The Peanut Butter in the Organizational Sandwich

Once again today I found myself feeling overwhelmed with both the volume and content of requests, issues, needs and - let's face it, demands - pulling me to and fro. And as usual, my main struggle was not so much in managing everything, although that is certainly a struggle. No, my main struggle as always were my feelings of stress and helplessness and unhelpfulness and stuck-in-the-middleness that come with being a middle manager.

As I processed all of this on the way home (aka. ground my teeth and held my breath and called other drivers the worst names I could come up with) I realized that I am neither the ultimate do-er nor the ultimate decider for nearly 100% of the things that cross my desk, er, screen. If you have never been in this place, it is a special kind of purgatory.

When I was the ultimate do-er, the tactician of tasks, I could at least feel some accomplishment in the getting done of things, as stressful as getting to the point of checking them off the list might have been in some cases. Now I am not the tactician anymore. Those who do the doing on my team are ultimately superior to me in nearly all forms of task completion, and thank goodness because they are doing 99.5% of the tasks.

And, while I do decide things here and there that help my do-ers do, I am not, for the most part the one who sets the direction for all that doing. That is done a level above me. And so what I am managing is the doing of the tasks by others according to the direction set by others.

Drawing from my old days on the stage (and I mean really old days), I now draw on the character actor's lament: what's my motivation??

My main motivation, aside from getting paid of course, is to help my staff check off their tasks so they can feel accomplished so that I can then report up the food chain that the check marks have been made and then go back to my folks with the next set of check marks. Oh wait, that's not my motivation at all. In fact, that makes me want to have a drink to forget that is actually what my "career" has come to...

But I digress. My main point here was to posit that middle management goes against nature. It is not in the nature of the human being nor the nature of the general functionality of the human mind to be neither focused on the end goal nor the details but on some nebulous, ever morphing grey area of "process" in between. Neither doing, nor deciding.

It just doesn't work. Not for me at least. Being the peanut butter in the organizational sandwich is no picnic my friend.