13 May Design in the Middle: Middle Managers as a Powerful Force in Organisation Design
Our next WorldsView Conversation Café, taking place online on 21 May 2025, is titled “Who Designs the Organisation?”It will explore the relationship between strategy, design, and human behaviour—and we hope you’ll join us. (Register here.)
This blog continues our build-up to that session. First, we introduced the idea of The Organisation Design Monster—exploring the multiple meanings and definitions of organisation design. Then, we featured Mbali Masinga’s reflections in The BHAG Coming to Life, focusing on middle managers and the sense-making they must do. Today, we shift our lens slightly again—to explore the organisational design role of the middle manager.
Three Layers of Organisational Design
Organisation design isn’t something fixed by one senior executive in a boardroom. It’s an ongoing process shaped at multiple levels: macro, meso, and micro.
At the macro level, industry effects and organisational positioning define strategic direction. Consider the difference between a reinsurer and a retail broker, or between a fast-food franchise and a high-volume catering manufacturer. Each business occupies a unique niche—and those niches influence how the organisation must be designed. Executive leaders interpret these strategic pressures and translate them into leadership practices, structures, processes, and systems.
At the micro level, the focus shifts to individual employees—their roles, capabilities, relationships, and interfaces with customers, systems, and managers. This is where the actual work gets done.
Many small organisations function only at these two levels. But in larger organisations, a critical middle layer emerges: the middle manager.
The Meso Level: Where Design Happens Every Day
Middle managers interpret strategy and leadership processes, translate them for local teams, and adapt them to shifting circumstances. They handle resourcing, recruitment, motivation, onboarding, performance, and coaching. They align people, navigate systems, and manage internal climate and culture—often without formal training in organisational design, and rarely with time to reflect on their design role.
Yet their choices—who they recruit, what gets measured, how team routines are structured—have powerful effects on the organisation’s shape and functioning. These are design decisions, whether we call them that or not.
Few middle managers follow an explicit organisation design process. But consciously or not, they preserve the status quo or shift the design every day through their behaviour. Middle managers are design agents—even if the org chart says otherwise.
Helping the Middle Do Better
Savvy middle managers often turn to HR for guidance, especially during change. But how many HR and L&D professionals have deep exposure to organisational design frameworks?
Increasingly, generative AI can help. A well-crafted prompt can surface proven practices for structuring teams, leading through transitions, or embedding new systems. But even that requires curiosity—and a desire to learn.
Organisations serious about capability in this area have a few options:
- Build an internal Organisation Design centre of excellence, led by OD professionals who advise on large-scale transformation.
- Develop OD capability through L&D by building middle managers’ exposure to theory and practice over time, so they’re better prepared for senior roles.
- Bring in consultants, using external expertise to guide high-stakes design work.
But whatever the approach, middle managers remain the ones who live the design, feel its constraints, and—intentionally or not—shape its evolution.
Join the Conversation
If you’re a curious middle manager or an HR/L&D professional supporting them, this Café is for you. If you’re a seasoned OD expert, your voice will enrich the mix. On 21 May, we’ll explore:
- What organisation design really means.
- Who actually “does” it in practice.
- What this means for strategy, structure, and performance.
This is a conversation—not a lecture—and we’d love for you to be part of it. Register here, follow us on LinkedIn, and sign up for our newsletter for more reflections in the run-up to the event. We’ll see you there.