Stop treating managers like corporate postboxes

18 Jun

Every time there’s a major announcement, a policy change, or an organisational pivot, the corporate playbook says to do the exact same thing: draft a massive, jargon-heavy script and tell middle managers to cascade it down to their teams.

Whyyyy are we still doing this? The manager cascade is an age-old corporate habit, and honestly, it’s not hard to guess why leadership teams still cling to it. It feels safe, and it allows the executives to say communication is complete without doing the hard work of engaging people. It’s cheap, it’s familiar, and it expects managers to instinctively know how to handle the message - even though the system rarely gives them the proper training, the right context, or the time to actually do it.

We’ve been treating managers like organisational postboxes since I joined the industry 15 years ago - piling a stack of mail on their desks and expecting them to deliver it flawlessly. The problem is, nobody is checking to see if the postbox is already overflowing.

According to the latest Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report, manager engagement has plummeted nine percentage points since 2022, dropping to a dismal 22%. If you are relying on an exhausted, disengaged middle tier to be your primary communication broadcast channel, you should know that your message probably isn't getting cascaded, because it’s buried.

The ultimate shock absorbers

For years, managers have been forced to act as the ultimate organisational shock absorbers. And let’s be honest about why: they are completely overloaded, under-resourced, and deeply unsupported.

When a brilliant individual contributor gets promoted to manager, organisations rarely give them the tools or the backing to delegate their old workload. They are still stuck doing their original day job, only now they have a team to run, too.

Then, instead of getting a targeted, specific briefing on how a piece of corporate news affects their specific department, managers see the update at the exact same time as everyone else on an open channel, and they are blindsided. They haven't been given the context, they haven't been briefed on what their team might actually care about, and they have no answers for the inevitable questions that are about to come flying at them.

The capability domino effect

The reality is that we treat communication and leadership like personality traits rather than professional skills. We expect managers to be instinctively good at it, but we only ever talk about communication when they aren't doing it well.

Think about it: when people become managers, are they given clear expectations around communication? Do they get proper training on how to delegate, how to brief a team, or how to translate macro corporate goals into micro team realities? Rarely. They are expected to decipher complex strategies without ever being shown what good actually looks like.

But this problem ladders all the way up to the top too.

The reason leadership teams fail to brief managers properly isn’t deliberate - it’s because they aren't equipped either. Organisations tend to assume that because someone is senior, they automatically possess leadership and communication capability.

If executives aren't clear on what a strategic shift actually means in practice, they can't brief directors. If directors aren't briefed, they can't equip managers. The system fails from the top down, costing businesses massive productivity - part of a staggering $10 trillion global loss highlighted by Gallup.

Empowering managers

If the traditional cascade model is dead, we need to build a structure that actually supports the people we task with delivering the message. That means shifting from a broadcast mindset to an actual empowerment model.

Here is how you fix it:

Ditch the scripts, give them huddle notes: Give managers three actionable bullet points designed for a quick, 5-minute team standup. If they can’t digest it in 60 seconds, they won't pass it on.
Show them what good looks like: Give managers targeted, specific briefings before the business-wide launch so they can anticipate what their specific teams will care about and ask.
Use direct channels for the big broadcasts: Use your direct-to-frontline systems (intranet, all-hands, video updates) for the heavy lifting. Let the corporate message come from the corporate source.
Retrain them to listen, not shout: Shift manager roles from delivering the news to capturing frontline sentiment and feeding it back up the chain. The most valuable thing a manager can do during times of change isn't speaking - it's listening.

Your managers were hired to lead, coach, and support their people, not to act as a human routing system for internal memos.

If you want your communication to be properly absorbed by the frontline, change the infrastructure. Stop handing scripts to people who don't have the bandwidth to read them, and start giving them the training, the briefings, and the tools to actually manage.

Need a hand with this? You know where we are.