15 Sep Middle Management Is Broken: How SMEs Can Actually Support Their Middle Managers

Middle Management Is Broken: How SMEs Can Actually Support Their Middle Managers

Middle managers are the layer that makes everything else in a business actually happen — and they’re also the layer that gets the least support. Gallup’s research on what it calls the “manager squeeze” found that only 31% of managers were engaged at work as of May 2023, down from 38% in 2020, while 55% were watching for or actively seeking a new job. That’s not a talent problem you can hire your way out of. It’s a structural one, and it shows up just as sharply in a 40-person South African SME as it does in a multinational — arguably more sharply, because there’s no HR department standing between the founder and the problem.

What “Broken” Actually Looks Like in the Data

Two findings, taken together, explain most of what goes wrong. First, McKinsey’s research on middle managers found they spend nearly half their time on nonmanagerial work — individual tasks that have nothing to do with leading people — and less than a quarter of their time on strategy. Less than one-third goes to actual talent and people management, the part of the job they were promoted to do. Second, only 20% of managers in that same research strongly agreed their organization helps them succeed as people managers, while 42% either disagreed or weren’t sure. Most managers are set up to spend their time on the wrong things and given little help doing the part that matters most.

Gallup’s manager-squeeze research adds the wellbeing dimension: only 22% of managers believed their organization cared about their wellbeing as of 2023, down sharply from 47% in 2020, and just 48% strongly agreed they had the skills needed to excel at their job. Three in ten managers said their own supervisor kept them properly informed about what was happening in the business. None of this is a motivation problem. It’s a design problem — managers are being asked to do a job that was never properly resourced or explained.

Why This Hits SMEs Differently

In a large corporate, a struggling middle manager is at least visible to an HR function with the mandate to notice and intervene. In most South African SMEs, that layer doesn’t exist — the founder or a general manager is doing double duty as the de facto people function, on top of running the business. Gallup’s span-of-control research shows the average number of direct reports per manager has climbed from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, a trend that tends to be even more pronounced in smaller businesses, where a department head might have no choice but to carry a wide team with no layer beneath them to delegate through.

The same research found that managers spending more than 40% of their time on individual-contributor work — which describes most SME managers, who are usually still doing hands-on work alongside their team — show declining engagement as team size grows. Managers who keep that figure under 40% hold steady at around 37% engagement regardless of team size. The lesson for an SME isn’t “hire more managers.” It’s that the time a manager spends actually managing, rather than doing the work themselves, is the variable that determines whether a growing team burns them out or not.

Five Things That Actually Help — Without an HR Department

1. Protect a Real Block of People-Management Time

If a manager’s calendar is 100% booked with their own deliverables, “manage your team better” is an instruction with no room to act on it. The fix isn’t a training course — it’s a standing, protected block (even two hours a week to start) where the manager’s only job is checking in with their people, not clearing their own inbox. This is the single lever McKinsey’s data points to hardest: managers who protect people-time outperform those who don’t, regardless of how skilled they are.

2. Make Feedback a Weekly Habit, Not an Annual Event

Gallup’s span-of-control research found that weekly meaningful feedback nearly triples engagement rates — roughly 68-70% engaged with regular feedback versus 22-26% without, and the pattern held across every team size studied. This doesn’t require a performance-management platform. A 15-minute weekly one-on-one, done consistently, moves the number more than an annual review process ever will.

3. Give Managers Real Authority, Not Just Responsibility

McKinsey’s research found managers’ most-wanted reward wasn’t a bonus — it was increased autonomy and responsibility, and 60% reported being handed new responsibilities without a matching increase in the authority to act on them. For an SME, this is usually free to fix: it means actually letting a department head make the hiring call, adjust the budget, or change the process, rather than requiring sign-off for every decision they’re nominally accountable for.

4. Build a Light Peer Network Instead of a Formal Program

Without an HR department, a 12-month leadership-development curriculum isn’t realistic — and it isn’t necessary. A standing 30-minute monthly session where the 3-5 people managing teams compare notes on what’s actually going wrong does more for a small leadership bench than an off-the-shelf course, because it surfaces the specific problems this business has rather than generic ones.

5. Ask What They Need Before Designing a Program

The gap between what managers say they need and what gets built for them is a recurring theme in this research — only 3 in 10 hybrid managers, for instance, had received any formal training on leading a hybrid team despite hybrid work being the norm. A 20-minute conversation with each manager about where they actually feel unequipped will point to a more useful set of fixes than any generic leadership-training package, and it costs nothing but time.

The Real Cost of Leaving This Alone

Gallup’s data on workplace relationships found they account for 39% of employees’ overall job satisfaction, and a manager relationship specifically accounts for 86% of a worker’s satisfaction with the people side of their job. A struggling, unsupported middle manager doesn’t just risk leaving themselves — they’re the single biggest lever on whether the 5-12 people reporting to them stay engaged or start job-hunting too. For an SME that can’t easily absorb the cost of losing a department head and the disruption that follows, this is one of the higher-leverage places to spend deliberate attention, even without a dedicated budget line for it.

If you want help figuring out where your own management layer is under the most strain, book a free 30-minute business review.