Middle Managers Upgrade Skills To Land Jobs Corporations Seek Team Players Who Can Adapt, Communicate Well

Judging from the layoffs of the last several years, you might think the middle manager has gone the way of tyrannosaurus Rex and the slide rule.

Not so. In fact, recent government and industry data show an upswing in hiring.

But the middle manager most in demand is an evolved species, shaped to fit leaner organizations and tougher competition, headhunters and labor experts say. Ideal candidates have more than one area of expertise and at least a nodding acquaintance with information technology. They work well in teams.

“It’s not just knowing my own job and information technology. It’s knowing my job, somebody else’s job and information technology,” said Eric Greenberg, director of management studies for the American Management Association.

“I’m talking about a marketing manager who knows about manufacturing, a manufacturing manager who also knows about purchasing and a purchasing manager who also knows information technology. … It’s the business equivalent of a double major in college,” Greenberg said.

A survey of about 2,000 hiring executives by Cleveland-based Management Recruiters International shows projected 1995 demand for professional and middle management staff at its highest since 1984.

Government data show a similar trend. Unemployment in the broad managerial and professional category was 2.1 percent in May, down considerably from a high of 3.7 percent in August 1992 and approaching a six-year low of 1.8 percent during spring 1989.

Ed Nalley, president of Executive Search International in Plano, Texas, said his business of recruiting sales and marketing managers for consumer products companies is up “about 50 percent from last year all across the country.”

That’s not to say layoffs aren’t continuing. Middle managers remain a prime target, especially when the corporate aim is to flatten bureaucracies or when entire functions are automated or farmed out to another firm.

But slimmed-down organizations are growing again, and they want a different kind of manager who can lead teams that cut across departmental lines, recruiters and business consultants said.

“They have to have experience in a variety of areas, and of course those people are hard to find,” said John Slocum, professor at Southern Methodist University’s Edwin L. Cox School of Business. Traditionally, managers had all their experience in a narrow “silo,” or departmental band such as marketing or accounting.

Mark Flynn, director of sales development for Johnson & Johnson in Dallas, said there are too many factors involved in selling the products that line today’s grocery and drugstore shelves to rely on narrow sales expertise in a manager.

“It’s not just the deal that makes the product sell. It’s the packaging, the size, the price point. And you have consumer demographics for example, the Hispanic market in Texas,” Flynn said. “The traditional sales manager isn’t making it in today’s world.”

Flynn started in retail sales, moved into sales management and then took a job at corporate headquarters in marketing and special projects before being promoted to his current post. Although Flynn is 32, new management isn’t a euphemism for young management although sometimes it turns out that way, recruiters said.

Consider Sam Hughes, a 49-year-old recruited two years ago to manage GenCorp’s plant in Shelbyville, Ind. He had been laid off when Weber Aircraft in Gainesville, Texas, was bought by French conglomerate Zodiac.

Hughes, who spent 17 years at Texas Instruments Inc. in circuit board manufacturing, broadened his skills by learning total quality management and managing self-directed work teams then applying them in different industries.

Two years after GenCorp hired him and $3 million in cost savings on quality alone, Hughes is president of GenCorp’s reinforced plastic division. The middle managers under him have vastly different job descriptions than in past years, he said.

They must be, above all, “great communicators, able to give a clear definition of what they want and have the ability to measure whether they’re getting it or not,” Hughes said.

To Sandi Taylor, a Dallas recruiter who found Hughes for Gencorp, the lesson is simple.

“The top-notch candidates have stayed up-to-date,” she said.