Many industries have gone through changes in the last decades, everyone involved have been affected but few have encountered the same amount of changes as the middle managers. Being in the centre of the organisation, torn between wills, middle managers have struggled during the last years to redefine their job. There exists research describing their workdays, what they do and how they spend their time, but we have not found any study that has tried to investigate what challenges the middle managers face.

The purpose of this study is to identify the challenges faced by internally-promoted middle managers.

This thesis uses an inductive approach to fulfil the purpose; the main motivation for the chosen approach is the authors’ reluctance to let any existing theories guide the process. Instead, it is now believed to capture what middle managers actually find challenging and not reject or confirm the work of others which are not directly aimed at the same problem area. The empirical material has been gathered by using qualitative semi-structured interviews with eight middle managers in the auditing industry.

We consider the greatest challenges faced by middle managers to be prioritising in situations of limited time. Since the middle managers tend to leave internal issue to be handled later and instead put their primary focus on customers; relational related issues are found very challenging. Among these; finding a proper level for criticism, handling conflicting expectations and lead personnel in general were emphasized. Administrative related issues was also found challenging, but not to the same extent as relational related challenges. Among the administrative issues: fulfilling goals, scheduling and planning, implementing unsupported decisions, and filter information were stressed as most challenging.