Management Perspectives

For organisations to thrive in the turbulent years ahead, managers must rethink how they approach their strategies to achieve growth and success. A more holistic approach is needed which considers a company’s purpose and commercial aims alongside the needs and abilities of their people. It is easy for me to remember my first middle management role. And the mistakes I made! Armed with no supervisory instruction, reliant, instead, on my uneducated assumptions, I struggled. With no time to think, I bounced from problem to problem that my team brought to my attention. That was what I thought I was meant to do: solve their challenges. Yet, by doing so, I remained oblivious to the bigger picture: what our clients and stakeholders needed. And when I got around to that, it was only because I was reacting to their concerns.

The fire fighter

I still feel so much admiration for middle managers. Every day, pulled in separate directions, middle managers must influence upwards, meeting the needs of senior staff by successfully delivering organisational strategy. They must also influence downwards, not only getting junior staff involved in delivering strategy, but also support their reports deal with customers’ issues and gripes from stakeholders. There is always conflict to quell. They are critical to success, delivering a combination of strategic and client-led tasks. However, middle managers are too often the fire fighters within the hierarchy, shifting from resolving one strategically unimportant problem to the next. So, what can be done to facilitate their success? If leaders are to engage middle managers, they firstly need to reflect on the root causes behind managers simply surviving rather than thriving in their work. These include:

• The management paradox: Middle managers do not come ‘readily formed’. Many experience the shock that while it was their exemplary employment of technical skills that helped propel them into a managerial role, their continued focus on these skills often hinders them making the successful leap. New skills, practices, and mindsets are necessary.
• The difficulty of that work environment: Their work environment is an extraordinarily difficult one to navigate. This is now exacerbated by numerous interconnected economic, legal, technological, social, environmental, and political issues making their environment increasingly uncertain and complex.
• The support given to middle managers: Too often managers are left to their own devices, forced to meet different needs without guidance or often without the resources necessary.

Transcending the technical

There are several priorities that leaders can consider in order to engage their middle managers change their story from the fire fighter to say, the conductor.

From paradox to practice

I believe that the shift from the technical to more generalist management starts with the middle manager being more contemplative of what they face and how they should proactively confront it. It requires a shift in thinking, to be more strategic rather than being led by the biases and dominant mindsets that we all have. On the one hand, a fundamental component of strategic thinking is to be able to prioritise, rather than the resulting wish lists that many create. Wish lists that have no rhyme or reason to what they are to deliver but spread teams too thinly – meaning little of note is delivered. So, leaders can support their direct reports by coaching them to reflect on their to-do lists. Just what tasks genuinely are priorities? What should be ignored? How do we delight our clients and stakeholders? Which tasks are not urgent but are strategically important (and therefore cannot be ignored)? What difficult choices need to be made? On the other hand, strategic thinking is also about getting managers to appreciate how they fit into their wider ecosystem. How they can impact, and be impacted by, others and other issues. What has been the middle manager’s personal story of how they should manage? Who are the influential people, internally and externally, required to get work done successfully? What needs to be done to support those people regarding communication, the removal of obstacles, and maintaining their dignity and worth? What political, economic, social, technological, legal, or environmental issues impact upon the manager’s team? And which of these does the team impact upon? Working with the manager, coaching them, to undertake these considerations and achieve ‘aha’ moments is a great way to engage them and build their capabilities when it comes to dealing with the complexity they now face.

Making the environment a little easier

Improving managers’ strategic thinking, helping them to become better informed and make better decisions is certainly important. Yet, the environment is still one with so many demands, wicked problems, and turmoil! All managers need development for a world experiencing seismic change. There is certainly a long suite of skills—a wish list, if you will—that I could recommend that managers need. Nevertheless, I have made some difficult choices with respect to what skills are required if managers are to successfully solve problems and deal with their strategic challenges in such an environment! With the middle manager trying to balance numerous demands on how issues should be addressed, conflict resolution is an important skill to develop. This capability, in turn, reduces the potential for solutions to be imposed on the affected, building trust. And trust is always an important currency for the manager caught in the middle. Foresight or future thinking is possibly one of the most critical skills middle managers now need if they are to be best prepared for the future and the uncertainties faced. Such a skill helps an individual anticipate, rather than predict, what may lie ahead of their team, stakeholders, and the organisation. What plausible scenarios are there of what the future could look like? What assumptions do we have about the future and why? What can we do in ‘the here’ and ‘the now’ to facilitate a preferred future? Of course, there are always short courses that managers can undertake and should be dependent on the context. Is agility an important skill for development in your managers? What about collaboration? Whatever is appropriate, embedding skills into time-poor middle managers is never easy. They are always focused on ‘putting out the fires’ rather than focusing on the medium- or long-term. Leaders can improve engagement by taking a genuine interest in their development, mentoring or coaching their direct reports so that such skills become habits. Mentoring or coaching helps to engage managers by showing them that you care, that you want them to succeed.

Engagement starts with you

Ultimately, how well a middle manager is engaged will have a significant bearing on an organisation’s reputation; absenteeism, presenteeism, and turnover; how successfully strategy is implemented; and its bottom line, to name a few. These people are that critical. And how well they are engaged depends on the efforts of the bosses. I cannot imagine how much leaders have on their to-do lists and the pressures faced. However, the relationship that leaders have with their direct reports cannot be understated; it cannot be transactional or ‘ticka-box’ in nature. Good communication and good relationships are paramount to engaging and developing middle managers. Engagement starts with twoway conversations; it starts with listening… and listening deeply. It starts with curiosity to truly understand the middle manager and what they face. It starts with the humility necessary to appreciate that leaders have all been through what the extraordinary middle manager endures. It starts with you.