When Your Best Middle Managers Are Quietly Looking for the Exit
Your senior leaders think they’re developing people. Your middle managers feel ignored and undervalued. Executive coaching can close that gap, but most organisations deploy it far too narrowly. Strickland & Martins, in ‘Executive coaching: A strategic tool for retaining talent and bridging the senior–middle leadership gap’, published in SA Journal of Human Resource Management in 2026, show exactly how much that misdeployment costs.
Executive Coaching and the Senior–Middle Leadership Gap
The researchers studied a South African civil engineering firm facing post-COVID disruption and the pressures of rapid technological change. They used a qualitative case-study design informed by participatory action research. Their sample included senior executives and middle-level managers across different age cohorts, career stages, and professional backgrounds.
The findings are pointed. Middle managers reported feeling disconnected from senior leadership. They described a culture where decisions arrived from above without context or dialogue. Senior leaders, meanwhile, believed they were communicating clearly. The coaching intervention revealed that emotionally intelligent behaviours, specifically active listening and perspective-taking, were present in senior leaders in theory but absent in daily practice. After coaching, participants reported measurably stronger working relationships and reduced intent to leave. One middle manager described the shift as moving from feeling managed to feeling led.
Applying These Findings in Your Organisation
The practical implication is uncomfortable for most boards. Executive coaching is routinely reserved for C-suite executives. It’s treated as a perk or a remediation tool. This research argues it should function as a retention mechanism aimed at the senior-to-middle interface. Consider what Arup, the global engineering consultancy, does well. Senior partners are expected to spend structured time in coaching conversations with associates, not just performance reviews. The distinction matters. A coaching conversation is exploratory. A performance review is evaluative. Mixing the two kills psychological safety. Equally, Deloitte’s 2024 restructuring of its leadership academy shifted coaching hours toward senior directors specifically to improve retention of high-potential managers at the principal level. The retention data improved within 18 months. The lesson from Strickland and Martins is that coaching works best when it’s emotionally informed. That means coaching senior leaders on how they listen, not just on what they decide. A senior leader who learns to name their own emotional state in a difficult conversation changes the entire relational dynamic below them.
What This Research Cannot Tell You
The study draws on a single organisation in one sector and one country. Findings from a South African engineering firm may not transfer directly to, say, a European financial services business with different cultural norms around hierarchy and emotional expression. The qualitative method captures depth but not scale, so treat the findings as a strong hypothesis worth testing in your own context rather than a universal prescription.
I keep coming back to the phrase one middle manager used in this study: moving from feeling managed to feeling led. It’s a small distinction in language and an enormous one in experience. I think most senior leaders genuinely believe they’re doing the latter. The evidence here suggests they’re often doing the former, and that the gap is costing them their best people.
If you were to ask your top five middle managers today whether they feel managed or led, what do you think they would say?
Image: Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
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