Leading from the Middle: A Playbook for Managers to Influence Up, Down, and Across the Organization

by Scott Mautz

Everyone seems to offer you a "playbook" these days.

Don't be fooled by the old Dilbert cartoons or Office reruns. Those who lead from the middle, let's use the often‐derogatory term “middle management” for a moment, aren't the go‐nowhere, has‐been, mediocre bureaucrats that block progress as popularized in pop culture. They're the ones that love what they do (mostly) and whose passion and talents make the company hum. They account for 22.3 percent of the variation in revenue in an organization, more than three times that attributed to those specifically in innovation roles, according to Wharton research.2 A five‐year study from Stanford and Utah universities found that replacing a poor middle manager with a good one boosted productivity 12 percent, more than adding an incremental worker to a team.3

Those leading from the middle are the key to employee engagement. They interact with the largest part of the organization and have the most direct impact on attracting and retaining talent. In fact, research shows that employees who have strong middle leaders are 20 percent less likely to quit their job if offered more money from another company.4 The Boston Consulting Group defined mid‐level managers as “vital to success,” according to their massive survey of executives spanning 100 countries that found nearly two‐thirds of respondents said middle managers were more critical than top managers.5

Being in the middle always means the chance to lead, it just requires a keen awareness and understanding of the conditions around you, so you know exactly what actions to take at what time.

It also always gives you the opportunity to follow or to influence.

I asked more than 3,000 managers who lead up, down, and across their organization what the most challenging thing is about their position. Nearly three‐quarters of responses had to do with the scope of their responsibility. Within that broad, daunting scope lie five categories of unique difficulties those leading from the middle face, captured in the acronym SCOPE and illustrated in Figure 1.2.

When you lead up, down, and across you wear more hats than you can keep track of. It requires constant micro‐switching, moving from one role to the other, all day long.

Mary Galloway, an Industrial and Organizational Psychologist and faculty member of the Jack Welch Management Institute, told me, “Middle managers are like the middle child of an organization, often neglected by senior managers and blamed by their reports. However, they're still expected to be as charming as the youngest and simultaneously as responsible as the oldest. We end up with middle child syndrome, enshrouded in conflict, wanting more of a say, and not sure how they fit in.”

In another big, multi‐industry study, researchers from Columbia University and the University of Toronto found that employees in mid‐level roles in their organization had much higher rates of depression and anxiety than employees at the top or bottom of the organizational hierarchy. In fact, 18 percent of supervisors and managers experienced symptoms of depression (40 percent said the depression derived from stress), 51 percent of managers were “constantly worried” about work, and 43 percent said the pressure they were under was excessive.9 Eric Anicich of the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business says the constant micro‐transitions from frequent role changes are psychologically challenging to the point of detriment.10 For example, disengaging in a high deference task to engage in a high assertiveness task leads to even more stress and anxiety, and a host of related physical problems like hypertension and heart disease.

A Reframework

Pick low‐risk situations to practice saying “no” and commit to delegating more.

My research reveals there are 21 distinct roles middle managers must play. Think of what follows as a 21‐gun salute. I'll honor each role with a brief description and then give you plays for each one (I call them “Role Plays”), in the form of the single best piece of advice to succeed with each hat you wear.

The Role Play: Toggle between the three strategy jobs to do (many mid‐level managers stop at the first job). First, cascade top‐down strategies to fully implement top management's intentions. Start by fully understanding the strategies, then share perspective to gain commitment when converting the strategies into operational tactics. Second, shape top‐down strategies in advance by analyzing information available to you, assessing opportunities and threats, and sharing your perspective and recommendations with decision makers above you. Finally, champion “on the ground” strategies, ones that you and your team create and implement given what you know by being closest to customers, consumers, and competitors. This last strategy job to do is the most often missed or underserved, which is a travesty, as one study showed that a whopping 80 percent of strategic projects initiated by top management failed while 80 percent of those initiated by mid‐level managers succeeded.11

This turns one role into three.

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

What does Sales want to experience from the meeting? Put yourself in their shoes.

Why not ask them?

Author Peter Bregman has the essence of driving accountability exactly right—it's about achieving clarity on five things. Be clear on expectations, capability (resources and skills required to complete the work), measurement, feedback, and consequences.15 It's as simple as that, but know that it's an all‐or‐nothing proposition. If you miss on any one of these five points, accountability will crumble.

Note how one role has five things to do and you must do all of them or accountability will crumble.

power plays

I thought they were role plays

The Others‐Oriented Leadership Mindset

If you want to thrive in leading from the middle, it can't be all about you. It's about helping everyone and everything around you to thrive.

If you want to lead successfully from anywhere, it can't be all about you.

For this reason, others‐oriented leadership is related to servant leadership; it's even from the same leadership tree. However, it's a different branch with critical differences. Classical servant leadership invokes an inverted leadership hierarchy; that is, the leader's main function is to serve those below him or her, putting employees' needs first, rather than vice versa. You don't think less of yourself; you just think of yourself less. You know that strength doesn't make you capable of rule, it makes you capable of service. But service doesn't mean subservience. With others‐oriented leadership, 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, which can happen with a pure servant leadership mindset. You know when it's time to command and direct versus support and stay in the shadows.

Others‐oriented leadership further distinguishes itself from classic servant leadership by avoiding the five stigmas (whether they're fair or not) associated with servant leadership.

I'm not sure this is fair to servant leadership, but more importantly, I don't know why we should define Other-Orieinted leadership in relation to anything else. The Marines handle it pretty well. If you're a leader (in the middle or otherwise) you have two jobs. Accomplish the mission and care for the people.

Reports of compassion fatigue (getting burned out in trying to always put others' needs first) are not uncommon with servant leaders.

Is there any evidence to support this statement?

The Others‐Oriented Compass

It starts with understanding that power flows through you, not from you, for the most part.

There are so many roles to play and so many things for an effective, others‐oriented leader from the middle to think about. But what's the net spirit and essence of all the activity the successful middle manager engages in? Into what role do all other roles feed at the highest level? What's the highest‐level skill required, and the skillset required to succeed within? I wanted to pinpoint this, so I interviewed or surveyed 1,000 others‐oriented leaders leading from the middle. I asked them to step back and describe their job when it was being done at its best. Very clear themes emerged. In fact, I kept hearing one word in particular, over and over. Amplify. Those who lead from the middle with an others‐oriented mindset and do it well describe their job on the whole as being an amplifier. You're not a mere conduit between everything and everyone up, down, and across. You make things that need to be heard, heard. You make things clearer and more powerful—like an amplifier. You bring the micro to the macro. You bring a quality to what people hear by sharing your perspective and framing it properly. You amplify the strengths of your employees and peers by investing heavily in them, amplify senior leadership's vision, mission, and strategies (making sure they connect to the team's daily work), amplify the team's effectiveness and output, and amplify the entire organization's capabilities and results. You share and amplify the truth, data, and different perspectives, in all dire...

And as luck would have it, I can offer the perfect seven‐letter acronym to help you remember each skill: AMPLIFY. The acronym is spelled out below, then we'll tackle each skill/letter one at a time for the rest of the chapter. Adaptability Meshing Political savviness Locking in Influencing Fostering compromise You setting the tone

I have plenty to work on as a leader but I can say a strength is being able to turn on a dime and pivot when required. I credit use of the 50/50 Rule for this, along with my willingness to quickly break from the past when needed. I don't get hung up in how things were or the pain of shifting—I just shift to pragmatism and possibility. I've also learned when you expect much of yourself in times requiring adaptiveness and are self‐confident along the way (recalling that you've navigated change successfully many times over), you build resilience, which makes the need to adapt in the future easier.

This would be a great place for an example of how this worked in pratice, rather than a statement of how good you are at adaptability.

A study from the University of Southern California illustrates what I mean. Researchers tracked results when leaders used a learning prompt with newly promoted executives every two weeks. The prompt was, “What have you done since we last talked, and what, if anything, have you learned from it?” The executives quickly started paying rapt attention to their growth because they knew the boss would be asking and were amazed at how much they were learning.1 You can use this same tactic to show that you expect learning and growth. And when you couple it with having patience and empathy for the learning process (and tolerance for mistakes), adaptability blossoms.

Whenever these signs start appearing often enough to indicate a trend, I've found it's very helpful to sit down with employees and, with great empathy, dig deeper. We'd discuss four hypotheses for their malaise (all rooted in the most common underlying causes of the chronic stress that leads to burnout):

There's a lot of research on this topic, there's no reason for the author to have his own four things. This where I quit reading.