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Middle Management: Lead Your Team and Manage Upward
2,905 students
Middle Management: Lead Your Team and Manage Upward
middle management | team leadership | delegation | managing up | conflict management | time management | org design
Last updated 9/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Read your organisation's structure and explain where your authority actually ends
- Map how power distributes in a matrix, where accountability and authority sit apart
- Switch leadership style to match the stage your team is at, rather than defaulting to one
- Motivate through a task from assignment to feedback, including when it goes wrong
- Delegate with RACI and GROW, so handing work over develops people instead of dumping on them
- Design communication that reaches people who do not report to you
- Diagnose a conflict, prevent the predictable ones and mediate the rest
- Protect your own week with SMART, Eisenhower, 4D, Pomodoro and time-blocking
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Explore related topics
Course content
14 sections • 38 lectures • 22h 27m total length
Requirements
- A team you are responsible for, and a manager you report to
- No management theory background required. Every model is introduced from the beginning
- Willingness to look at how much of your week is work you should have handed over
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- A real situation with your own manager or a neighbouring function to work on
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Middle management is the only job where you are accountable for outcomes you cannot fully control, using people you did not choose, to satisfy decisions you did not make.
Nobody warns you about that when they offer the promotion.
Why the middle is the hardest layer
You are the compression point. Above you, a plan built without your input. Below you, a team that expects you to defend them from exactly that plan. Beside you, functions whose cooperation you need and whose priorities are elsewhere.
So the week fills with other people's problems, delegation feels slower than doing it yourself, and the strategic work you were promoted for happens at ten in the evening, badly.
The organisation, and leading a team inside it
Thirty-six lessons. Eight on organisational design first, because you cannot navigate a structure you have never had explained: the five-step design process, the star model, six design drivers, structural archetypes, the three types of matrix, how power actually distributes when accountability and authority sit with different people, span of control, transition planning, and five real company cases.
Then six on leadership as a craft rather than a personality: what the research actually shows, the styles available and what each costs, switching between them deliberately, motivating through a task from assignment to feedback, the stages of team development, handling burnout, the destructive team member, coaching, and holding standards without micromanaging.
Handing work over, and everything around it
Then four on delegation, which is the only mechanism that makes this job physically possible: the psychological barriers, SMART for a handed-over task, the Eisenhower matrix, RACI so responsibility is unambiguous, feedback that does not demotivate, GROW for developing someone through the work, and converting freed hours into the work only you can do.
Then six on communication with people who do not report to you: audit, goals aimed at behaviour, segmenting by what each function is measured on, channel choice, other managers as distribution, delivering unwelcome news, and measuring whether anything changed.
Then six on conflict, which arrives at your desk more than anyone else's: escalation dynamics, the resolution algorithm, structural causes, political conflict and nepotism, prevention and mediation. And six on your own week, because a manager with no slack has nothing left for anyone.
Who is teaching this
Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals, promoting people into this layer and watching which ones survived it.
What is included
Lifetime access to all course materials
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
Udemy Certificate of Completion
Practical assignments and real business cases
A section with additional courses, tools and resources
One audit to start with
Take last week's calendar and mark every block as one of three things: work only you could do, work someone on your team could have done, or work that should never have reached you. The second and third categories are usually the majority, and they are the entire subject of this course. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.
Who this course is for:
- Managers promoted from specialist roles who were given the title and no method
- Team leads who deliver well and cannot get decisions made above them
- Middle managers squeezed between executive demands and a team that expects protection
- Function heads whose results depend on colleagues who do not report to them
- Managers who are working sixty-hour weeks because delegating feels slower than doing
- Anyone who has been told to be more strategic and given no time to be
- People preparing for a first management role and wanting the whole picture first