Managing in the Middle
Advocate, Assert, Adapt
“It feels like I have two full-time jobs. I have 40 hours a week of my own work and then 40 hours a week of leadership.”
A client shared this while exploring why she was feeling “crushed”.
Katy (not her real name) had recently been promoted to a senior management position in a thriving company that was growing aggressively through mergers and acquisitions. She’d been tasked with creating and running a department that was creating a new consumer channel - one she believed could eventually become the primary profit center for the business.
When this conversation happened, she had 9 direct reports, despite having no previous leadership experience, a host of individual responsibilities she couldn’t delegate, and was serving as a part of three distinct cross-departmental teams driving innovation in different segments of the business.
Katy’s situation is not unique. It reflects the crisis of middle management in many organizations.
The crushing weight of being caught in the middle between:
Strategy and Execution
Leading and Doing
Creating and Managing
Sadly, it often involves:
Accountability without Authority.
Responsibility without Autonomy.
Decision-Making without Clarity.
The weight of competing expectations and priorities, coupled with the multidirectional pressure from executives, shareholders, customers, and employees, can be devastating.
Coaching clients like Katy is one of our most missional and meaningful tasks. It’s also some of the most challenging.
There are no easy fixes.
We live in a time and economic system that rewards and expects leaders to do more with less.
Unfortunately, the answer to who does more is often middle managers. And, the answer to who receives less - less resources, less acknowledgement, and less development, also middle managers.
When Katy says she feels like she’s “being crushed,” she’s not being hyperbolic; to her and to many others, the weight of pressure, responsibility, and workload can feel, and in many cases simply is crushing.
So, what can Katy do?
Again, there are no easy solutions, but there are things Katy can do that will help.
Advocate
Katy is fortunate. She works for an organization that is competitive and savvy, but they also care about people. In Katy’s case, she’s been a successful self-starter for her whole life. She prides herself on her independence, toughness, and self-reliance. And, truthfully, she is all of those things in spades. However, in some cases, there are realities that are too daunting for even the most capable.
If Katy doesn’t tell her organization how she’s struggling, they will assume everything is fine and working as anticipated. It’s incumbent on her to communicate her reality to the organization so they can respond accordingly. If she can’t do this for herself, at least she can do this for her team.
And if she’s feeling responsible for things that she doesn’t have authority or autonomy to change, she needs to communicate that - her supervisor or organization may be able to provide additional support, or simply reset expectations by removing the perception of responsibility where it doesn’t exist, or assigning additional authority and autonomy.
Self-Coach (Advocate)
What do I need?
Who can I ask for help?
What does my team need?
How can I help?
If our department were operating at peak performance, what would be different?
What’s the value of that difference to the organization?
Assert
Epictetus is credited with saying, "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them."
One of the challenges of the pressure that middle managers face is that in many instances, they’ve never faced anything like this before. Therefore, their psychoemotional toolkit is poorly equipped to hamper the deleterious effects of the stress and weight of expectations. Therefore, these pressures become amplified, causing in some cases as much harm as the external realities themselves.
The solution here is simple, but far from easy. It involves the manager learning how to set boundaries, recalibrate expectations, and hold a more realistic view of what’s possible and … what’s not.
There are tactical skills that can help facilitate this, like time management, goal setting, and delegation. But, for the most part, the most beneficial skills to develop are psychological and emotional: comfort with ambiguity, navigating change, managing stress, resolving imposter syndrome, becoming aware of and managing emotions, and others.
Self-Coach (Assert)
What are my supervisor’s expectations for my performance?
Are they higher, lower, or the same as the expectations I’m placing on myself?
How does my work fit into a broader vision of a fulfilling life?
Is it currently occupying too much space?
Adapt
Not all stress is bad. In fact, growth happens when we are uncomfortable, within a specific threshold. Advocate and Assert are about ensuring the discomfort isn’t so high that it’s counterproductive and crippling.
Adapt is about leveraging the remaining discomfort to promote growth. Part of the challenge of being a middle manager is simply a byproduct of the novelty of the role, responsibilities, and challenges therein.
Rather than seeking to eliminate or wish away the discomfort, the manager should learn to reframe it as an indicator that they are being stretched and, therefore, given the opportunity to grow. Middle management is sort of like the teenage transition into adulthood - it won’t always look or feel good, but it’s a necessary part of the journey for skill and mindset development.
Self-Coach (Adapt)
What discomfort are you feeling?
What gratitude do you have for what the discomfort is teaching you?
What’s the gap between where you are and where you want to be?
How can you use this current season to close that gap?
Our hearts go out to anyone feeling crushed like Katy was. Being caught in the middle is challenging at least and often overwhelming.
But it isn’t hopeless.
There are two paths forward.
If the weight is simply too much - this is an invitation to get out from under it. Use the self-coaching reflection in Advocate and Assert to lighten the load.
If the weight is heavy, but not unbearable - this is an invitation to get stronger until the weight is manageable. Use the self-coaching reflection in Adapt to chart a path towards growth.
