CWA Blog Archive-Middle Management In Indoor Climbing Gyms Strategies For Success

Middle Management In Indoor Climbing Gyms Strategies For Success

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Ashley Routson tackles middle management, a notoriously difficult and stressful role in any industry, because you're always caught in the middle. You supervise but need supervision, people report to you while you report to others, you have some control but not all, some decision authority but often need permission, some answers but never all of them. She calls middle managers ping-pong balls, bouncing between leader and follower, managing the demands and complaints of those above and below, a position that can be frustrating, exhausting, and a path to burnout. The article makes clear how central these roles are: most day-to-day gym operations are controlled by middle management. And it's rarely a single tier. The bigger the gym, the more likely multiple tiers of middle management exist, and the more programs, departments, and locations a company has, the more layers pile up, a real complexity for multi-gym operations. Writing from her own experience as a general manager, Routson explores both the sociology of how gyms manage their middle managers and concrete strategies that have worked. The piece is aimed at middle managers themselves and the senior managers who oversee them. Its throughline is that middle management's difficulty is structural, not a personal failing, and that recognizing the peculiar pressures of being permanently in between is the first step to supporting these employees. Because they run daily operations, keeping middle managers effective and unburned-out is directly tied to gym performance. Routson connects the piece to the CWA's 5 Employee Recognition Hacks as a complementary resource, reinforcing that acknowledging and supporting the people stuck in the middle isn't a nicety but an operational necessity for any gym that depends on them to function.

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Ashley Routson on middle management, structurally stressful because you're always caught between supervising and being supervised, deciding and needing permission. Yet middle managers run daily gym operations, often across multiple tiers. Drawing on her GM experience, she offers strategies and frames their difficulty as structural, not personal, deserving real support.