Scott Mautz - Leading from the Middle

The Role Play: Try the powerful question that follows; I used to ask myself this as a filter before initiating anything: “Am I about to make the right thing happen at the right time for the right reason?”

This means designing structures and processes to support macro‐organizational designs.

The Role Play: Don't design in a silo. Enroll the people who will do the work in the structures and processes you design. What looks good on paper often doesn't translate in the real world. More structure and process are not always the answer; the mortal enemy of the Designer is the Overengineer.

Sometimes your job is to simply implement someone else's strategies or plans.

The Role Play: But even then, think about this role not as order‐taking, but as closing the gap between intention and implementation. In other words, fully understand what the strategy or plan is intended to do, but don't just execute it blindly. To meet that intent, make adjustments and adaptations along the way based on the circumstances. While situational leadership is most certainly a thing, so is situational followership.

All. Day. Long. That's what those in the middle do, make decisions. Key is to ensure you're deciding on the maximum number of things that make the biggest impact.

The Role Play: Negotiate your level of authority to avoid ending up a victim of what researchers call the Karasek model, which says stress is maximized in conditions of high responsibility with little authority to make decisions. 12 Be bold. Get clear on where your decision‐making power starts and ends and push the boundaries. Craft an agreement for autonomy with your boss where you spell out the scope of what you get to make the call on and how your boss will be kept up to speed and can input on what you decide.

Some of the most frequent decisions those who lead from the middle make is how to allocate their resources.

The Role Play: Many things go into good resource allocation, but the most important play is to not underestimate the cost of getting it wrong. For example, poorly allocated resources mean employees are underutilized, projects are delayed, margins drop as more last‐minute contractors are hired, and key projects are under‐resourced or staffed with the wrong skillsets or equipment. Work as hard and carefully at allocating your resources as you did at obtaining them.

Mid‐level managers are at the intersection of the horizontal and vertical information flow in the company; it's easy to get overwhelmed. But the best middle managers avoid analysis paralysis while carefully processing the most important information and using it to trigger action.

The Role Play: The key to being a good synthesizer of information is to listen carefully and be critical of everything you read and hear. The opposite is all too common. For example, it's not unusual to see those leading from the middle take new information and run straight out the window with it because they were in a hurry to decide, because they were overwhelmed with information and just making the call was the easiest way out, or because they weren't skeptical and analytical enough about what was being presented to them. Missteps here also include missing the things not being said or written, failing to keep the motivations in mind of the presenter and getting overly swayed by emotion, and failing to spot discrepancies in data or questionable data sources.

This refers to taking the initiative to advance innovation, to act like an entrepreneur, within your company.

The Role Play: Deloitte research shows the key to doing this well is to avoid the most common intrapreneurship trap—favoring familiar ideas close in proximity to existing solutions over unfamiliar, new ideas (ones that could result in far more meaningful innovation). 13 This may mean taking calculated risks, breaking some rules, and working “underground” (away from broader scrutiny) with your innovation as long as possible to achieve your goals.

Everything meets in the middle, by definition. And the middle manager builds the bridges to connect all sorts of groups, up, down, and across the organization to make things happen. Bridges are built and maintained on trust, the subject of many books, so I'll simply laser in on one aspect of this here.

The Role Play: Remember that every action you take will be put by observers (even if subconsciously) into one of two classifications: something that builds trust or erodes it. Research shows the three best ways to visibly reinforce trust are revealing your thoughts about important issues and encouraging others to raise issues, admitting mistakes, and acting consistently with company values. 14 The opposite of any of these things can destroy the trust you've built up in the blink of an eye. In the middle especially, every action produces a rippling reaction of trust built or broken.

Getting things done from the middle happens by constantly providing context up, down, and across, and by shaping decisions.

The Role Play: Key here is to remember that without proper framing, the building of a house will never progress. Likewise, without proper framing, building support for ideas and desired decisions will never progress, either. So, invest the time it takes to mold and shape the inputs to get the desired outputs. For example, give well‐prepared recommendations framed with multiple options and pros and cons for each.

We've established that the middle is messy, which means what passes through it doesn't always make sense. Employees can easily lose the bigger picture and the plot, disconnecting from why they're doing what they're doing and wondering if what they do matters. A big role of the middle manager is to connect employees with the meaning in and at their work.

The Role Play: As I explain in detail in Make It Matter , you create meaning for employees by connecting them to the higher‐order purpose behind their work, by feeding their learning and growth, by stoking their sense of competency and self‐esteem, by granting autonomy liberally, and by nurturing a caring, authentic, teamwork‐based environment. When you help make meaning, you help employees make sense of why they're spending so many hours at their job.

The effective leader in the middle champions ideas they believe in up, down, and across the organization, helping them to fruition.

The Role Play: The key here is to act as an active sponsor, not a passive fan of the initiative. True champions of an initiative or idea roll their sleeves up to help. They bring in allies for support, help overcome detractors, and tout the initiative's benefits while helping identify weaknesses to be shored up. Champions are in a unique position to help an initiative team see around corners and anticipate barriers. Use that power to aid progress.

This is about constantly controlling flow, keeping things moving to achieve goals. In the end, no one must be more action‐oriented than those who lead from the middle; otherwise you become the bottleneck.

The Role Play: Here's the trick to being a great facilitator, drawn from my experience as a leadership training facilitator. The most important rule of running great training is to design the session with the participants' experience in mind. Think of each opportunity to facilitate in this light. For example, perhaps you're facilitating a meeting between Sales and Product Supply to develop a plan to ship enough product into stores for an upcoming promotion. What does Sales want to experience from the meeting? Put yourself in their shoes. What does Product Supply want to experience? How can you orchestrate the experience of the meeting to produce an outcome that moves things forward?