Its Time for a Middle Manager Role Redesign After Three Decades of Quiet Cost Cutting
Managers probably have the hardest jobs in business today, and they're underserved and underrepresented.
Elizabeth Jenswold
President
Bridgepoint Consulting LLC
Being a middle manager today is a clunky job. There was a time when managing people could be the whole job, an administrative leadership role with the scope and decision rights to match. Cost pressure pared that down over three decades and left a more junior position with far less support. The work of translating strategy and steadying a team stayed, and the gap between that demand and the way the job is now built keeps widening.
Elizabeth Jenswold is the President of Bridgepoint Consulting LLC, powered by The Human Resource Consortium, an HR consulting firm. She spent more than two decades in senior people roles at companies including CBRE and JPMorgan Chase, where she helped lead global HR and talent strategies. After moving from a corporate role into consulting, she spent time talking with people across industries about why frontline leadership feels so strained.
“Managers probably have the hardest jobs in business today, and they’re underserved and underrepresented,” Jenswold says. That difficulty traces back to how the job itself has been built and rebuilt.
Stretched by design
Human resources teams have spent years treating the friction between managers and their teams as a training problem. They built accountability programs and changed how executives communicate with frontline teams. They adjusted how many people report to each manager. None of it moved engagement, and the friction held. Jenswold reads that track record as evidence that the job’s design lies at the root of the trouble. “I ultimately go back to the fact that we have a design problem,” she says. Each fix treated a symptom while the structure underneath went unexamined.
Driven by pressure to control costs, many organizations came to see standalone management as a luxury they could not justify. They pushed the role down the org chart and trimmed the administrative and operational support that once came with it, then promoted their strongest technical performers on the assumption that skill at the work would translate into skill at leading it. The model that resulted asks one person to keep producing, coach a team, spot problems, and solve them, often with no backup.
“When you’ve promoted people who are really good at technical ability, and you pray you’ll be able to train them to be good at the leadership piece, there’s really no time in the day to be a full-fledged individual contributor and a manager and a problem identifier and a problem solver, all with no support,” Jenswold says. Staying in the work lets managers catch problems early. Acting on them is where the hours run out.
The squeeze does not stay contained at the manager level. It shapes the daily conversations between leaders and their teams, especially the hard ones. When a manager cannot explain the reasoning behind a decision, asking people to accept it becomes a strain on both sides.
Spend on people
Companies have tried to close that gap with what Jenswold calls a manager in a box. Leaders receive clean talking points for each strategy and a weekly agenda of what their teams need to hear. What the package leaves out is the why behind any of it. “Managers in today’s world often spend their time having things done to them rather than being a part of the solution,” Jenswold says. Buy-in tends to follow from involvement in a decision, and handing down conclusions without the thinking that produced them asks managers to sell a case they were never briefed on. Transparency tops what employees want from leadership, the top ask for 58% of workers in BambooHR’s State of the Workforce 2026 report, and a manager working from talking points has little of it to give.
Restoring scope and support to the manager role costs money, and most organizations have spent years looking at those same roles as a place to cut. Jenswold’s recommendation is to push the role back up a level or two and resource it properly, with more pay and more authority for the people in those seats. She knows how that lands in a finance review. CFOs want hard numbers, and cost-avoidance arguments built on lower attrition or steadier retention rarely move them. The money for a redesign often already sits inside current operating budgets, tied up in real estate that goes unused or technology rollouts that run ahead of need. “People are investing heavily in AI and technology. Are they investing too fast? I have so many questions about where companies are spending their time and money today on things outside of their people,” she says.
Reallocating budget assumes the pressure on managers will keep building, and Jenswold sees no reason it would slow. The pace of change has been climbing for as long as she has worked, under one name or another.
Setting the pace
Pacing is the part Jenswold thinks companies can still control, and it’s where the missing context costs the most. “If a manager doesn’t understand the big picture and is just handed the plan and told to implement it, there’s no way to say, yes, we can do that, but we need a different timeline, and here’s why,” she says.
BambooHR’s research finds 54% of leaders admit to putting off a known fix because the cost or disruption looks too high, the kind of call a manager with the full picture could help time better. The rollout happens either way. Whether anyone can slow it down for an overloaded team depends on access that the role no longer comes with.
A harder choice
The redesign is a choice, and Jenswold’s point is that companies keep making the easy one. Cutting the role again costs nothing this quarter. Rebuilding it takes money and nerve. Her case is that the harder option is the one that lasts, because these are the people a company depends on when the next round of change hits.
She puts it to executives as a question about the team itself. “How do you think about your organization in terms of having the right talent on the team versus continuously optimizing the jobs? Look at the people you’re bringing in, and how to optimize who you have today and who you want for tomorrow,” Jenswold says.
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TL;DR
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Elizabeth Jenswold
Bridgepoint Consulting LLC
President
President
Being a middle manager today is a clunky job. There was a time when managing people could be the whole job, an administrative leadership role with the scope and decision rights to match. Cost pressure pared that down over three decades and left a more junior position with far less support. The work of translating strategy and steadying a team stayed, and the gap between that demand and the way the job is now built keeps widening.
Elizabeth Jenswold is the President of Bridgepoint Consulting LLC, powered by The Human Resource Consortium, an HR consulting firm. She spent more than two decades in senior people roles at companies including CBRE and JPMorgan Chase, where she helped lead global HR and talent strategies. After moving from a corporate role into consulting, she spent time talking with people across industries about why frontline leadership feels so strained.
“Managers probably have the hardest jobs in business today, and they’re underserved and underrepresented,” Jenswold says. That difficulty traces back to how the job itself has been built and rebuilt.
Stretched by design
Human resources teams have spent years treating the friction between managers and their teams as a training problem. They built accountability programs and changed how executives communicate with frontline teams. They adjusted how many people report to each manager. None of it moved engagement, and the friction held. Jenswold reads that track record as evidence that the job’s design lies at the root of the trouble. “I ultimately go back to the fact that we have a design problem,” she says. Each fix treated a symptom while the structure underneath went unexamined.
Driven by pressure to control costs, many organizations came to see standalone management as a luxury they could not justify. They pushed the role down the org chart and trimmed the administrative and operational support that once came with it, then promoted their strongest technical performers on the assumption that skill at the work would translate into skill at leading it. The model that resulted asks one person to keep producing, coach a team, spot problems, and solve them, often with no backup.
“When you’ve promoted people who are really good at technical ability, and you pray you’ll be able to train them to be good at the leadership piece, there’s really no time in the day to be a full-fledged individual contributor and a manager and a problem identifier and a problem solver, all with no support,” Jenswold says. Staying in the work lets managers catch problems early. Acting on them is where the hours run out.
The squeeze does not stay contained at the manager level. It shapes the daily conversations between leaders and their teams, especially the hard ones. When a manager cannot explain the reasoning behind a decision, asking people to accept it becomes a strain on both sides.
Spend on people
Companies have tried to close that gap with what Jenswold calls a manager in a box. Leaders receive clean talking points for each strategy and a weekly agenda of what their teams need to hear. What the package leaves out is the why behind any of it. “Managers in today’s world often spend their time having things done to them rather than being a part of the solution,” Jenswold says. Buy-in tends to follow from involvement in a decision, and handing down conclusions without the thinking that produced them asks managers to sell a case they were never briefed on. Transparency tops what employees want from leadership, the top ask for 58% of workers in BambooHR’s State of the Workforce 2026 report, and a manager working from talking points has little of it to give.
Restoring scope and support to the manager role costs money, and most organizations have spent years looking at those same roles as a place to cut. Jenswold’s recommendation is to push the role back up a level or two and resource it properly, with more pay and more authority for the people in those seats. She knows how that lands in a finance review. CFOs want hard numbers, and cost-avoidance arguments built on lower attrition or steadier retention rarely move them. The money for a redesign often already sits inside current operating budgets, tied up in real estate that goes unused or technology rollouts that run ahead of need. “People are investing heavily in AI and technology. Are they investing too fast? I have so many questions about where companies are spending their time and money today on things outside of their people,” she says.
Reallocating budget assumes the pressure on managers will keep building, and Jenswold sees no reason it would slow. The pace of change has been climbing for as long as she has worked, under one name or another.
Setting the pace
Pacing is the part Jenswold thinks companies can still control, and it’s where the missing context costs the most. “If a manager doesn’t understand the big picture and is just handed the plan and told to implement it, there’s no way to say, yes, we can do that, but we need a different timeline, and here’s why,” she says.
BambooHR’s research finds 54% of leaders admit to putting off a known fix because the cost or disruption looks too high, the kind of call a manager with the full picture could help time better. The rollout happens either way. Whether anyone can slow it down for an overloaded team depends on access that the role no longer comes with.
A harder choice
The redesign is a choice, and Jenswold’s point is that companies keep making the easy one. Cutting the role again costs nothing this quarter. Rebuilding it takes money and nerve. Her case is that the harder option is the one that lasts, because these are the people a company depends on when the next round of change hits.
She puts it to executives as a question about the team itself. “How do you think about your organization in terms of having the right talent on the team versus continuously optimizing the jobs? Look at the people you’re bringing in, and how to optimize who you have today and who you want for tomorrow,” Jenswold says.