Seven starting points for when you feel caught between team and senior leadership, with insights from research and from my coaching practice.
A coachee recently described his feeling in middle management to me like this: he leads his team, motivates it, solves problems, and at the same time has to meet the expectations of senior leadership, who, for example, stop a project that has been running for months just before launch, or start emailing customers directly again themselves, even though that was actually the team's job. This feeling of being pulled from two sides at once, and ground down in the process, is not an isolated case.
A study by Perceptyx puts this in sharper focus. 39 percent of leaders report rising pressure from senior leadership, 37 percent rising pressure from their own team, an almost even split. This exact squeeze is what many coachees in middle management describe when they talk about their everyday work.
This strain is not a side issue. Gallup has shown for years that leaders account for roughly 70 percent of the variance in their teams' engagement. So how you are doing in middle management directly affects your whole team, not just you.
The seven starting points below will help you regain room to maneuver out of the squeeze. Each one combines a short piece of context with concrete steps and a reflection question for you.
Why it matters: As long as pressure from two directions stays unnamed, it feels like personal failure. It is actually a structural pattern that most middle managers recognize.
Reflection question: How much of my current exhaustion actually comes from the task, and how much from the position in between?
Why it matters: Middle managers usually communicate intensively downward, but rarely actively upward. Anyone who does not clearly state expectations to senior leadership stays a pure recipient of decisions.
Reflection question: When did I last actively tell senior leadership what I need, instead of just delivering?
Why it matters: When senior leadership steps in on short notice or gets operational itself, middle managers end up caught between the fronts. How they frame that for the team decides the team's trust.
Reflection question: How do I talk to my team about decisions from senior leadership that I myself do not understand?
Why it matters: Only 19 percent of leaders show strong delegation skills, according to DDI. Under pressure, many middle managers pull tasks toward themselves at exactly the moment they most urgently need to hand them off.
Reflection question: Where do I behave just like the senior leadership I sometimes criticize?
Why it matters: The Microsoft Work Trend Index 2025 shows that leaders spend a disproportionate share of their time in meetings and administration, leaving correspondingly less capacity for coaching and strategic thinking.
Reflection question: How much of my week goes into meetings and administration, and how much into actually leading my team?
Why it matters: 71 percent of leaders report noticeably higher stress, according to DDI, and for middle managers, uncertainty about the future of their own position often comes on top of that.
Reflection question: When did I last admit to myself that the double burden is wearing me out?
Why it matters: Leaders account for roughly 70 percent of the variance in their teams' engagement, according to Gallup. Your own pressure, passed downward unfiltered, hits the whole team.
Reflection question: What is my team currently sensing of my own pressure, without me saying it out loud?
The following four patterns show up in leadership research as well as in my own coaching practice, again and again with leaders in middle management.
Just as interventions from above undermine middle management's trust, unfiltered frustration passed downward undermines the trust of your own team. The mechanism is the same, just one level down.
Only 19 percent show strong delegation skills, according to DDI. Anyone who tries to absorb pressure from above and below alone becomes the bottleneck themselves.
Staying silent with senior leadership lets misunderstandings grow instead of clearing them up early. Managing up is a skill that can be actively trained.
71 percent report noticeably higher stress, according to DDI. Many middle managers wait too long before getting support.
This guide gives you structure for everyday work in middle management. Even so, some questions are easier to work through in conversation than alone on paper, especially when it comes to your own room to maneuver.
In a no-obligation introductory call, we look together at your current situation in middle management and work out whether coaching is the right next step for you.
Since 2020, I have supported leaders in one-on-one and group coaching on their way to more clarity and room to maneuver in their role.
Book an intro callI have been Managing Director of BGM³ GmbH since 2017, and since 2020 I have also worked as a coach for leaders, in one-on-one and group coaching. As an NLP Practitioner, NLP Master and NLP HypnoCoach, I combine psychologically grounded methods with practical experience from running my own company. As a coach, mentor and Managing Director of the CoA Leadership Academy, I have supported numerous leaders through one-on-one and group coaching as well as mentoring, many of them in middle management, in exactly the squeeze this guide describes.