leadership, but it shaped the department more enduringly than any formal policy I enforced.

Middle managers aren’t mocked because they’re unnecessary. They’re mocked because they’re exposed. We are close enough to power to be blamed for it and close enough to labor to absorb its frustration and anger. This exposure and structural vulnerability are what make the role so vital. The middle is where institutional contradictions become human.

The role carries distinct exhaustions. It’s emotionally demanding in ways that pure scholarship isn’t. Many of us move from the solitary life of professor and scholar into a job that requires we spend more attention on others than on ourselves. The work never feels finished. It’s no wonder so many avoid it. Those who serve often count the days until they can return to full-time teaching and research.

In some ways, chairing made me a better scholar. As a historian, I try to understand the consequences of human behavior on people, institutions and societies. As chair, I gained a deeper understanding of why people do what they do. I tell my students that history is, at its core, “humans doing human things.” It also deepened my understanding of the role the institution plays in the quality of life and careers of its people. These dual identities—colleague and administrator, advocate and implementer—create productive tension. Like Bruce Wayne and Batman, our dual identities are the hardest parts of the job. We understand constraints from the inside while trying to remain loyal to the community we are charged with representing and defending.

Early in my tenure, I discovered the less visible dimensions of departmental leadership. Financial systems needed rebuilding. Relationships required patient attention. The infrastructure of trust had eroded in ways that didn’t appear in any strategic plan. None of this work announced itself dramatically. It emerged gradually as I learned what had been left unattended.

This kind of repair happens in the middle. It doesn’t generate headlines or strategic initiatives. It’s the quiet maintenance work that keeps departments functional. It’s exactly the kind of labor that vanishes when organizations decide the middle is disposable.

If senior leadership defines direction and faculty create intellectual life, then the middle is where these powerful forces meet to create the reality of university life. Chairs decide how institutional aspirations are interpreted locally. We decide how scarce resources are justified. We decide how failure is explained—or forgiven.

The mentorship role of a chair often goes unrecognized. We support junior faculty. We identify emerging leaders. We help colleagues who haven’t seen themselves in leadership roles imagine the possibility. A conversation that seems minor in the moment can shift someone’s trajectory years later.

Perhaps the problem isn’t that middle management has become a wasteland. Perhaps we’ve simply trained ourselves to recognize only the loudest forms of leadership as meaningful. Using a sports metaphor, no one wants to interview the offensive coordinator after a football game. They want the head coach. But the coordinator most likely created the plan for success.

Corporate middle management has become shorthand for organizational excess. Regional managers. Assistants to the regional manager. District supervisors. Coordinators of coordinators. These roles get mocked in ways senior leadership doesn’t. The implication is clear: The middle is where legitimacy fades.

In many corporate settings, this rings true. When the middle exists primarily to relay information, enforce compliance or justify decisions made elsewhere, it’s susceptible to both scorn and satire mostly because the work itself has been hollowed out.

But department chairs sit at the intersection of faculty identity, student experience, institutional constraint and disciplinary culture. Unlike many corporate middle managers, chairs aren’t removed from the core work. They are the core work.

The ease with which we make fun of the middle says less about its emptiness than about our exasperation with the work it requires. Institutions don’t move by charisma or efficiency alone. They move by negotiation, repair and compromise. These are forms of labor we’re culturally bad at valuing.

My 16 years in this role have convinced me of something specific: Chairs occupy a unique position in the university ecosystem. We’re close enough to daily operations to see what actually helps people do their best work. We’re positioned where good intentions meet practical constraints. The leverage we have is real, even when authority is limited.

The middle I experienced was never a management wasteland. It was thick with human complexity. I had to know my colleagues well in order to make the best decisions for their careers. I became the voice of reason and calm in situations that created anxiety (even if I was panicking internally).

Leading from the middle means creating conditions for others to succeed while mitigating the friction that university life generates. It means being visible enough to be accountable but humble enough to know that success belongs to the people you serve.

The middle is where we find out whether institutional values and initiatives are tangible realities or simply words on paper. The middle is where the most human part of a university resides.