However, the middle manager, despite being a hunted species, has survived because the role has quietly evolved and substantially been redefined – in service companies to become a key support to service delivery. The middle manager role has become multi-faceted, outward-looking and a means of providing mentoring within a company to help an organisation grow organically. These findings have been endorsed by recent research into middle managers generally. More particularly, LSE research shows that the MM has now become one of the key factors determining the effectiveness of an outsourcing relationship. What then do MM’s do, precisely, to have so much influence on effective outsourcing?

 

Middle managers have been described as ‘executives or senior supervisory staff in charge of the detailed running of an organisation or business and reporting to top management.  This is now far too narrow. Working in technologically and organisationally more complex, globalising environments, middle managers are now found to be the ‘glue’ that hold organisations together, and are responsible for accomplishing the core tasks of the organisation. At the basic level, the MM still has the historic role of acting as the transmission belt between the top and bottom of organisations, but the MM now has scope to manage internal and external teams and relationships and be fundamentally involved in managing risk. They make day-to-day choices and key trade-offs that escape top management attention, know-how and interest, yet are central to an organisation’s performance. In service companies in particular, MMs have to look both ways - externally to the customers and other suppliers, and internally both to their senior management to obtain and interpret direction, and to their junior management where they provide the mentoring and training.

 

In the context of offshoring and outsourcing, MM must acquire another dimension of skills. These are the skills of dealing across significant boundaries, countries and perhaps cultures where there can be distinct status differences. The building of “virtual teams” across these boundaries, the development of trust and the necessity of effective communication, are crucial if team leaders or project managers are to achieve effective outcomes. This is particularly complex where, for example, a company has BPO offshoring in India, customer services in Egypt, manufacturing in China and software development in the Czech Republic.

 

Moreover, recent, specific research has shown that international offshoring to a particular host country may only be profitable if it includes MMs. This enables the company to deal effectively and knowledgeably with production as well as provide supervision during the processes. By shielding the top management in the home country from dealing with routine problems faced by workers in the host country, the presence of middle managers can speed up transmission of knowledge across countries. 

 

In summary, middle managers emerge as the key means by which strategic direction and executive decisions are converted into work. They do this by coordination, retention and communicating information and knowledge, and through becoming repositories of corporate memory and experience. They create vital social capital through relationship management, as well as through team and project leadership. In dynamic contexts, with frequently changing demands, they can become adaptive change agents in search of business results. 

 

The priority given to the four general roles of Coordinator, Knowledge Repository, Social Capitalist and Change Agent will depend on the specific context in which a middle manager is operating. But far from dispensing with these modern roles, outsourcing changes the management model, further increasing the importance of middle managers for both client and supplier organisations alike. 

 

 

The speed with which many non-BRIC and BRIC countries are developing their outsourcing and offshoring industries means revenues have come without the corporate structures to sustain sufficiently the speed or scalability of long term growth. Without the necessary middle management to hold the company together and provide the smooth running and in-depth corporate knowledge, many companies will reach a growth plateau.  

 

In India – often looked to as a model of a dynamic outsourcing country – the lack of middle management and the low retention rates are causes of concern, as there is limited experience available from which graduates can learn. The Philippines offers complex BPO services but has insufficient numbers of talented, experienced middle management. Egypt has identified a similar middle management gap and is working with other countries, especially India, to obtain benefits from targeted secondments. Senior personnel are appointed for fixed terms, to provide both the model and the necessary internal training. This is part of a wide scale strategy to fill both an immediate and longer term shortfall. 

 

In Egypt there is a dynamic story of new company growth and substantial investment in further training. Companies such as IBM, Oracle, Orange, Microsoft and Vodafone have each established sites in the newly formed Smart Villages and are providing their own training and career development as part of the current investment plans. The high level of linguistic skills and the clear motivation of recruits have encouraged these companies to invest in people and training. Each one is importing their international corporate skills and training programmes to help develop potential future managers.  

 

Home grown companies such as Teleperformance have appointed European senior managers in order to provide the necessary skills transfer and help to develop the next generation of middle management, which are essential for the continued growth of the company. The country – as others must - has adopted a comprehensive range of government-backed programmes to complement and extend middle management training and skills development. 

 

But it is one thing to know that you need to invest; quite another to know what to invest in...