How Middle Management Can Drive Your Business Into the Ground Neglecting your middle managers, who often oversee the majority of employees in an organization, can lead to trouble. Here's how to keep things on the right track.

A lot of time is spent analyzing leadership and its effects on corporate performance. Leadership at the top is important for direction and vision, but it's the middle that makes up the majority of the organization and can have the biggest impact on the day-to-day work. It's also the middle management that receives the least amount of scrutiny. Companies tend to keep the closest eye on entry-level employees and those at the top of the org chart, but bad behavior of people in between can go unnoticed.

Why watching the middle matters

There are close to 11 million people in the U.S. working in nonexecutive middle-management roles. From a numbers perspective, that's a lot of people — and it represents the backbone of many organizations. Since these aren't the green talent, the assumption is that they have some experience and know-how to do their jobs. However, this may not actually be the case.