In Praise of the Unglamorous Middle

Nobody writes about middle management because middle management's where careers go to die quietly and nobody wants to read about that. Fine. I'll do it.

I'm a manager. Close enough to executive that I can see it, not actually one. I sit in a professional layer that has all the responsibility of leadership, none of the authority, and somehow twice the meetings. It's a great deal if you hate yourself.

I absorb pressure from above and panic from below. Founders escalate to me when something's on fire. My team escalates to me when something's on fire. There's no shortage of fires. There is, however, a shortage of fire extinguishers, and they're all in my hand. Funny how that works.

Meanwhile I'm still doing the actual work. Running audits, building strategy, in the weeds because that's where strategy actually lives. And running performance reviews, mentoring juniors, sitting in escalations, jumping on calls I wasn't briefed for, and absorbing churn risk on accounts I didn't sell and wasn't allowed to scope.

There's a name for this. The name's limbo.

The lie

The lie about mid-career is that it's a station stop. A clean little middle act between scrappy early years and influential senior years. Pay your dues, prove yourself, get promoted, ascend. Hashtag girlboss.

Bullshit. Mid-career's a swamp. You can be in it for a decade. You can be excellent at your job, get promoted three times, and still be in it. The swamp doesn't care about your title. It's the space between "person who executes" and "person who decides," and companies need way more of the first one. Do the math.

So you stay. You manage. You execute. You run the fire drills. You build the team. You watch younger people come up around you, some pass you, some you outlast, most you just work alongside while everyone pretends this is a meritocracy and not a vibes-based promotion lottery.

The interview question

There's a question every senior-level interview eventually gets to:

"What are your five-year goals?"

You're supposed to have an Answer. A specific title at a specific level at a specific size of company. Something that signals ambition, vision, hunger, and ideally a TED talk in the works.

My actual answer, the one that would tank an offer if you said it out loud:

Grow a cool agency. Do awesome work. Build a great team. Become a recognized voice in this industry by doing the work, not by quitting it.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

No title. No corner office. No equity event. Nothing on a vision board. Just a working desire to do good work with people you like for clients who actually listen, and to be known for the work itself.

Apparently that's the wrong answer in 2026. You're supposed to want to be a CMO. Or start your own thing. Or build an audience as the goal. Or become a "thought leader," which, fine, except the way that pipeline currently works is: stop doing the work, start talking about the work, sell a course about doing the work you no longer do.

I want the opposite. I want to be a person whose name is associated with results, not reach. Recognized because the work shows up. Quoted because I'm in the room when the strategy gets built, not because I'm filming a carousel about strategy I read about. There's a difference. The industry's lost track of it.

I want the work to be good. I want my team to thrive. I want strategy to actually ship instead of dying in a deck. I want clients to stop firing the agency every time someone in the C-suite has a feeling on a Tuesday.

If that's the wrong answer, fine. I'll live.

The tired part

The other thing about the unglamorous middle: it's tiring in a specific way nobody warned me about.

Not the tired of working too many hours, though sure, that's also there. It's the tired of being the only one in the room who's been here before. The tired of explaining the same lessons to the same kinds of people and watching the company make the same mistakes anyway because nobody listens to the woman with the receipts.

The tired of being the most senior woman in the room. Again. And the only mother. Again. And the one who has to point out, again, that maybe we don't schedule the all-hands at 4:30 PM on a Friday because some of us have to physically retrieve small humans from buildings.

The tired of not being new anymore. Of not having early-career energy where every problem feels solvable and every promotion feels like a milestone. Mid-career's when you figure out promotions don't fix anything. They just hand you new problems with bigger budgets and more people to disappoint.

Why I'm still here

To be clear: I love this work. I love SEO. I love the puzzle of it. I love a clean technical audit. I love watching a client's organic actually move. I love when a junior on my team cracks a problem they would've escalated to me last quarter. That's the good stuff.

That's why I'm still in the swamp. The work's good. The team's worth it. Every once in a while you ship something you're actually proud of and for thirty seconds the limbo feels like the point instead of the punishment.

The unglamorous middle isn't a station stop. It's the destination for a lot of us. We're not going to be CEOs. We're not starting unicorns. We're going to keep doing the work, building teams, mentoring the next batch, and trying to make our small corner of this industry slightly less broken than we found it. And if we end up writing about it, talking about it, getting quoted about it, it's because we're still doing it, not because we stopped.

That's enough. That should be enough. The fact that we've built a culture that says it isn't is the problem. Not us.

If you're in the swamp too: hi. The work's good. The five-year plan's whatever you say it is. The interview question's bullshit.

We're allowed to just want what we want.