Cometh the hour, cometh the manager. While chief executives and their coterie are in emergency board meetings, drafting crisis directives, or reassuring panic-stricken investors, coronavirus is testing underrated, overburdened, oft-maligned middle managers as never before.
Some will emerge as heroes. Not that they will receive the acclaim. Public credit for getting through the crisis is likely to accrue to their superiors, as it almost always does.
This is not to underplay the influence and importance of good leadership. But much of the strain of interpreting the uncertainty for worried staff is falling to managers, at a time when their own jobs, health, families, and financial security are under threat. Managers are also taking the operational decisions on which national, not just corporate, welfare depends, from overseeing the restocking of supermarket shelves to ensuring the supply of face-masks for healthcare workers. “There’s definitely a view at the moment that we cannot manage without managers,” one NHS hospital doctor told me last week.