Middle management roles are also a trap

Why we picked it · the editor's summary

Larson's mechanism is a feedback loop: middle management rewards balancing pressures, defining process, and allocating resources, and the feedback you get there tells you to drive execution less closely or be called a micromanager. Those are necessary executive skills and not sufficient ones, and the missing ones, domain depth, driving execution, and shaping culture, are built in line management. Stay long enough and the loop selects against the person an executive job needs. He concedes the feedback is often valid in the roles themselves, which is what makes the trap hard to see from inside. His advice is to take the tour and keep it short. We disagree that a long middle-management run is a career mistake, but not with the loop, which we have watched run on people we rate.