For a middle manager running a technical unit the job is often to serve as a buffer between upper management and workers. This doesn't necessarily involve lying

For a middle manager running a technical unit the job is often to serve as a buffer between upper management and workers. This doesn't necessarily involve lying to people but rather focusing on different priorities with different groups. A middle manager is two APIs: one for upper management to interface with the workers, and one for workers to interface with upper management. The two APIs have distinct areas of responsibility, but both of them should include sanity-checking on their inputs rather than just passing them on to the layer above/below, and sometimes they should definitely throw exceptions. This is what makes middle management a difficult role: it is literally two-faced. Internally, however, there should be a single state machine that maintains some kind of consistency, balancing the current corporate direction with the well-being of team members and the desired career track of the middle manager. Unfortunately the ideal balance often involves all parties being about equally unhappy.