The average CEO joke about middle management lands with a nervous laugh.
Someone says, "Our strategies die in the frozen middle," and the room nods. Then everyone turns back to the deck, adds a few more initiatives, and quietly piles more weight on the same layer they just blamed.
Behind the joke is a real number. Research consistently shows that roughly 70% of strategic initiatives fail to deliver their intended results. The most common explanation is not that the strategy was wrong. It is that "the middle" did not execute.
This framing is convenient. It is also dangerously wrong.
The impossible job
Consider what a typical middle manager is actually asked to do.
They receive strategic direction from above, often in the form of high-level goals that need to be translated into concrete work. They manage a team with existing commitments, ongoing projects, and limited capacity. They are accountable for delivering results on the old priorities while simultaneously adopting the new ones. They attend meetings about the future while being measured on the present.
They are, in effect, asked to be translators, project managers, people leaders, change agents, and individual contributors, all simultaneously, with no additional resources and the implicit understanding that they should not complain about the workload.
When the strategy fails to execute, the diagnosis is almost always the same. "Middle management did not cascade effectively." What this really means is: we handed an impossible coordination problem to a layer of people who were already at capacity, gave them no tools to manage it, and then blamed them when it did not work.
Why middle managers freeze
The frozen middle is not a character flaw. It is a rational response to impossible conditions.
Information overload. Middle managers sit at the intersection of every information flow in the organisation. Strategy comes down. Operational issues come up. Cross-functional requests come sideways. Most middle managers receive more information in a week than they can meaningfully process. The natural response is to filter aggressively, which means some strategic signals get dropped. Not because managers do not care, but because they are triaging for survival.
Priority collision. When a new strategic initiative arrives, it rarely comes with a corresponding removal of existing work. The middle manager is told to "also do this." The maths does not work. A team with capacity for three major workstreams cannot absorb a fourth without either dropping something or doing everything poorly. Most managers choose to do everything poorly, because explicitly dropping work feels like insubordination.
Accountability without authority. Middle managers are accountable for strategic execution but often lack the authority to make the decisions required to execute. They cannot reallocate budget. They cannot hire. They often cannot even deprioritise existing work without approval from above. They are asked to drive change while sitting in a vehicle with no steering wheel.
Translation without context. The strategy arrives as a headline or a set of OKRs. The middle manager is expected to translate this into concrete work for their team. But they often lack the strategic context needed to make good translation decisions. They do not know the trade-offs the executive team considered. They do not know which parts of the strategy are flexible and which are non-negotiable. So they guess, and sometimes they guess wrong.
The structural failure
The frozen middle is not a people problem. It is an architecture problem.
The traditional organisational hierarchy was designed for a world where information moved slowly and decisions were made at the top. It assumes that each layer adds value by translating and specifying the direction from above. In practice, each layer adds latency, loses context, and creates a new opportunity for misinterpretation.
The alternative is not to eliminate middle management. That has been tried, and it produces its own pathologies. The alternative is to change the infrastructure around middle management.
Make strategic context visible to everyone. When a middle manager can see not just what they need to do but why, and can trace their team's work back to the company's strategic priorities, translation becomes much simpler. The guessing disappears. The context travels with the directive.
Make priority trade-offs explicit. When a new strategic initiative arrives, the system should show what it displaces. If a team does not have capacity for a new workstream, that should be visible before the initiative is assigned, not discovered six weeks later when deadlines start slipping.
Create feedback loops that bypass the hierarchy. The frozen middle is partly a symptom of slow feedback. By the time a middle manager reports that a strategy is not working at the frontline, weeks or months have passed. Faster feedback loops, where progress and blockers surface automatically, allow course correction before the freeze sets in.
Give middle managers the authority that matches their accountability. If someone is accountable for executing a strategy, they need the ability to make the operational decisions required to execute it. This does not mean unlimited authority. It means clearly defined decision rights that match the scope of their responsibility.
Thawing the middle
The frozen middle will not thaw because of better training or more motivational speeches. It will thaw when the organisation builds infrastructure that makes middle management's job possible.
That means visible strategy, explicit priorities, fast feedback, and matched authority. It means treating the cascade not as a communication exercise but as an engineering problem.
The middle is not frozen because it wants to be. It is frozen because the system around it was never designed for the load it now carries.
Fix the system, and the middle moves.
