Developing Middle Managers in Shrinking Organisations

The central concern of this paper is managers in the middle who are hierarchically suppressed by new systems from above and squeezed by new technologies from below. They represent one of the most disillusioned groups in work organisations. Mid‐career crises, redundancies and exhortations to perform better make their plight worse. One answer has been management development. My thesis here is that very little development actually occurs as strategies and structures work against it and the realities of learning are ignored. If we hope to address this middle management problem we should return to the basics of the learning process.