---
title: "Four Things Every Middle Manager Needs to Do Well"
description: "A former Alibaba entrepreneur asked what the hardest part of being a middle manager is. The answer: being caught between the boss and employees. Middle managers must translate the boss's decisions into executable strategies, lead the team to implement them, and ensure results, while also addressing employees' needs for growth and income. To succeed, they should focus on four key areas: team building, information transmission, process optimization, and problem-solving."
author: "韩叙"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
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published: "2016-07-02"
language: "en"
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# Four Things Every Middle Manager Needs to Do Well

> A former Alibaba entrepreneur asked what the hardest part of being a middle manager is. The answer: being caught between the boss and employees. Middle managers must translate the boss's decisions into executable strategies, lead the team to implement them, and ensure results, while also addressing employees' needs for growth and income. To succeed, they should focus on four key areas: team building, information transmission, process optimization, and problem-solving.

I was chatting with a former Alibaba entrepreneur whose project had just secured Series A funding of tens of millions of dollars. He asked me: as a middle manager in a company, what is the hardest part?
I thought for a moment and said: it's probably being caught between the boss and the employees. The boss's decisions and pressure need to be passed down, but the boss only cares about the final result; how to get there is the middle manager's job. Employees care less about the company and more about their own growth and income, as well as the specifics of execution.
It's clear that the two sides are on completely different wavelengths. They have different starting points, conflicting interests, and little understanding of each other. They have no common language, so it's up to the middle manager to turn the boss's decisions into executable strategies, lead the team to implement them, and ensure the final outcome.
Thus, the core role of a middle manager is to bridge the gap, digest information, and pass it on. It's fair to say they are the soul of the team. An excellent middle manager can quickly execute the boss's decisions, keep the team running healthily and efficiently, and also feed back frontline information to the boss with practical suggestions.
In short, the team's execution and atmosphere largely depend on the middle manager's management. Under normal circumstances, the boss can only influence, not directly intervene. After all, the essence of teamwork is that everyone does their part.
As a middle manager, doing the following four things well is enough:
**1. Team Building**
Once we've decided what to do and when, the human factor becomes most important. Things are accomplished by people. The right and capable employees can have an immediate effect on project progress; even the hardest problems cease to be problems. So, find the right people, put them in the right positions, give them the right incentives, and you can expect the desired results.
This can be further divided into two points:
> Finding people. Find suitable people with the right values.
>
>
> Managing. Focus on growth and make the best use of everyone's talents.
1. Finding People
First, find suitable people. A common analogy is: one radish, one hole. Talent is the radish, and the position is the hole. Holes vary in size and depth, so radishes come in all shapes and sizes. When recruiting, aim for the hole and find the most suitable radish, not the best one.
Second, find people with the right values. People with the right values at least ensure that actions stay on the right track, avoid principled mistakes, and won't cause major problems in teamwork or damage the team atmosphere. This is a basic quality beyond professional competence.
2. Managing
First, practice humanistic care. The core is to affirm people's value, respect individuality and freedom, encourage rational thinking, and care about employees' spiritual life.
In the internet industry, creativity is productivity, and creativity comes from every employee. Only by practicing humanistic care, respecting employees, and giving them reasonable space to express their individuality and think can a soil for creativity be cultivated.
Humanistic care is reflected in company decisions, compensation and benefits, management systems, and communication between superiors and subordinates—factors big and small. It involves all aspects and needs to be implemented as part of corporate culture over the long term. For a team leader, it's important to pay attention to employees' personal states, including work and life. If necessary, invest effort to help solve personal problems; this is one form of humanistic care.
I don't favor companies that only focus on growth speed and don't care about employees. I don't believe that corporate culture can be remedied after the company grows; it's not a matter of sequence. Such companies can't fight tough battles and may collapse instantly when facing difficulties.
Second, make the best use of everyone's talents. My previous supervisor told me: employees are not wrong; they just haven't been placed in the right position. This means managers should know people well and use them well, manage the team with a service attitude, discover employees' strengths, and place them in suitable positions as much as possible.
**2. Transmitting Information**
As mentioned earlier, the core role of a middle manager is to bridge the gap, mainly by implementing the boss's decisions. This is divided into three steps: digest, transmit, and execute.
> Digest. Fully understand the decision, including background, purpose, goals, and all known information.
>
>
>
>
> Transmit. Turn the decision into executable strategies that are easy for employees to understand and execute.
>
>
>
>
> Execute. Push the project forward and take responsibility for the final result.
Let's use a simple example: the boss says to build a building at a certain location on a certain street. That's a decision. After receiving this instruction, the middle manager must first gather sufficient information, such as why build here, what it will be used for, when it should be completed, and any special requirements. This is the digestion phase.
After fully understanding the decision, the leader first formulates an execution strategy, including budget, architectural style, interior design, office facilities, etc., and also specifies the standards and process for hiring a construction team. Finally, these tasks are assigned to team members, ensuring everyone fully understands the project and knows the deadlines for each task. This is the transmission phase.
The previous steps are planning and preparation; the most important is execution. The leader must have project management skills, keep a close eye on each milestone, and participate in key steps that could affect success or failure. For example, the standards and process for hiring a construction team should be personally followed up. This is the execution phase.
Some friends might say that emphasizing the middle manager's role in transmitting the boss's decisions sounds like being a mouthpiece without their own opinions. Of course not. I believe the ultimate teamwork is like an army: execute unconditionally. The middle manager is also an execution link. First do the basic execution work well, then it's not too late to bring subjective value.
Moreover, major company decisions are always top-down. Even directors may not participate in all of them; most of the time, they are in a role of implementation. So, being a "mouthpiece" is the most basic value of a middle manager.
Besides transmitting decisions, it also includes transmitting pressure. This is a management method, often used in special periods, such as when the company is experiencing rapid growth or when it wants to rectify a team with low morale.
As discussed above, the middle manager should not directly relay the boss's exact words and tone, such as "If you can't do it, quit"—that certainly won't have a positive effect on employees. Instead, they should stand from the employees' perspective, use their language, and consider their interests. That's effective communication. It's not convenient to give specific examples, so I won't elaborate.
**3. Optimizing Processes**
A team is like a machine; all parts must work together to operate normally and orderly. If the team leader is seen as the machine's operator, then their duty is to reduce internal friction and improve efficiency.
The best solution is to establish and optimize process norms, aiming to keep the team running orderly and improve work efficiency. Common process norms include resource requests, product requirements, daily communication and reporting, etc. Each is essential and similar across companies. However, you can still find details to optimize based on actual conditions to improve efficiency.
For example, daily and weekly reports. The content can be streamlined to the extreme—just two or three sentences describing core progress. Detailed analysis is completely unnecessary. First, because everyone should already be familiar with daily work content and shouldn't rely on reports for information; second, important projects should have separate detailed analyses, not written in daily or weekly reports. You can give employees a template for weekly reports, noting which sections and data must be included.
Another example: promotion resource requests. You can list all site ad slots, define the content types, banner design, copy standards, timing, and landing page requirements for each slot, and make the application process and priority order public. Standardizing the process takes some effort, but once perfected, it can improve efficiency in work. Although the norms are complex, each department only needs to focus on what's relevant to them.
For establishing process norms, there are a few points to note:
1. Processes don't mean inefficiency.
Take traffic rules as an example. If they are reasonable, they can make traffic more orderly and efficient. Although stopping at red lights and yielding to straight traffic may seem to waste time, the total time spent doesn't actually increase. The same applies to work.
2. Continuous optimization is needed.
Process norms aren't built in a day. After all, there are many complex situations that you only encounter later. Initially, you can establish a rough norm, then continuously optimize based on real-world experience.
You should have this mindset: after solving a problem, think about whether the process norm has issues. If so, how to optimize; if there's no process norm, establish one as soon as possible.
3. Stick to execution.
Again, using traffic rules as an example, traffic police will definitely encounter violators asking for leniency. The same happens when enforcing work process norms. Chinese people value face and relationships more than process norms. As the rule maker, you must persist in enforcement. Only if you persist will others take it seriously.
**4. Solving Problems**
In operations, the norm is to follow long-term and short-term plans and process norms, gradually executing and observing results. These are all systematic. But in the internet industry, there are more unexpected, non-routine new problems every day, and they are very tricky. These problems are not anticipated, don't fit any existing process norms, fall into gray areas between departments, have no previous experience to reference, and are difficult to decide on.
These are the "pit-filling" or "bickering" tasks we often talk about, which everyone wants to avoid. But a key responsibility of a team leader is to handle such problems. After all, you're hired at a high salary and high level to solve problems.
To do this well, you need good communication skills and quick decision-making ability. Because there may be a dozen things to handle each day, spending too much time on them will affect progress on important work, which is not worth it. This problem cannot be solved at the root; you can only alleviate it. The specific method is as mentioned above: establish and optimize process norms.
That's all.
**Source: Operations Dog Work Diary (yunyingriji)**
Han Xu, ten years in operations. Experienced the hardships from 0 to 1 in startups, and the gameplay of massive users at Baidu. Currently at Maoyan Movie.
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