There’s a strange credibility problem built into middle management.
The things that make a manager credible with the people above them are not always the same things that make them credible with the people below them.
Upward, managers are often rewarded for being composed. Know what’s happening. Understand the numbers. Bring some clarity. If there’s a problem, have a sense of what might be done about it.
That all makes sense.
But downward, credibility can work almost exactly the opposite way. Teams tend to trust managers who are willing to be candid about what they know and what they don’t, who acknowledge when something isn’t working, and who don’t pretend to have answers they simply don’t have yet.
So managers end up taking two different credibility tests at the same time.
Composed going up. Candid going down.
Neither expectation is unreasonable on its own. The challenge is what happens when they collide.
Imagine a change gets announced that your team immediately dislikes. You understand some of the reasoning behind it, but not all of it. You can already see a few problems leadership may not have anticipated, and your employees are looking to you to make sense of something you didn’t decide.
What exactly does credibility look like in that moment?
If you push too hard upward, you risk being seen as resistant, negative, or unable to manage your team through change. If you simply carry the message downward, you risk becoming a mouthpiece for leadership and losing credibility with the people you actually have to lead every day.
Managers learn to navigate this pretty quickly.
And one of the most interesting ways they do it is through a tiny word:
They.
Talking upward, it might sound like, “They’re really frustrated about this.”
Talking downward, it becomes, “They’ve decided this is the direction we’re going.”
See what happened?
In both cases, the manager has quietly stepped outside of the group they’re talking about.
It’s actually a pretty rational move. “They” creates a little distance between the manager and the frustration coming from below. It can also create distance between the manager and the unpopular decision coming from above.
That distance buys a little safety.
But it costs something, too.
Because if a manager is always “we” with leadership when talking upward and “we” with the team when talking downward, eventually someone is going to notice the inconsistency. And if the manager protects themselves by becoming “they” in both directions, they can end up belonging fully to neither.
That’s the credibility squeeze.
I don’t think the answer is asking managers to choose a side. In fact, that’s exactly the trap.
Their value comes from occupying the middle well.
A strong manager should be able to sit with a team and say, “I understand why this is frustrating. Here’s what I know about why we’re doing it, here’s what I don’t know yet, and here’s what I’m going to carry back.”
Then they should be able to walk into the other room and say, “Here’s what we’re seeing. I understand what we’re trying to accomplish, and there’s something happening on the ground that I think we need to pay attention to.”
Same manager.
Same organization.
Still part of we in both rooms.
I think we underestimate how sophisticated that kind of leadership actually is. It requires judgment, trust, translation, and the ability to hold tension without immediately resolving it by picking a side.
And maybe that’s another reason the middle gets muted.
Sometimes silence isn’t the absence of something to say.
Sometimes silence is what happens when saying the wrong thing in either direction feels more expensive than saying nothing at all.
I explore this and other middle management challenges in our newest training: Accelerant Manager.
