Flattened, unbossed, indispensable: The new middle manager

Middle managers have long carried a difficult role: translating senior leadership priorities into work teams can act on, while supporting the people responsible for delivering it. Yet as companies flatten structures, introduce AI, and reduce entry-level hiring, more work is falling to fewer people in the middle – often with fewer colleagues to whom they can delegate.

In this edition of ESMT Insight Hour, , lecturer in leadership at ESMT Berlin, will examine how the middle manager’s role is changing and what remains indispensable. Drawing on her research and work with leaders across industries, she will discuss where middle managers create value that flatter structures and AI cannot replace: translating strategy into the context their teams actually operate in, exercising judgment, and developing people.

The session will offer a practical view of what this shift means for people in middle-management roles: which parts of the old job to leave behind, which capabilities to build, and how to reshape their day-to-day leadership practice.

The session will be moderated by , director of executive education, ESMT Berlin.

is a lecturer in leadership at ESMT Berlin. Her teaching, speaking, and research concentrate on the moments when leadership gets hardest: stepping into a new role, holding a team together across organizational boundaries, and getting genuine collaboration out of a screen. She is known for putting executives inside the problem rather than in front of a slide deck, treating enactments, simulations, and escape games as serious instruments of learning. Grasselli has spent fourteen years designing and delivering leadership programs for Mercedes-Benz, Allianz, thyssenkrupp, the European Central Bank, and the InterAcademy Partnership’s Young Physician Leaders program.

She edited “The future of executive education: Learning leadership in a digital age” (2023) and writes regularly for Forbes on hybrid teams, remote leadership, and the return-to-office question. Her research has appeared in MIT Sloan Management Review and Organization Studies, and her case studies are distributed through Harvard Business Publishing. She holds a PhD from HEC Paris, taught for six years on the joint HEC Paris and Oxford Saïd executive master’s in Consulting and Coaching for Change, and was a strategy consultant at the Boston Consulting Group.

is director of executive education at ESMT Berlin, where she has led the school’s executive programs since 2022 and has worked since 2019. She spent the previous eight years at Gallup, rising to head of consulting for Germany, advising organizations on employee engagement and strengths-based leadership development. Her work centers on what makes a leadership program actually change how people work once they return to their desks, a question she takes up in her chapter on individualized learning in “The future of executive education: Learning leadership in a digital age” (2023). She holds an MSc in management and strategy from the London School of Economics.

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ESMT Berlin, Schloßplatz 1, Berlin, Germany

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