Category: General

4 TIPS FOR C LEVEL EXECUTIVES TO EMPOWER THE MIDDLE MANAGER

I often think that being a “middle manager” may be the worst place to be in the organizational hierarchy.    I often have middle managers in my leadership classes who complain that they feel stuck in the role of go-betweener.  They feel as though the purpose they serve is to act as a buffer between employees and upper management without the authority to make key decisions that they feel are best for their people and the company.

I recently saw this happening to a middle manager that told me, “I feel like I can’t do my job for fear of losing my job.” One individual was going around him to complain to the C level executive. Instead of the CEO asking the middle manager for his take on the situation, the CEO threw him under the bus and changed a decision that had already been made in order to please the complainer.  This middle manager was stuck in a place where he wasn’t empowered to make his own decisions about how to handle his unit of work for fear that his boss would change the decision.   Instead of thinking,  “What is best for this employee or my people?” he was stuck in the “What would my boss think?” mentality even when he knew his boss didn’t have all the facts.

I offered this person up some advice for improving his situation, but today I’d rather address what C level leaders should do to empower middle managers and get them out of the “stuck” position:

1. Set the vision and mission and give examples of how this should affect decision making for your middle managers.
2. Regularly communicate with your middle managers. Do not create an environment where you are only talking to them when something goes wrong.
3. If someone comes to you with a complaint about their manager, ask them if they have discussed the issue with their manager. Unless it is an issue related to harassment, direct that person back to their immediate manager to discuss and resolve.  Emphasize that their manager is the decision maker and that you are there to support him/her.
4. If there are frequent issues of people coming around their manager to discuss issues with you, examine why this is happening and have a candid conversation with this manager. It may be that you are micromanaging decision making instead of empowering and teaching your middle managers to be leaders instead of the go-between.

When have you had someone override a decision you made and how did it make you feel?  What was the result of the decision being changed?

Last week,  I talked about how boredom at work is one of the worst employment states and offered suggestions for how employees can improve bored working conditions.  I want to focus now on leaders who have bored workers.

If you have people who are bored on the job, I believe there are two primary reasons and two primary tips for curing the boredom.

1. They are bored because you don’t need them, or you don’t need them full-time. 

Long gone are the days where every single position on the face of the planet needed to be a 40 hour a week job.  Nothing is a waste of money and talent more than paying people for time in a chair rather than time being productive.  Yet we are so enthralled with the 40 hour work week.

If your people are sitting there with nothing to do 50% of the time, then you need to either delegate (see below) tasks to them, or find a modified way to employ them in the time that it takes them to complete the job, whether this is full-time or not.

Tip 1: Consider Contract

In an interesting article entitled The Forgotten 5th?, by Erik Pages, an emphasis is placed on 1/5th of the workforce that operates on a contract basis.  Maybe contracting is an option for you to maximize your money and maximize others’ talent.

In addition, Charles Handy, a great British thinker who was way ahead of his time, talks about the usefulness of the nimble “flea”  in his book  The Elephant and the Flea instead of the cumbersome “elephant” as an organization and a workplace.  Maybe you need to employ more “fleas” or “free agents” and think creatively about how to design jobs and working hours to get work done as efficiently and effectively as possible.

2.  They are bored because you have the I can do it better than everyone else syndrome. In other words, you have trouble delegating.

I recently had someone tell me, “Well, I don’t just hand it over because it takes more time to hand it over than it takes for me to do it myself.”   I’ll admit, I’ve had these feelings before myself, but in actuality, if this thought is occurring to you more often than not, and you’re also overwhelmed with your workload (the person I am referencing definitely is overwhelmed with his workload), then why aren’t you handing things off to people you are paying to get work done for you?

Tip 2: Delegate

Map out what you have to do every day or every week.   Pinpoint is what is critical for you do to, then delegate the rest.  Oftentimes we have an emotional attachment to certain task(s) or clients.  Instead of considering who we employ that could learn and thrive on these tasks or client interactions, we take them for ourselves because we are emotionally attached. That emotional attachment is often, to be quite honest, tied to wanting to get the credit for the work.  But leaders make more leaders, and credit does not matter so much to leaders as developing people does.  Delegate to develop.

New Leader Tuesday-Develop as a Decision Coach