Ask most change practitioners where middle managers fit in a change effort, and you will get one of two answers. The first is that middle managers are a communication layer. They receive messages from above and pass them down to the people doing the work. They are, in this framing, a delivery mechanism: useful for reach, important for consistency, essential for making sure the communication cascade actually reaches the front line.

The second is that middle managers are a source of resistance. They have the most to lose from changes that flatten hierarchies, shift decision rights, or disrupt the operational routines they have built their authority around. They are, in this framing, a risk to be identified, engaged, and ideally converted into visible advocates before they become visible obstacles. Both framings contain some truth. Neither one captures what middle managers actually are.

Middle managers are the translation layer between organizational intent and operational reality. They are the people who have to make the change make sense to the people doing the work, not in the abstract, but concretely, on a Tuesday afternoon when a customer is waiting and something is not working the way the design said it would. They know things about how work actually happens that no one in the steering committee knows, and that no consultant parachuted in from outside can learn in a workshop.

And yet, on most programs, we hand them talking points.

The Talking Points Problem

Talking points are, in my view, one of the most consistently misused artifacts in change management. The intention behind them is reasonable: ensure that key messages are delivered consistently, that managers are not left to improvise in conversations where consistency matters. The problem is what talking points implicitly assume about the people receiving them.

They assume that the manager’s job is to deliver the message, not to understand it. They assume that the people who crafted the message know what the front line needs to hear better than the managers who work alongside the front line every day. And they assume that communication is fundamentally a transmission problem: get the right words to the right people in the right sequence, and understanding will follow. None of these assumptions hold up.

When a manager is handed talking points about a change they were not involved in shaping, they often can’t answer the questions their teams will ask. The follow-up questions are precisely the questions talking points do not address, because talking points are written to convey messages, not to anticipate operational reality. The manager looks uninformed. The change looks poorly managed. And trust erodes at exactly the layer where it matters most. Why was this decision made? Who was consulted? What happens when this process breaks down in the field?

This is not a communication failure. It is a design failure. And it usually starts long before the talking points are written.

The Plan That Was Built Before the Environment Was Read

Talking points don’t appear in communication plans because someone thought carefully about what this organization needs and concluded that talking points were the right tool. They appear because they always have. Town halls, email updates, manager briefings, talking points; these are familiar artifacts, and they get incorporated into communication plans early, often before the solution has been designed, before stakeholder perception has been assessed, and before anyone has taken a serious look at how communication actually works in this particular organization.

This is, I will say directly, often the change practitioner’s responsibility. Not through malice, but through a default to the familiar. The communication plan has a structure that worked on the last engagement, and the one before that, and it gets applied here because applying it is faster than starting from the environment and working forward. The artifacts get chosen before the stakeholders are understood. The messages get crafted before the organization has been listened to. And middle managers end up as mouthpieces not because anyone decided that was the right approach, but because the plan had a slot for talking points and someone filled it.

What It Looks Like When It Works

I have seen change programs get middle managers genuinely right, and the difference is not subtle.

The most effective approach I have encountered brings key middle managers into design sessions early, not to rubber-stamp decisions that have already been made, but to participate in shaping them. They get to see the solution as it evolves. They contribute operational knowledge that the design team does not have. They ask the questions that only someone close to the work would think to ask: what happens when a customer is waiting and this process breaks down? What does this decision cost the people doing the job? They leave those sessions not as recipients of a message but as co-authors of a direction.

For middle managers who cannot be part of design sessions, the alternative is not talking points. It is a genuine briefing, one that explains why design decisions were made, who was involved in shaping them, and what tradeoffs were considered. A briefing that creates space for questions and concerns, and that treats the manager’s operational judgment as something worth hearing rather than something to be managed.

The distinction sounds simple. In practice, it requires a fundamentally different orientation toward what middle managers are for. It requires treating them as sources of intelligence rather than channels of communication. It requires building the change plan around an understanding of the organization rather than around a template that appeared to have worked somewhere else.

And it requires a change practitioner willing to put the familiar artifacts down and ask a harder question: what does this organization actually need, and are these the right tools to deliver it?

Middle managers sit where the actual work happens. They understand, better than almost anyone, how a change will land when it meets operational reality. The change profession has spent years treating that knowledge as a communication problem to be managed. It is time to treat it as an asset to be used.