According to Gallup, managers account for about 70% of the variance in their teams’ engagement. How committed people are in an organization depends mostly on their direct boss. In practice, middle managers are the ones really responsible for engagement and for whether people stay, whatever their job title says.
Nobody experiences a company’s strategy in the abstract. They experience it through the person who hands them their work, makes clear what is expected, notices what they do well and helps them grow. It works like teachers: a good teacher brings a subject to life, a bad one can kill your interest in something you used to enjoy. A middle manager does more than carry out the strategy. They decide how it feels day to day: whether the work is clear or confusing, whether it gives energy or drains it. They also set the emotional climate of the team, because moods are contagious. Celebrating small wins keeps motivation up and builds a culture of recognition.
What the role asks for is mostly relational: trust built on keeping your word and on a real interest in each person, influence instead of orders, and the ability to turn strategy into concrete questions for the team, with enough safety that everyone dares to speak up.
This is the part that tends to get missed. Many organizations treat their middle managers as a purely operational function. They load them with reports and follow-ups and train them in processes and metrics. That leaves the strongest lever they have unused, and the problem cascades down: only a minority of managers feel engaged themselves, and a disengaged manager passes that on to the people below. So taking care of middle managers starts at the top. Training them in relationships takes more than a one-off course: it needs ongoing support, and explicit permission from leadership to spend time on people as well as on numbers.