4 Vital Ways To Make Your Middle Managers Successful
Being in middle management is a tough job. Middle managers are often caught between a rock and a hard place. Senior management demand the middle managers deliver their plans, their goals, and their vision often while providing little in the way of help. On the other side, middle managers are also responsible for keeping their team happy, productive, engaged and developing. Senior management is focused on next quarter and next year. The workers are focused on today and next week. Middle managers are stuck in the middle trying to link both these very different groups with different aims and needs. Being a middle manager is tough.
Middle managers are absolutely vital in driving the success of a business. Research by McKinsey’s shows that organisations with top performing middle managers create 3 to 21 times the shareholder returns compared to those companies with average managers over a 5 year period. A compelling reason to invest to make your middle managers more successful.
4 vital ways to make your middle managers successful:
- Communicate more clearly – your expectations plus the goals and deliverables you want from your middle managers
- Train your middle managers in leadership so they become successful quicker
- Provide responsibility and flexibility to your middle managers
- Work at measuring success and accountability
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communicate more clearly your expectations and their goals – The first vital way to make your middle managers successful
A question for you – “How do you expect middle managers to add the most value to your organisation?”
Research reports that more than half of middle managers report that they deliver the most value to their business through strategy-focused work, such as developing plans and projects and overseeing initiatives. The second most commonly cited area that managers can add the most value is developing their employee’s skills and capability.
In contrast to this, these same middle managers say their organisation values and rewards those that individually create great output. Nearly half of their time is devoted to non-managerial work such as administration and creating the individual output their organisations value.
Stop wasting your middle managers!
Encourage them to spend more of their time on the more valuable activities such as translating your business strategy and goals into projects, tasks and activities that will transform it into reality within your business.
Make the time to help your middle managers understand exactly how they can contribute to the success of the business. Work alongside them to plan out the projects and initiatives that will improve performance and best translate the company strategy into the daily and weekly activity of the staff your middle managers look after. Your managers will value the additional time you spend with them, and you will get a better understanding of how the business plans and goals will be met.
The more you publicly recognise, praise, and reward the work middle managers do on delivery the strategy and developing their teams, the higher the general perception of its value. This will result in more of middle managers time and energy being focused on the highest value activities they can do. Align your incentive programmes and reporting to further reinforce and increase the importance of strategy focused work and the development of others.
train your middle managers in leadership – The second vital way to make your middle managers successful
In nearly every profession – lawyers, doctors, accountants, and teachers – individuals receive a lot of specific training and gain specific qualifications before they are allowed to work in those professions. Most people promoted into management positions are expected to get on with the job and be successful with no or little specific training.
Those organisations with middle managers in the top quartile on average create 3 to 21 times more shareholder value than those with managers in lower quartiles. Investing in training your middle managers should give you very impressive returns.
How are you going to help your managers be good at delegating, at project management, at giving and receiving feedback, at dealing with conflict and at developing their teams? Being a successful manager is more than a collection of skills. Successful management is understanding the best way to apply management skills to a large range of different situations. Teach successful management mindsets and approaches and you increase how effective your managers are.
Invest more of your time in developing your reports. Ask them to do the same. Enrol managers on training programmes such as our Management Skills Accelerator course. Organise coaching and mentoring both internally and from external providers. Develop peer learning programmes, buddy systems and cross training programmes. There are so many development options for all budgets and time commitments.
Making time and focusing on developing the managers within your business is perhaps the most important first step to make your middle managers successful.
Provide responsibility and flexibility to your middle managers
Middle managers are asked to walk a tightrope between the leadership and the staff. To do this successfully and effectively, give them the responsibility and flexibility to make decisions based on the staff and situations they face.
Middle managers are tasked with getting the best from their teams, with developing staff, with organising them, focusing team time on the most valuable areas, with keeping engagement, motivation and ownership high … having permission and the ability adapt their approach will make them a lot more successful. A successful team results in higher team and business performance. Good news for everyone.
A barrier to pragmatic and flexible management is excessive rules, requirements and bureaucracy. While a level of structure and process is needed to manage and control complex organisations, drowning middle managers in rules and administration definitely prevents them creating the value you need them to. Why promote talented individuals into middle management positions and waste their talent by exerting excessive control over them, focusing them on administration and limiting their responsibility.
Reduce Their Challenges
Work to reduce the bureaucracy and administration managers have to undertake. Automate as much reporting and low value tasks as practical. Change the way you manage to give increasing amounts of autonomy and flexibility to those middle managers that earn it by delivering great team results.
Remove unnecessary meetings, reduce forms, simplify approval requirements and reduce the amount of low value reporting. Increase the range of decisions and responsibilities that the better performing middle managers are allowed to make.
Another good longer term option is to review and potentially reduce the number of management layers thus increasing job scope in each layer while saving costs.
Do everything you can to maximise the time middle managers focus devote to high value areas. Giving middle managers responsibility and flexibility enable them to do the best job they can to support business success.
work at measuring success and accountability – The fourth vital way to make your middle managers successful
Creating visibility of performance encourages accountability and taking actions to achieve success. No-one wants to be bottom of the pile, to let colleagues and team members down or be branded a failure.
Creating good visibility and accountability is a great step to enable greater flexibility, autonomy, and responsibility throughout the organisation.
Decide on KPIs (or key performance indicators) to track performance in each team, department or business unit. Design KPIs carefully and practically maximise the automation of data collection to minimise administration. Publicly share KPIs and results on a regular basis across the business. The more everyone understands business performance and what they need to do to improve performance, the better the decisions everyone will make at all levels.
To demonstrate that everyone is accountable, work out how the leadership team is going to measure its own success and accountability. How are you going to share this with the employees of the business?
To further encourage managers and employees to be accountable, what mechanisms, rewards and consequences could you create within the business? There are a whole range of options – for example using praise, prizes, promotions, pay rises, bonuses, additional training and opportunities as rewards and reducing or withholding these as consequences.
Visibility of the performance of middle managers and their teams helps you further increase the strength and capability of middle management, which in turn drives business success.
In summary
The success of your business is part depends on how to make middle managers more successful. Communicate exactly what you expect from your middle managers and how they can add the most value to the overall business. Provide as much training, mentoring and coaching as practical so they increase their skills and improve their approach as quickly as possible.
Remove as many barriers, problems, administration, and bureaucracy as possible from middle managers. Give them responsibility and flexibility to do the best jobs they can so that their teams do their best work and use visibility and measurement to further increase accountability, ownership, and the success of middle managers.
Middle managers are vital to translate your strategy, goals and plans into projects, activity and tasks that will turn these into reality within your business.
Help your middle managers set their teams up for success.
If you have any questions on “4 Vital Ways To Make Your Middle Managers Successful”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
Being in middle management positions is tough and exhausting. It can feel like you are running uphill the entire time and managing different groups who are rarely happy with you. It is easy to feel like you are being batter from all sides as a middle manager.
The 4 ways to make middle manager’s life easier will also massively benefit the success of your business so please seriously consider each area discussed and work out the best way to improve how you support your middle management.
Jess
