Why middle managers are India Inc.’s missing link in operational risk

This article is authored by Omesh Garga, managing director, dss+ India.

In high-hazard industries, operational risk is rarely decided in the boardroom alone. It is shaped daily in plants, control rooms, maintenance shutdowns and project sites — through the judgement calls of middle managers operating where leadership ambition meets execution pressure.

Indian Growth Story (Representative Image)

As India scales manufacturing, energy and infrastructure, organisations are asking operating teams to deliver faster, cheaper and more reliably. This growth story is positive and necessary. But that growth also brings greater operational complexity. The critical question is not whether companies have safety policies; most do. The question is whether leadership intent is translated into consistent risk decisions when production, cost, delivery and safety collide. This is where middle managers matter. They are not merely coordinators between strategy and the shop floor. In high-hazard operations, they are a live control layer in the operational risk management system. Their choices influence whether barriers remain effective, whether weak signals are escalated, whether contractor shortcuts are challenged and whether deviations are treated as exceptions or allowed to become normal practice.

Middle managers sit closest to these conditions. They decide whether a permit-to-work exception is acceptable, whether a maintenance deferral can wait, whether a contractor’s shortcut is stopped, whether a near miss deserves escalation and whether a weak signal is noise or a warning. Individually, these choices may appear small. Collectively, they define the organisation’s true risk appetite.

Most organisations say safety is non-negotiable. But middle managers do not only listen to what leaders say; they read what leaders reward, question, and tolerate and overlook. If leadership celebrates lost production being recovered without asking how it was achieved, questions escalation more than deviation, or treats delayed delivery as a bigger failure than weakened safety margins, a disconnect emerges between stated expectations and actual operational priorities.

Middle managers are especially sensitive to these signals because they operate at the intersection of commercial urgency and operational risk. Under sustained pressure, they may interpret leadership behaviour — explicitly or implicitly — as permission to trade safety margins during execution. A bypass becomes temporary, then familiar. A checklist exception becomes manageable, then routine. A deferred maintenance item is accepted because the next shutdown is “close enough.” Over time, what once felt abnormal becomes operationally acceptable.

This is how operational drift develops — not typically through one dramatic choice, but through repeated compromises that gradually normalise deviation from expected standards.

The distinction between a priority and a value is useful here. Priorities shift when quarterly targets, customer commitments or cost pressures intensify. A value is demonstrated and felt, especially when it costs something. When safety is experienced as a business value, people see leaders pause work despite commercial pressure, ask for risk visibility before approving acceleration and recognise managers who escalate early rather than those who merely deliver despite degraded conditions.

For many industrial organisations, improvement still centres on training, audits and procedural compliance. These foundations are necessary, but insufficient. The next level of operational risk maturity requires strengthening the quality of decisions made under pressure.

Middle managers need more than accountability. They need clear decision rights, escalation pathways and management operating rhythms that make risk visible before failure occurs. If managers are responsible for delivery outcomes but unclear about when they can stop work, slow production, reject unsafe contractor practices or escalate degraded controls, the organisation is asking them to own risk without giving them authority.

This is particularly important in contractor-intensive environments, where risk is often managed in real time through field decisions rather than policy documents. Leaders should, therefore, ask: Are near misses and weak signals reviewed as business intelligence, not paperwork? Are production reviews balanced with leading indicators such as barrier health, permit quality, maintenance deferrals, fatigue exposure and contractor capability? Do leaders examine how targets were achieved, not only whether they were achieved?

For India Inc., this is not a soft cultural issue. Weak risk decisions disrupt production, damage assets, injure people, erode trust, attract regulatory scrutiny and create reputational exposure. Conversely, organisations that surface risk early are better positioned to protect reliability, resilience and licence to operate.

The leadership task is to make operational priorities unmistakable. When leaders consistently ask about risk before pace, controls before recovery and learning before blame, middle managers receive a different signal: Delivery matters, but not at the expense of degraded margins of safety.

As Indian industry scales into more complex operating environments, competitive advantage will not come only from growth, cost or speed. It will also come from the ability to maintain discipline under pressure and act on weak signals before escalation becomes unavoidable.

That is why middle managers should not be viewed as a communication channel between strategy and the shop floor. They are a critical component of the operational risk system itself — shaping escalation quality, control effectiveness, safety culture and ultimately the organisation’s capacity to prevent serious injuries, fatalities and major operational failures.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Omesh Garga, managing director, dss+ India.