By Abdulaziz AlSmairi

The full potential of Kuwait cannot be unlocked through middle managers chosen strictly for their seniority. It is a near impossibility to expect the creation of a qualified and cohesive management team through promotions driven by seniority instead of merit. Middle management is responsible for translating the leadership’s broad strategies and directions into actionable items for the operational staff to implement.

It is imperative for them to be able to understand their role as a cog in a much larger machine and to exercise their authority in the most productive way possible. A middle manager’s responsibility classically lies in facilitating the communication of the leadership’s goals from the top to the bottom of the pyramid. However, it is equally important for the middle manager to communicate in the opposite direction the realities faced by the operational staff in the form of business cases. These business cases act as a reality check for the leadership’s directions.

The practice of drafting a business case requires an analytical mindset that can identify a problem, collect the relevant data and come up with a feasible conclusion. As such, seniority is not a prerequisite to analysis. The most senior person may be the most familiar with the procedure but may not be the best to develop and streamline it.

The government’s reality is a middle management that is notorious for being procedure- rather than productivity-driven. This managerial mindset has created rigid organizations that focus on bureaucracy, resistance to change, ineffective communication and a gross lack of accountability. The leadership is significantly challenged by middle managers who act as independent entities separate from their organizational goals and purposes. A middle manager’s inability to look beyond the daily procedure results in a lack of innovation and business development, poor planning for future growth and counterproductive engagement with operational staff.

The symptoms of the crisis in middle management are well documented and were most recently showcased by Kuwait’s inability to host a football match without resulting in a PR and geopolitical nightmare. The middle management responsible for the event blatantly failed in the planning phase and could not account for all the necessary stakeholders and related factors to succeed.

Moreover, on a broader scale, the Kuwaiti government has been unable to perform the most ordinary of managerial tasks which is to set a budget in time, to accurately forecast project timelines and to prepare a line of qualified successors for organizations that have been in operation for over five decades. The leadership has been overwhelmed by a growing and overstaffed organizational structure with significant overlaps in responsibilities and no clear path forward. The leadership’s delegations to middle management to map the issues and escalate them accordingly with sound business acumen and data supported evidence have been less than productive.

Given that Kuwait has no niche problems, the solutions are abundant and readily available. The crisis can be averted by selecting middle managers who are bold enough to exercise their given authority, to evaluate them based on measurable metrics and to set up a framework for data driven decisions. The fundamental role of a middle manager is to exercise judgment and be held accountable for it. Without a sophisticated infrastructure of systems to support data-driven decision-making, the role of middle management is exaggerated, as it is the channel of communication between the employees and the leadership.

The disconnect between the goals set by the leadership and the realities faced by the operational staff can only attributed to the middle management’s failure as the sole means and channel for planning, business development and establishment of accountability. The way towards genuine reform starts with the development of a clear and measurable strategy and the selection of a qualified team able to implement it. Only then can we observe thoroughly assessed decisions by the leadership instead of across-the-board solutions.