“Stuck in the Middle With You:” How to Lead Well from the Center
“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.”
If “Leader of the Pack” is Number 1 on the playlist for CEOs, this 70s classic by Stealers Wheel has to be the anthem for those of us with experience in middle management. At least it feels that way when we’re dealing with tyrannical bosses, disgruntled direct reports, and cut-throat peers jostling to climb the next rung on the corporate ladder.
When most people think of middle management, they think of Michael Scott from The Office clutching the “World’s Best Boss” mug he secretly purchased for himself or perhaps the annoyingly nasal office manager from Office Space ambushing his employees at the end of a long work week to say, “Yeahhh, I’m going to need you to come in on Saturday, m’kay?”
Not exactly the sort of role models who inspire us to vie for that next promotion, are they?
Rather than the bumbling bureaucrats portrayed by pop culture, the reality is that middle managers are the very heart of their organizations, with a disproportionate impact on the engagement of the workforce, the strength of the culture, and ultimately the ability of the overall organization to achieve its strategic objectives.
Impact of Middle Managers
For purposes of this discussion, I am defining “middle managers” broadly to include anyone who is a boss, has a boss, and has peers at the same level in your organization. You also might have individual performance objectives of your own, on top of being evaluated on the performance metrics of your team.
Study after study confirms that the impact of middle managers on employee engagement and overall organizational effectiveness is enormous. We’ve all heard the cliché that “people don’t quit their jobs, they quit their bosses,” but that understates the influence of managers if anything.
In addition to the impact on employee attrition, a host of studies and surveys suggest the quality of middle management has a dramatic effect on your employees who stick around and ultimately on your customers and clients. Specifically, employees who feel unsupported by their managers are more likely to:
Sue for wrongful discharge or unlawful discrimination;
Organize labor unions to represent them in their dealings with management;
Contribute to a toxic environment that leads other employees to quit;
Make costly mistakes leading to loss of customers and litigation;
Leak important company information and trash the company on social media; and
Stop potential hires from joining the company.
Conversely, managers who take the time to develop the talents of their employees and cultivate relationships with their team members are more likely to create world-class organizations that outperform their peers in all key performance metrics, including higher profitability, sales, and customer satisfaction; and lower turnover; defects; absenteeism; and safety incidents. (https://www.gallup.com/workplace/238064/re-engineering-performance-management.aspx).
Two Differentiators for Effective Middle Management
Middle managers are able to make such a positive impact on their workplaces in two primary ways: first, by simply paying attention to their employees; and second, by utilizing their emotional intelligence, or EQ.
This first point was brought home vividly by Gallup in its 2015 analysis of workplace trends, which showed that employees whose supervisor focused on developing their strengths were 30 times more likely to be engaged than employees who felt ignored (61% vs. 2%). Even more startling was the finding that employees who felt mistreated by their bosses reported much higher levels of engagement than employees who were ignored (45% vs. 2%). (https://news.gallup.com/reports/193427/strengths-meta-analysis-2015.aspx)
As it turns out, being ignored by your boss is much more damaging to your sense of engagement than working for someone who criticizes your every move but at least is paying attention to you, which bears out the truth of Elie Wiesel’s saying that, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”
The other method effective managers use to create healthier, more productive workplaces is through the use of emotional intelligence. TalentSmart, which is the leading provider of EQ assessments in the world, analyzed its database of over one million people and determined that middle managers had the highest EQ of any job title in its database. Not only that, the analysis showed that EQ scores declined in each promotion above that, with CEOs having the lowest EQ scores of all. Check it out:
Ignoring for the moment the short-sighted way companies seem to promote people to the upper echelon without regard to their people skills, one key takeaway from this analysis is that middle managers are better positioned than anyone else in the organization to use their EQ skills to create healthier workplaces and more engaged employees. And those middle managers who take steps to develop their EQ skills are even better positioned to take their workplaces to the top.
Ways to Improve the Impact of Middle Managers in Your Organization
Now that we’ve established the influence middle managers can have on their workplaces, let’s discuss three ways to make that influence a positive one.
Recognize that not everyone is equipped to be an effective middle manager. This point is an important one both for people aspiring to move up the corporate ladder and for those people responsible for promoting them. Being an effective middle manager requires a unique combination of technical knowledge and interpersonal skills and is not for everyone. In particular, star performers who become stars based on their individual performance rather than their ability to work effectively as part of a team often make for poor managers. Look for the presence of managerial skills when considering candidates for management positions and find other ways to reward your star individual contributors.
Emotional intelligence is key to effective middle management. One definition of EQ is your ability to recognize and understand emotions, combined with your skill at using this awareness to manage yourself and your relationships with others. TalentSmart estimates that 90% of top performers have higher than average EQ and having a high EQ has a much greater correlation with high performance than IQ.
From a selection perspective, this suggests at a minimum using an EQ assessment when making decisions on who to promote to management positions. On top of that, studies have determined that unlike IQ, which is relatively fixed, EQ can be improved significantly through group and individual training. All middle managers should be provided the tools for increasing their EQ as part of your training programs.
Know your audiences. In my role as a law firm partner, one of the messages I share with newer lawyers is the importance of knowing your audience and communicating accordingly, since the way a busy client needs to receive information can be very different than how a judge, colleague, or opposing counsel would.
The same principle applies to effective middle managers, not just with respect to communication, but also to their overall responsibilities to different levels of their organization:
To your bosses, you have a responsibility to provide them information they need to make a good decision rather than simply what they want to hear. Once the decision is made, your responsibility shifts to “making that decision good” (quoting UpStream Principles Co-Founder Paul Sinclair), by doing everything you can to support the decision with your direct reports and providing them the tools to carry it out.
To your direct reports, you have a responsibility to develop their individual strengths, to have their backs, and to make sure their needs and ideas are being communicated to your higher-ups. You also owe them the truth about their performance and role on team.
To your peers, you have a responsibility to share your best practices, learn from their best practices, and view them as colleagues rather than competitors. After all, if your team is the only one that succeeds, then the entire organization will suffer.
From Middle to Center
Having spent many years in middle management myself, I wonder if we’ve been using the wrong terminology all these years. Another word for middle is “center,” and the most important position in our national pastime of baseball has always been centerfield.
Instead of the sardonic lyrics of Stealer’s Wheel, maybe John Fogerty captured the right attitude toward leading from the middle in his classic, Centerfield:
Oh put me in coach, I'm ready to play today
Put me in coach, I'm ready to play today
Look at me, I can be centerfield.
Image Source: New York Daily News Archive
Mike Tooley is a Co-Founder with Upstream Principles LLC, a coaching and consulting firm dedicated to helping individuals, leaders, and teams go upstream to discover solutions for their leadership and employee development challenges. As a certified Leadership and Strengths Coach, Mike is committed to serve as a guide to help others discover, and live out, who they are designed to be.