The university is an institution that has knowledge as its raw material and that exists to leverage society and to contribute to its development, aiming at the training of qualified professionals. Due to the management difficulties that universities present and the challenges that emerge, they should be concerned with the training and development not just of their faculty, but also of their technical staff, especially in management, because it is the foundation of the organization's functioning. Because of the role that intermediate level university managers play and because of the complexity of the assignments given to them, these professionals must be well prepared, must be competent in performing their duties and should be aligned to the expectations of the organization. This work is qualitative in its approach. In its purposes, this study can be classified as exploratory and descriptive. As for the means of investigation used in this research, it can be classified as bibliographic. Thus, the objective of this paper is to present a theoretical framework to begin discussions on the role of intermediate managers in the management of federal universities and on the skills needed to perform their activities.