Middle management can be the amplifier for any organization with a more significant impact on business success than the quality of the products and services offered. It is the engine of strategic organizational alignment, the engine that ensures execution, excellence and commitment.
But middle management can also become the rubber band in the middle of your companyโs organization that creates stalemate inertia and prevents change and growth. It can bounce back any top-down changes, regardless of how necessary they are. At the same time, it can keep โunder the lidโ any ideas, innovations or signals coming from the bottom of the organization. This poses a major threat to the success of the organization because the ability to change and adapt is crucial for being able to thrive in most markets today.
The Paradigm of the Rubber Middleย
If you have ever worked in a company with โrubber middleโ, you are probably able to recognize the perfume of stagnation from afar. The head notes are boastfully announced strategic initiatives that silently die before they manage to make any difference and are never If you have ever worked in a company with โrubber middleโ, you are probably able to recognize the perfume of stagnation from afar.
The head notes are boastfully announced strategic initiatives that silently die before they manage to make any difference and are never heard of again. The heart notes reek of the innovative ideas rotting somewhere in the infinite internal scrutiny. And the base notes? That is the mud of unclear, poorly guided meetings, priorities shifts without explanation and ambiguity of roles and responsibilities. In the ultimate phase of the rubber middle, most employees are disengaged, sitting it in while looking for a better job. And the top executives are being replaced faster and faster by the shareholders – in the hope that the next one will be the one who will bring the magical recipe to solve this situation.ย
The bad news is that once companies have allowed this rubber middle to fully solidify, there is no easy recipe for how to get rid of it. The middle management is numerous and holds substantial institutional knowledge. Trying to break through it takes a lot of persistence and courage. Necessary personnel changes can lead to temporary disruption of the companyโs operations and cause panic among employees and key stakeholders.
The good news is that unless your company is in the ultimate stage of this โrubber middleโ situation, you should still be able to step by step reverse it. One of the corrective actions is changing the criteria on how the middle management is selected/recruited and developed.
Overcoming the Peterโs Principle Situation
When considering someone ready to be promoted to middle management (manager of managers, usually corresponds to level Director or Senior Director), most companies probably leverage the following set of criteria:
- Merit in the current role
- Potential to take on more of additional responsibilities
Focus on the first point โMerit in the current roleโ only would very likely lead to a Peterโs principle situation where people are promoted above their abilities This happens as merit in lower management levels is usually based on specialization, respectively, excellence in a particular, localized part of the business. But success in middle management and above requires becoming a generalist with a broader level of understanding of the organization and their peersโ agendas.
Thus the future success of the company really depends on effective assessment of the point nr. 2; the potential to take on more of additional responsibilities. It is crucial for the growth and even survival of your organization to continuously assess the middle management (and above) potential!
โA general is expected to have general knowledge of everything in the army – blue, red, green, and everything in between. It is because they have this general knowledge that leaders can be trusted to make major decisions.โ
Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World.ย
The quote above is from one of the best books about leadership I have ever read and holds a lot of ideas for hyper nimble organizations that grow from overcoming the Peterโs Principle.
In most organizations, the role of middle/upper middle management is not dissimilar to being a general. Directors/Senior Directors (or equivalent title) are expected to lead their part of the organization in alignment with the company’s strategic direction. They are expected to make decisions on the execution of the said strategic direction, and course-corrections. They are expected to troubleshoot and provide feedback back to the top leadership. If they do that purely based on their specialized knowledge and expertise from the past, they will be wildly unsuccessful. Blue, green or red, at this level they need to be qualified to make the best decisions taking into account all the colors. But how to assess that someone will be successful in being the general(ist) when the usual pool of candidates is coming from specialists?
Learning Mindset based promotions are assessed holistically
The secret sauce is to assess holistically the promotion potential based on the learning mindset of the candidates, for which we developed the Learning Mindset Profilers on the personal and team level.
Why emphasis on the word holistically? When shifting from specialist to generalist, you need to stretch different learning muscles beyond those that you built as a specialist. Innate human competencies such as Imagination, Curiosity, Openness, Empathy, and Consilience suddenly appear of major importance in comparison to the pure ability to learn from the books/research/courses. Also, the importance of learning through social interactions weighs in at this stage as the major stream of learning – as the crucial part of being the โgeneralโ is to understand your peers and their agendas.
โLearning is not compulsoryโฆ and neither is survival.โ
William Edwards Deming.
As the quote by W.E. Deming suggests, focus on learning is a must. If the candidates for middle and upper middle management roles are selected based on their holistic ability to learn (and further developed in this area after they got the job), there is a good chance that they will not form the โrubber middle”. Quite the contrary – they will be for the organization the super power driving co
The Learning Mindset Organisationโs mission is to support individuals, teams and organisations in developing much-needed learning mindsets. To this end, we not only offer global services such as keynotes, consulting, coaching and human-centred innovation, but have also developed unique Learning Mindset Profilers with AI and coaching options based on Jana Gutierrez Kardumโs and Katja Schipperheijnโs expertise and research for the book The Learning Mindset.
The purpose of these profilers is to help you reflect on your mindset, after which you can use the results to relate to and reframe it. Both the free profiler and the profiler for professionals and teams are connected to the five drives that underpin your learning mindset But remember, the total score isnโt what matters, itโs the progress you choose to make that truly counts.
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