Leading from the Middle

1. Leading from the Middle: A Unique and Vital Role

Those leading from the middle are the key to employee engagement.

The linchpin. Middle managers are not the bureaucratic roadblocks often portrayed, but rather the vital connection between senior leadership and frontline employees. They are the key to employee engagement, productivity, and ultimately, a company's success. They account for a significant portion of revenue variation and boost productivity when effective.

Leading in all directions. Leading from the middle requires influencing up, down, and across the organization. This unique position offers the opportunity to impact all levels, making it a career-defining role. It's about knowing and embracing your position, realizing that being in the middle is a blessing, offering the opportunity to lead in all directions.

Embrace the challenge. Don't be fooled by negative stereotypes. Leading from the middle is a chance to lead, to make a difference, and to drive progress within the organization. Take pride in your position and recognize the value you bring.

2. Navigating the Messy Middle: Understanding the Five Core Challenges (SCOPE)

Leading from the messy middle means dealing with Self‐Identity, Conflict, Omnipotence, Physical, and Emotional challenges.

The SCOPE framework. The unique difficulties of leading from the middle can be categorized into five areas: Self-Identity, Conflict, Omnipotence, Physical, and Emotional challenges. Understanding these challenges is the first step to overcoming them.

Addressing the challenges.

• Self-Identity: Combat role-switching fatigue by recognizing your pivotal role as the core of the organization.
• Conflict: Embrace the constant contradictions and view them as opportunities to impact in all directions.
• Omnipotence: Focus on discerning what you should know, rather than trying to know everything.
• Physical: Prioritize self-care and set boundaries to reduce stress and maintain well-being.
• Emotional: Recognize that feelings of isolation are common, but you are a safe haven for workers and can control your attitude.

Reframing the perspective. By reframing these challenges, middle managers can transform them from daunting obstacles into opportunities for growth and leadership. It's about seeing the potential for impact in every direction and taking pride in the unique skills required to navigate the messy middle.

3. The Others-Oriented Leadership Mindset: A Compass for the Middle

If you want to thrive in leading from the middle, it can't be all about you.

Shifting the focus. The most effective mindset for leading from the middle is the "others-oriented" approach, which prioritizes understanding and acting on the perspectives of those around you. It's about helping everyone and everything around you to thrive.

The Others-Oriented Compass. This mindset is guided by four considerations:

• What You Give: Credit, praise, informed encouragement, bedrock respect, time, attention, assurance of mastery.
• What You Give Up: Self-interest as first priority, power and control (selectively), the limelight (selectively), information, hubris and ego, the need to be liked all the time.
• What's a Given: Concern for success of all stakeholders, asking and acting, willingness to share a prioritized workload, prioritizing investment in others, readiness to flex to authoritative mode, everything from authenticity.
• What You Get: Trust, loyalty, full engagement, sense of community and kinship, accountability, strength in adversity/resilience, peak performance.

Servitude, not subservience. While power flows through you in servitude, you don't deny your power, knowing when it must flow from you. You lead with others in mind, but make no mistake, you serve and you lead—you don't lose your authoritative leadership qualities.

4. Amplifying Impact: The Seven Core Skills (AMPLIFY)

You make things that need to be heard, heard.

The amplifier essence. The most effective middle managers act as amplifiers, making things clearer and more powerful. They amplify the strengths of their employees, senior leadership's vision, and the entire organization's capabilities.

The AMPLIFY skillset:

• Adaptability: Embrace flexibility and be receptive to change.
• Meshing: Foster collaboration and reconcile conflicting viewpoints.
• Political Savviness: Understand the organizational landscape and navigate it effectively.
• Locking In: Identify and address hidden constraints, capacities, capabilities, and cultural elements.
• Influencing: Persuade and motivate others through clear communication and nonverbal cues.
• Fostering Compromise: Broker peace and find common ground between opposing interests.
• You Setting the Tone: Exude trust, transparency, and a positive attitude.

Building the skills. Each skill can be developed through specific techniques and practices, such as the 50/50 Rule for adaptability, the three C's of collaboration, and the SHARP acronym for persuasive communication.

5. Leading Up: Building a Partnership with Your Boss

Being held in high regard by your boss is one of the most powerful forms of influence and visibility you can wield.

The Managing Up Staircase. Building a strong partnership with your boss requires a step-by-step approach:

• Step 1: Nature Before Nurture: Understand the fundamental nature of the boss-subordinate relationship as interdependence between two imperfect human beings.
• Step 2: Understand the Asks: Clarify expectations by asking specific questions about performance, behaviors, and priorities.
• Step 3: Style Awareness: Adapt to your boss's communication, decision-making, and conflict-resolution styles.
• Step 4: Get Personal: Build rapport by understanding your boss's pressures, aspirations, and values.
• Step 5: Your House in Order: Ensure you are delivering results, know your business, and are organized and prepared.
• Step 6: Purposeful Support: Provide information, expand capacity, lead decision-making, solve problems, and advocate for your boss.

Avoiding common mistakes. Managing up is not sucking up, deference is not an obligation, it shouldn't come at the expense of managing down, your boss doesn't have extrasensory perception, and your boss doesn't define you.

6. Leading Down: Coaching, Feedback, and Teachable Moments

It's about relationships, not reporting lines.

The coaching mindset. Effective downward influence is about building relationships, fostering commitment, and facilitating growth. It's about being a facilitator, not a fixer, and helping others improve, not proving your own depth of knowledge.

The Coaching Conversation Funnel. Structure coaching conversations with a clear start (purpose and desired outcome), a focused middle (seeking to understand, ironing out distortions, and triggering options), and a reinforced end (expectations and accountability).

Pinpointing opportunity areas. Identify areas for improvement by considering the shadow of strengths, facing reality, discerning between aptitude and attitude issues, isolating themes, calibrating your point of view, and getting the skeletons out of their closet.

Giving transformative feedback. Follow the SHARES framework (Situation, Halo, Articulate, Result, Example, Solicit) to deliver feedback that is specific, sincere, calibrating, proportionate, timely, and tailored.

Seizing teachable moments. Be alert to opportunities to teach and guide, such as when reality doesn't match expectations, during conflicts, when the "A" game isn't present, after a risk is taken, or when you can share the view from the window seat.

7. Leading Across: Influencing Peers Through Connection and Value

You influence peers when you draw them to you, creating a desire for them to work more closely with you.

Building a foundation of connection. Treat peers as potential relationships, not just transactions. Get to know them, find common ground, and be someone they can confide in.

The Golden Rule of Influence. Influence others the same basic ways you were influenced: by caring, listening, giving, and teaching.

The Four Pillars of Peer Influence:

• Build the Right Reputation: Be known for willingness to help, expertise, objectivity, fairness, ownership, shining in adversity, crediting others, and enthusiasm.
• Make Unexpected Investments: Provide peer-to-peer feedback and advocate for your peers' success.
• Hardwire Their Help: Use reciprocity, give 10% more, link your agenda to theirs, and solve problems together.
• Get the Approach Right: Be clear on your context, know what you're asking, respect their time, understand their motivations, let them have the ideas, and exert the opposite of peer pressure.

8. Leading Change: Navigating the Emotional Journey and Building Commitment

It's not the change itself that's painful, it's the transition.

Understanding the truths of leading change. Change elicits an emotional journey, is more than a process, is historical, is about changing habits, requires visible champions, and happens sequentially.

The EMC2 Change Model:

• Phase 0: Conduct a Change Readiness Assessment: Get clear on what's changing and why, assess the skill, will, and hill, get meaningful early input, and establish a Change Coalition.
• Phase 1: Evoke Enthusiasm for Change: Transparently express the state of the union, articulate the personal impact, and create excited urgency.
• Phase 2: Move Employees to Commitment: Feed the know-how, leverage the Circles of Commitment (safe, involved, accountable), and create commitment in context.
• Phase 3: Create New Habits2: Follow the laws of habit change (obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying), help develop new routines, and keep revisiting what's at stake.

The One-on-One Change Conversation Guide. Use this guide to understand and address individual concerns, build trust, and foster commitment to the change.

Last updated: March 13, 2025