The Forgotten Middle: Why Your Nonprofit’s Middle Managers Need Coaching Too

There’s a pattern I’ve noticed across dozens of nonprofit organizations that keeps me up at night. Executive directors invest heavily in their own development. They send emerging leaders to conferences and training programs. But somewhere in between, there’s a group of people holding everything together who rarely get the support they desperately need.

I’m talking about your middle managers.

These are the program directors, department heads, and team leads who translate your strategic vision into daily reality. They’re managing up to you, managing down to their teams, and managing sideways across departments—often simultaneously, and often without anyone asking how they’re doing.

When I work with nonprofit leaders who are struggling with organizational performance, the conversation almost always circles back to the same place: middle management is stretched thin, burning out, and wondering if anyone notices.

The Unique Pressure Cooker of Nonprofit Middle Management

Middle management in any sector is demanding. But nonprofit middle managers face a particular kind of pressure that their corporate counterparts rarely experience.

Consider what we’re asking of them. They’re expected to maintain program quality with shrinking budgets. They translate board priorities they weren’t part of setting into operational plans. They absorb the emotional weight of mission-driven work while shielding both their teams and their executive directors from unnecessary stress. And they do all of this while often earning less than they would in equivalent corporate roles.

Research from Harvard Business Review confirms what I’ve observed in practice: middle management development is essential to helping organizations navigate rapid, complex change. Middle managers are positioned close enough to the ground to understand operational realities, but high enough to see strategic connections. They’re the glue holding teams and enterprises together.

Yet in most nonprofits, middle managers exist in a development desert. The executive director gets coaching. New hires get onboarding. But the people in the middle? They’re expected to figure it out through osmosis.

The cruelest irony in nonprofit leadership: we invest least in the people responsible for making our biggest investments work.

Two Failure Patterns That Keep Middle Managers Stuck

After working with organizations across the nonprofit sector, I’ve identified two patterns that consistently undermine middle management effectiveness.

The Forgotten Middle

This is exactly what it sounds like. All development resources flow to senior leadership or emerging talent, while middle managers receive nothing. Organizations assume that because someone was promoted to management, they must already know how to manage.

This assumption is almost always wrong. Being excellent at program delivery doesn’t automatically translate to being excellent at developing others, navigating conflict, or thinking strategically while maintaining operations. These are entirely different skill sets that require intentional development.

The Forgotten Middle pattern creates a vicious cycle. Underdeveloped managers struggle, which creates more work for executive directors, who then have even less time to invest in developing their managers. Everyone gets more stressed, performance suffers, and talented people leave for organizations that will invest in their growth.

The Competence Without Confidence Trap

The second pattern is more subtle but equally damaging. Some middle managers have developed real skills through experience and self-directed learning. They can run effective meetings, manage projects, and handle most operational challenges.

But they lack something equally important: a leadership identity.

They still see themselves as individual contributors who happen to have people reporting to them. They hesitate to make decisions they’re fully capable of making. They defer to their executive director on matters they should own. They struggle to hold their teams accountable because they don’t feel entitled to lead.

This competence-without-confidence gap can’t be closed through training alone. It requires the kind of reflective, developmental work that coaching provides—space to examine assumptions, build self-awareness, and consciously step into a leadership identity.

Core Competencies for Middle Manager Success

Before we can develop middle managers effectively, we need clarity on what we’re developing them toward. Based on my experience coaching in nonprofit contexts, four competencies consistently distinguish effective middle managers from those who struggle.

Delegation that develops. Many middle managers were promoted because they were excellent doers. The transition to leading requires a fundamental shift: success now comes through others. Effective delegation isn’t just about getting tasks off your plate—it’s about growing your team’s capabilities while maintaining quality. For nonprofit middle managers working with limited staff, this is especially critical. You can’t do everything yourself, and you can’t afford to delegate in ways that create more problems than they solve.

Team development under constraints. Corporate managers can often throw resources at development—external training, conferences, stretch assignments. Nonprofit middle managers must be more creative. They need skills in coaching their direct reports, creating peer learning opportunities, and turning everyday work into developmental experiences. The essential development areas for leaders include strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, communication, and adaptability—all of which middle managers must both develop in themselves and cultivate in their teams.

Resource optimization. This goes beyond budgeting. Nonprofit middle managers must constantly balance competing priorities with insufficient resources. They need frameworks for making difficult trade-off decisions, skills in advocating for resources without appearing negative, and the resilience to maintain team morale when they can’t get what they asked for.

Stakeholder management. Middle managers sit at a crucial intersection. They must maintain productive relationships upward (with their executive director and sometimes board members), downward (with their teams), and sideways (with peer departments and external partners). This requires emotional intelligence, political awareness, and communication skills that many technical experts never developed.

The Coaching Approach for Middle Managers

So how do we actually develop these competencies? The approach that works best combines two elements: skill building and confidence development.

Skill building addresses the practical gaps. Many middle managers have never been taught how to run a one-on-one meeting, give difficult feedback, or facilitate a strategic planning session. They need models, frameworks, and practice opportunities with real-time feedback.

Confidence development addresses the identity gap. This is where coaching becomes essential. Through reflective conversation with a skilled coach, middle managers can examine their assumptions about leadership, process their experiences, and consciously choose how they want to show up as leaders.

The combination matters. Skills without confidence creates hesitant leaders who know what to do but can’t bring themselves to do it. Confidence without skills creates leaders who charge ahead without the tools to succeed. Effective middle manager development addresses both.

Skill tells you what to do. Confidence gives you permission to do it. Middle managers need both.

Managing Former Peers: The Transition Nobody Talks About

One of the most challenging aspects of nonprofit middle management rarely appears in leadership books: the transition from peer to supervisor.

In many nonprofits, middle managers are promoted from within. Yesterday you were grabbing coffee with colleagues and commiserating about organizational frustrations. Today you’re their supervisor, responsible for their performance evaluations and career development.

This transition is genuinely difficult, and managing former peers requires intentional navigation. The relationships will change—that’s inevitable. The question is whether they change in ways that serve everyone or in ways that create lasting damage.

Common pitfalls include:

• Overcompensating with authority. Some new managers distance themselves so dramatically from former peers that they destroy trust and create resentment.
• Pretending nothing changed. Others try to maintain the exact same relationships, which undermines their authority and creates confusion about boundaries.
• Avoiding difficult conversations. Former friendships make it harder to address performance issues, leading to problems that compound over time.

Coaching provides a confidential space to work through these relationship challenges. A skilled coach can help middle managers find their authentic leadership style—one that honors existing relationships while stepping into new responsibilities.

Group Coaching: A Model for Resource-Constrained Nonprofits

Individual coaching is powerful, but let’s be realistic: most nonprofits can’t afford individual coaching for every middle manager. This is where group coaching for managers becomes essential.

Group coaching brings together cohorts of middle managers—either from within a single organization or across multiple nonprofits—for structured developmental experiences. The format combines the personalized development of coaching with the peer learning benefits of community.

Effective group coaching models typically include:

Peer coaching circles. Small groups of middle managers who meet regularly to support each other’s development. With proper training and facilitation, these circles can provide ongoing support at minimal cost.

Cohort-based programs. Structured learning experiences that combine teaching, practice, and coached reflection. Participants learn alongside peers facing similar challenges, which normalizes struggles and accelerates learning through shared experience.

Action learning groups. Peers work together on real organizational challenges, with coaching support to facilitate learning. This approach develops skills while producing tangible organizational benefits.

The peer learning element is particularly valuable for middle managers. Remember that isolation we discussed? Group coaching directly addresses it. Participants discover they’re not alone in their struggles, learn from each other’s experiments, and build support networks that extend beyond the formal program.

Building Strategic Thinking While Maintaining Operations

One of the trickiest developmental challenges for middle managers is learning to think strategically while remaining operationally effective. This isn’t about abandoning operations for strategy—it’s about holding both simultaneously.

The skill is more like learning to shift your focus between a microscope and a telescope than choosing one instrument over another.

For transitioning from emerging leader roles, this shift can be disorienting. Emerging leaders were valued for their operational excellence. Middle managers must develop the capacity to zoom out, see patterns, anticipate problems, and align their team’s work with organizational strategy—while still ensuring the daily work gets done.

Coaching supports this development by creating regular opportunities for strategic reflection. When a middle manager is consumed by operational fires, coaching sessions become protected space to step back and ask: What patterns am I seeing? What should I be anticipating? How does this work connect to our larger goals?

Over time, this reflective practice becomes internalized. Strategic thinking stops being something that happens in coaching sessions and becomes a natural lens through which middle managers view their work.

The Six-Month Transformation Roadmap

Meaningful middle manager development doesn’t happen overnight, but it doesn’t require years either. A focused six-month development journey can produce significant transformation.

Months One and Two: Foundation

The initial phase focuses on assessment and awareness. What competencies are strongest? Where are the gaps? What assumptions about leadership need examination? This phase includes formal assessment tools, 360-degree feedback, and initial coaching conversations to establish developmental goals.

Months Three and Four: Skill Building

The middle phase emphasizes practical skill development. This is where training, practice, and feedback intersect. Middle managers learn and apply new approaches to delegation, feedback, meeting facilitation, and stakeholder management. Coaching sessions focus on integrating new skills and troubleshooting real-world application.

Months Five and Six: Integration and Identity

The final phase consolidates learning and solidifies leadership identity. Middle managers have been experimenting with new approaches; now they reflect on what’s working and consciously choose their ongoing leadership practices. Coaching in this phase often addresses deeper questions: Who am I as a leader? What do I stand for? How will I continue developing beyond this program?

Six months won’t make anyone a perfect leader. But six months of focused development can transform a struggling manager into one who’s found their footing—and their voice.

The ROI of Middle Management Development

For organizations making the case for middle manager investment, the returns are substantial and measurable.

Retention. Underdeveloped middle managers are flight risks. They’re doing difficult work without support, watching executive directors receive coaching they’ll never get. Investing in their development signals that the organization values them and sees a future for them. This alone can dramatically reduce turnover in a population that’s expensive to replace.

Performance. Effective middle managers multiply the performance of everyone who reports to them. They also reduce the burden on executive directors, freeing senior leadership time for strategic work. The performance gains compound across the organization.

Succession readiness. Where will your next executive director come from? For many nonprofits, the answer should be: from among today’s middle managers. But only if those managers receive the development that prepares them for advancing to senior leadership. Middle manager development is succession planning in action.

These returns make middle management development one of the highest-leverage investments a nonprofit can make. The cost of coaching and development is real, but it’s dwarfed by the cost of turnover, underperformance, and leadership gaps.

Starting Where You Are

You may be reading this and thinking: this all makes sense, but where do I even begin?

Start with visibility. Ask your middle managers directly: What support would help you most in your role? What challenges are you facing that you don’t feel equipped to handle? What would help you develop as a leader?

Their answers will reveal both needs and opportunities. You may discover that your middle managers are craving development and will enthusiastically engage with whatever you offer. Or you may learn that they’re so overwhelmed that they can’t imagine adding anything to their plates—which tells you something important about workload and sustainability.

Then, begin with whatever is possible. If you can provide individual coaching for middle managers, do it. If you can only afford group coaching, that’s valuable too. If formal coaching isn’t in the budget, consider peer coaching circles that require only training and facilitation support.

The key is to stop ignoring the middle. Your organization’s effectiveness depends on it.

Moving Forward Together

If you’re an executive director who recognizes your middle managers in this article, I hope you’re already thinking about next steps. If you’re a middle manager who’s been feeling forgotten, I hope you know: it’s not you. The challenge is real, and you deserve support.

The path forward starts with a leadership development framework that includes every level of your organization—not just the top and bottom. Middle managers aren’t a transition stage to rush through. They’re a critical leadership layer that deserves intentional investment.

What would change in your organization if every middle manager felt truly supported in their development? What would become possible if they had the skills and confidence to lead with clarity? What strategic capacity would open up if you could trust them to handle more?

Those aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re invitations to imagine a different reality—and then to take the first step toward creating it.