The Loneliest Job in Any Organisation Is the One in the Middle

I moved into a team lead role at a financial services firm in Newcastle at 26 with a team of six below me and a senior manager above me and the confident expectation that the role would be broadly similar to what I had been doing but with additional scope.

The additional scope turned out to include something I had not modelled into my expectations: the specific experience of being the translation layer between two groups with different and sometimes competing interests, with loyalty expected in both directions and support reliably available in neither.

My team needed direction, development, protection from pressures that came from above, and the kind of consistent presence that sustained people through difficult periods. My senior management needed delivery, compliance with direction, upward communication that was appropriately positive, and the kind of smooth execution that made their own reporting straightforward.

When the interests of these two groups aligned, which they often did, my job was to facilitate that alignment. When they diverged, which happened with enough regularity to be instructive, my job required a navigation that nobody had prepared me for.

I had a team member whose performance was struggling in ways that were at least partly attributable to workload decisions that had come from above me. Managing the situation required me to be honest with her about what I could and could not change, honest with my manager about the contributing factors without it reading as blame, and honest with myself about the degree to which I was able to protect my team versus the degree to which I was colluding with conditions that were making their work harder.

I had a period where a strategic direction came down from leadership that I privately disagreed with and had to communicate to my team in a way that did not undermine either the direction or my own credibility.

The gymnastics of that communication were exhausting and felt dishonest in a way I had to sit with carefully. At 29, having moved through and then out of the role, I understand middle management as its own discipline - not a transitional phase but a specific skill set that requires a capacity for ambiguity, a tolerance for competing accountabilities, and a clarity about your own values that the pressures of the role will test continuously.

Nobody told me that going in. I tell anyone I can now.