CWA Blog Archive-Managing Middle Management

Managing Middle Management

Pdf Summary

This article examines the challenges of middle management in gyms and how to support these pivotal roles. It opens by acknowledging that anyone who has held a General Manager or similar title knows the word general can be a blessing and a curse. Middle management holds some of the hardest roles in the industry, catering to those above while supporting those below, constantly balancing. The work is ever-changing, regularly exciting, often tedious, and, crucially, more often misunderstood by both sides, above and below. The key, the author argues, is finding a balance of empowerment, ownership, and accountability so that all levels of leadership stay appropriately engaged and informed. A central pain point is the unclear nature of decision-making approvals, especially in matrix organizational structures where leaders have multiple supervisors, typically one direct and one or more indirect. Even with direct reporting, identifying who actually makes a given decision can be difficult and time-consuming. The article illustrates the breadth of a typical gym GM's responsibilities, operations, retail, marketing, events, fitness, and yoga, and notes each of those areas may have one or more senior or corporate leaders with their own idea of what good looks like. This creates the core tension: too much oversight leads to micromanaging, while too little leads to chaos. Finding the right level of oversight and clarity about who decides what is the essential challenge. The throughline is that middle managers occupy a structurally difficult position, sprawling responsibilities across many functions, multiple bosses in matrix structures, unclear decision authority, and constant pressure from both directions, and that supporting them requires deliberately balancing empowerment with accountability and clarifying decision-making. Because GMs run so much of daily operations while being misunderstood and pulled in many directions, organizations that clarify approval authority, avoid both micromanaging and neglect, and give middle managers appropriate empowerment and ownership will keep these critical leaders engaged and effective. For gyms, the article argues that managing middle management well, providing clarity, balance, and support, is essential to organizational health, since these are the people holding the whole operation together.

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This piece examines middle management's structural difficulty in gyms: GMs juggle operations, retail, marketing, events, and more, often under multiple bosses in matrix structures with unclear decision authority, misunderstood from both directions. Supporting them requires balancing empowerment with accountability and clarifying who decides what, avoiding both micromanaging and chaos.