How can I lead within middle management?

How can I lead within middle management?

How can I lead within middle management?
By Pete Hall

Middle management. The ultimate opportunity to test your leadership mettle. On one hand, you’re responsible for carrying out the directives, legislation, and initiatives provided to you from the higher-ups; on the other, you’re obligated to inspire, direct, and generate growth within your own team.

From this position (branch manager, section director, school principal, etc – you know who you are), how can you both follow and lead in authentic ways? That’s a question that wakes up many of us in the middle of the night, dripping in sweat and craving a BLT.

Following and leading can work interdependently with one another. Doing both well creates the strongest link between organizational direction and individual performance.

Let’s begin by examining the first chain: following. Middle managers are part of a larger organization. Multiple tiers of owners, executives, directors, boards, and other powers all have a significant amount of say in how our organizations are established, what our priorities are, and what expectations are provided. So you’ve got to be a good soldier and follow orders, passing them down the line. By itself, that’s a manageable directive, except…

…there’s a second chain: leading. You’re expected to lead. You’re obligated to meet your agreed-upon goals, stewarding your allocated funding, adhering to local socio-political influences, championing your community, and handling employees, direct reports, and support staff. The key metrics all come down to defined outcomes incumbent to your market and expertise, so clearly there’s a need for local authority and decision-making, except…

…for that first chain. Decisions made by the universal powers-that-be don’t always meet local needs.

Fret not. This is work that can be done — and done exceptionally well. As a middle manager, you can be the strongest link.

Before you begin panicking and raiding the fridge, there’s hope found in a couple strategies for managing your middle-management responsibilities with savvy:

Align everything to the mision. That’s right, mision: that amazing place where your mission (the reason the organization exists in the first place) and your vision (what it looks like and feels like when it’s going spectacularly well) coexist. Are you and your stakeholders, superiors, and colleagues clear on your mision? Are all your ships headed in the same direction?

  • Understand your charge. As a team, unpack your directives. What are your long-term goals? What is the board’s current comprehensive plan? What are the results you’ve been assigned to achieve? Knowing what exactly you’ve been charged to do helps to align the rest of your work toward the mandated targets. You’re going to be linking to this chain, so it behooves you to be clear on the content and direction.
  • Define the outcomes. Together, ask each other what success looks like; how your department/office will look in 1, 3, and 5 years; what goals will drive your work; why this work is important. Take the time to unpack comments to paint a clear and compelling picture of a desirable future. Refer to this often (in leadership retreats I facilitate, we often draw an image and describe it – that becomes your de facto “logo”). Feel free to use our Visioning protocol to walk your team through this process, step by step.
  • Clarify your priorities. Isolate the non-negotiables, determining what’s tight (we’re going to focus on creating a positive experience for customers no matter what, for instance) and what’s loose (flexible ways we can empower staff to adhere to the “customer is always right” mantra while monitoring the bottom-line). Defining parameters allows adherence to imposed initiatives and puts local staff at ease, feeling they’ve still got some ownership and choice in how the work is done.

Connect every single individual to the mision. Great leaders do two things really well: they identify what everyone has in common in order to work together and row in unison toward the goal, and they uncover what drives and inspires each person – in order to link individual efforts to the collective goal.

  • Ignite individual passion. Every individual you lead got into this work for a reason. What is that reason? Are you aware of it? Does the person know it? On a regular basis, sit down with each of your direct reports, each member of your team. Get to know them, find common ground that enhances your relationships, and investigate. Ask questions that peel back the layers of that artichoke until you get to the heart: surfacing why folks entered the profession in the first place, why they stay, and what determines their success and personal happiness. By naming and defining the source of our people’s passion, we are more apt to connect them to the mision
  • Embed everything. Set goals and action plans that support each other, like Russian nesting dolls – each fits within the greater structure. When individual employees’ performance goals help the team meet its goal, that enables the team to be successful, which moves the branch closer to its goals, helping the entire organization achieve success as well. Then budget time, resources, professional development opportunities, and communication structures in such a way that orients all our work towards the mision. Everyone relies on everyone else, and the entire operation begins working in concert with one another – interdependency rules, and networks of scaffolded support are inherently built-in.

Middle management is daunting, and… it’s an opportunity to make an immense difference. Are you up to the challenge? Are you willing to do what it takes to succeed? If so, work strategically, get a good night’s sleep, embrace the mision, and change people’s lives. You can become the strongest link in the chain.

Pete Hall is the President/CEO of Strive Success Solutions. You can reach him via email at Pete@StriveSS.com.

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Peer coaching for systemic, reflective growth

Peer coaching for systemic, reflective growth

Peer coaching for systemic, reflective growth
By Pete Hall

*In a subtle shift from the traditional blog post format, Strive Success Solutions President/CEO Pete Hall shares an article he penned for Talent Development magazine, a publication of the Association for Talent Development.

Download the article

Executive summary:

Adopting a proactive approach to coaching can transform organizations. Rather than using coaching to “fix” employee weakneses, savvy organizations are utilizing a peer coaching model that builds individual and collective capacity. Based on a cycle of reflective thought that predictably leads to success, this peer coaching approach simultaneously grows individual employees, builds a collaborative culture, and transforms organizations into hubs of continuous learning and ongoing growth. Embedded in the article are the processes of self-reflection, tips for HR officials and supervisors, and prompts to generate reflective thought.

 

Pete Hall is the President/CEO of Strive Success Solutions. You can reach him via email at Pete@StriveSS.com

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The magnifying power of self-reflection

The magnifying power of self-reflection

The magnifying power of self-reflection
By Pete Hall

If I were to tell you there’s one rather simple, replicable behavior that could lead to remarkable success in whatever venture you pursued, how would you respond? Would you reply by asking if I’m also offering to sell you a piece of the Brooklyn Bridge? Well, indeed there is such a behavior, and if the title of this blog didn’t give it away, let me be straightforward:

Mastering the art of self-reflection will help you meet whatever goal you’ve set for yourself. A hundred times over.

Self-reflection? You might say, incredulously. You mean there’s an art to thinking about things? Then I’d clarify:

Self-reflection, simply defined, is the discipline of focusing your mental energy on your goals, making intentional decisions in order to achieve the goals, paying attention to the results of your actions, and determining the modifications necessary to improve the outcomes.

As you hone your reflective habits, you increase your skills, and in a repetitively expanding and strengthening pattern, you develop both simultaneously. This pattern, first published in the teachers’ handbook Teach, Reflect, Learn and expanded upon in Pursuing Greatness, is called the Reflective Cycle, and it describes the repeated behaviors of thought that we all follow as we learn something, develop our skills, and progress towards expertise. The steps of this Reflective Cycle are rather predictable (starting in the top-right quadrant of the diagram below, and following clockwise):

  • Build awareness. What is your goal? What outcome do you desire? What is your current state of affairs?
  • Make intentional decisions. What do you need to learn? What next steps must you take? What are you going to do to move forward?
  • Assess & analyze your impact. After taking that step, what changed? Have you improved? What’s different now?
  • Become responsive. What new questions have surfaced? What worked that you can repeat, and what didn’t work that you can discard?

This simple pattern is repeated, ad infinitum, until you hit mastery…at which point you realize there’s even more growth potential then you ever imagined, and you continue to push forward. Your potential for excellence, it turns out, is an asymptote: the closer you get to it, the greater your potential expands.

Developing rich habits of strategic self-reflection is like having a skeleton key to unlock all your goals, dreams, targets, ambitions, and endeavors. It simply requires discipline to build those habits.

Now you ask, Does this pattern of self-reflection lead us to success in any field? In any profession?

Not only can you experience tremendous success in whatever job – or element of your job – you want, this pattern of thinking is the secret key to unlocking success in just about any aspect of your life. Want to lose weight? Eat better? Improve relationships? Barbeque more effectively? Focus your self-reflective energy on the goal – and keep it there as you mentally spin through the Reflective Cycle – and see for yourself.

There must be an app for that, you quip.

Yes, sure, there’s an app for everything. However, here’s the rub: you can focus simply on self-reflection if you want to. You know, reflect on your ability to reflect. However, if you truly want to improve a skill, master a technique, attain a goal, or surpass an expectation, you’ve got to reflect on that outcome. Think of it like this: You can download a self-reflection app, and that’d be great. Or you could update your operating system by strengthening your self-reflective behaviors, and you can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of every single app in your collection! Self-reflection isn’t an app; rather, it’s the platform upon which all the other apps operate.

So the next time you’re attempting to meet a goal, trying to learn something new, or aiming to improve your practice somehow, don’t just do things and hope that leads to improvement. Instead, reflect – and reflect very intentionally – on the entire growth process:

  • Pay attention to your goals. Be clear on exactly what you’re trying to accomplish.
  • Survey your options and decide upon the path most likely to yield success, and stay true to that decision as you begin to take deliberate actions.
  • Assess your impact by analyzing the cause-and-effect relationship between what you did and the results you got.
  • Respond accordingly: if the results were great, keep going or ramp it up; if the results didn’t measure up, adapt and adjust as needed.

Repeat this pattern as many times as you need until you achieve the goal you’ve set for yourself. By engaging in frequent, accurate, deep self-reflection in an intentional manner, you’re setting yourself up for success. Over and over again.

Pete Hall is the President/CEO of Strive Success Solutions. You can reach him via email at Pete@StriveSS.com.

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