MOTIVATED TEAMS
Middle managers are more important than ever
Middle managers are the engine of the business, the cogs that make things work, the glue that keeps companies together. In short, they are the implementers of change, according to Alpha Consulting.
“The CEO is given credit or blame for the level of company success,” says Robert Vines, author of the recently published You Can Replace the Jerk at the Top. “While the CEO plays a critical role in a company’s success, middle managers often make the difference.”
The El Paso native is a professional engineer who has moved through the ranks to middle management in four Fortune 500 companies.
“The middle managers, not the CEOs, run the company,” Vines says.
When he joined IBM, it manufactured basic parts for assemblies as well as the final finished product and boasted of as many as 25 levels of management and 385,000 employees.
Who do you think was actually running IBM? Vines asks. It wasn’t the executives; it was middle managers, he answers. “They hire the people who are doing the real work,” he says. “If they don’t hire the right people, they fail.”
Middle managers have to find those uniquely talented people and hire them, Vines says. The hard part and the most crucial factor are evaluating the candidates who have a “can-do attitude,” he adds. “Companies succeed when their employees don’t give up on a task and don’t finish until they are proud of their effort.”
But hiring talented candidates is only the first step, Vines says. The tough part is keeping them motivated and building them into an effective unit.
As a middle manager, Vines developed a couple of techniques that built motivated teams. “The first was always to involve the team in the plan,” he explains. If employees feel that they are a part of the plan, it becomes their plan, and everyone works especially hard to make it work.
It is also better to tell employees what needs to be accomplished rather than how to do something. Then have them tell you how they plan to do it. Do the same with a team. You become a guiding member of the team, not the boss. If you tell them what to do, they will do exactly what you say. That is how they sidestep the boss, because the boss is sometimes wrong, Vines says.
Vines’ second technique was to create a crisis occasionally. This is especially helpful during slow periods. “Teams always stop bickering and rally around an urgent goal,” he says. “The crisis can be a deadline, a sales goal, production or quality target, or a needed improvement.”
Vines can cite dozens of situations where small changes and simple incentives were powerful motivators.
Another factor demonstrating middle managers’ critical function is their role as an advocate for both the company and its employees. “They must always conform to the needs of the company as well as the wishes of top management,” Vines adds. “But it is the wishes of top management that become the most difficult, because they are occasionally hard to reconcile with what seems to be the best interest of the company. The middle manager has the delicate task of modifying an executive wish into a productive suggestion.”
Middle managers also must speak up for employees during periods of staff reductions. “They advocate for the employees to top management because they realize that the value of the company is simply what these people can do,” Vines says. “Giving them up is giving up part of the company. They also must advocate for the company by making the choices of who must go. That will be the middle manager’s worst day.”
Clearly, middle managers make a difference.
How to transition to middle management
“The first step to take to be effective in your new role is to understand that middle management requires a different set of skills than front-line (first-level or supervisory) management,” Vines says. “Specifically, the technical skills that were instrumental in your promotion to middle management are less important to you at this higher level. As a middle manager, you must now excel in your leadership, interpersonal and big-picture (conceptual) work. Your communication, interpersonal relationships, planning and delegation skills are more important at this level than your technical skills.”
As remote and hybrid work become more pervasive — the new normal — and the distance between employees increases, the middle manager’s role becomes even more critical for organizations to function properly.