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Mid-Management: Engagement’s Final Frontier

In a Harvard Business School study, mid-level managers emerged as the most disengaged of all workers.¹ This is not a big surprise. Mid-managers are overworked, undervalued, and the most at-risk employees during lay-offs. Academics and business authors routinely suggest that we get rid of them as a first step to becoming more lean and improving organizational performance. It’s practically mindless at this point. It also protects the executive ranks from the impact of necessary downsizing.

Organizations have a history of adding more and more work to mid-managers. We frequently select many mid-managers because they get the job done quickly and accurately. We then promote them to manage others or to use that core strength to finish an important project. However, many do not receive management skills training, so instead of elevating to a level of management performance, they generally continue doing the work the way that led to their success. Thus, their workload goes up until they break or leave. Ongoing restructuring, the elimination of career ladders, and persistent insecurity have diluted mid-managers’ loyalty. Many become demoralized and disenfranchised. Why don’t we manage this group better?

In 2012, Harvard Business Review indicated that almost half of the Gen-Xs, which represents the largest segment of mid-managers, planned to leave their jobs within two years. A year before, Bersin & Associates released the findings of their research and indicated that: “Middle managers have fewer resources, manage more people, and are less engaged than all other employee groups.”² This is backwards. If we think so little of them, why do we let mid-managers lead and motivate the organization’s largest number of workers, often the ones that directly touch our customers?

Take a moment to consider all of the managers in customer service call centers, grocery stores, department stores, service centers, specialty retailers, schools, insurance agencies, healthcare, and government. Now imagine that stressed, overworked, and disengaged professionals are managing the very individuals that engage with our prospective or dedicated customers. Yet we wonder why we complain about the poor customer service we experience and why it so pervasive. The problem has grown to the point that many companies routinely do nothing because the competition is exactly the same. Why change if the public hates everyone in the category? It has been normalized as something that cannot be avoided.

There is this deeply embedded organizational message that is quite clear and also destructive. We tell mid-managers to keep moving faster. We then invest far more time and money on our executives and sales teams. It’s a relatively codependent way of existing. No one questions it and everyone plays along. But isn’t it a little odd that the people who most influence our market interface can be treated as such an afterthought?

A Day in the Life of a Mid-Level Manager

Years ago, I was listening to a human resources manager talk about the dreadful past she had lived through. Earlier that year, the firm’s headquarters tower caught fire. She was given the responsibility to handle the injured and dead team members. Her next job was to relocate more than 3,000 employees to new quarters. About three months later, a few missteps by the CEO led to laying off more than 2,000 workers, followed quickly by another 1,500. During their annual holiday celebration, they did one of those gift lotteries. She got a cheese wheel with a hatchet. Someone at the table laughed, “Isn’t that appropriate.”

I remember asking her if anyone, just once, had asked her how she was doing and she responded with a flood of tears. They were tears filled with sorrow, loss, and sheer emotional exhaustion. She had laid-off friends, colleagues, people she had known and worked with for years, and yet no one asked. The implicit message was, “You should be happy to have a job.”

Mid-managers who run profit centers have many of the same issues, but they are treated far more respectfully than managers in areas categorized as overhead. This particular category often falls victim to a syndrome I call “losing one’s life through competency.” They become mid-managers because they solve problems quickly and effectively. They know their job and they do it well. When we promote them, they solve larger volumes of problems. Their support system, if they even have one, can rarely keep up. They work harder and faster until the day comes where they simply run out of fuel. Sound familiar?

Back then my friend from the bank was living in the era of the One-Minute Manager, a popular book by Spencer Johnson. The book struck a chord because it was a concept so appropriate for the times when people were veritable machines constantly racing towards the next quota. The pressure to keep running overshadowed the concept of right-sizing our attention based on the needs of the person in front of us.

The Morphing of the Mid-Level Manager’s Role

Mid-managers were once the “jack-of-all-trades” and the watch-dogs. We went to them to solve problems and for key information. They came after us when we fell behind to fill the gaps. Today, the internet is one of the biggest competitors with middle management. There is essentially an answer for anything and it’s instantaneously available. In many organizations, mid-managers are there to simply keep track of what people are doing. Today, technology does a much better job of tracking performance.

As the need for mid-management changes, there is a real opportunity for these individuals to look at life beyond the trappings of recent years and become experts, counselors, coaches, and leaders who inspire the best from everyone they touch. This is a very different role than someone who checks the boxes of productivity, which for most, especially the Millennials, is just meddlesome and irritating.

Engaged workers want and expect to be trusted. The traditional mid-manager interferes with that need. Today, the mid-manager exemplifies the type of individual that most needs to change and yet has reached a certain level of success by doing the same thing over and over, more and more quickly. Ongoing restructuring, the elimination of career ladders, and persistent insecurity have diluted the mid-managers’ loyalty, as many have become demoralized and disenfranchised.

Where We Go From Here

As stated earlier, almost half of the Gen-Xs, which represents the largest segment of mid-managers, planned to leave their jobs within two years. But are they going to get better jobs? The probability is high that their next jobs might be only incrementally better or the same. And without a thought revolution, they will get more of the same.

For example, in the human resources profession, the prevailing word of caution is that you either find your way “to the table”—in other words, on par with other C-level executives—or face irrelevance. Tactical human resources positions are getting outsourced to technology. Time and time again, human resources professionals want to find their way into the senior leadership circles but will continue to fail to get their messages through to the other executives if they cannot decidedly move beyond the task-heavy and strategically weak skill sets they are more know for. They are trying, and a growing number are succeeding, but many more still need to realize breakthroughs.

Not only do mid-managers need extra support in embracing the skill-building and strategic development outlined in The Workplace Engagement Solution, they ought to be given additional time to change before assuming any mentorship roles. Why? Let’s return for a moment to the “killer filter”: frenzy.

It is unusual for mid-managers to show up to training and development programs with big smiles on their faces. They don’t have time, even if the promise is that it will change their lives. Many of them work through lunch rather than proactively connecting with mentors. They simply do not have the time. The mid-management mindset that creeps into their system is about making piles of tasks and plowing through them endlessly. They can never catch up.

In other cases, mid-managers are being asked to shift supervisory activities to get back on the ground and to manage a project and make miracles happen inside a complex set of resources. Their necks are always on the line, even if they don’t have direct responsibility for the project. So, in essence, the people that we are moving out of people supervision and back into project management are trudging through with a strong sense of dissatisfaction working against them. Many would likely make great executives, but we can’t even evaluate a good number of them properly because they are not given access to the change and attention-focusing skills we have described in this book.

This is why leadership development ought to include everyone—democratic, complete. The current state of overload is not their fault; it is a collective failure of leadership coupled with a growing cynicism within the entire mid-management category. If we are not giving them the development they need to succeed in their existing roles, how will they grow and evolve into future leaders? That said, managers that see change as an opportunity will practice collaborative accountability with leadership or they will remain exactly where they are today. Otherwise, they may slip further downward under the weight of the growing pressure.

Evolving Leadership

We should point out that transforming our mid-managers into strategic, thinking, connective professionals will require full accountability on both sides of the fence. Mid-managers will have to demonstrate an almost-hair-raising commitment to change in order to let go of the “crazed worker” persona who measures all value by constant activity. In order to do that, they will have to reclaim their time.

Among the many managers I have worked with, I have often observed that they take on everything with a survival-mode vengeance, but often lack priorities in how to use their time and to get others to help them where appropriate. Many managers are in such a trance that time is used the same way high fructose corn syrup is used in the American diet as nourishment. We just keep stuffing more in.

We need to begin by helping mid-managers reclaim their time. It is so necessary to prioritize what we do with our time in ways that create the greatest value. It’s important to begin each day by asking questions that help us define who most needs our attention and what we can do to move forward strategically, analyzing what kind of support would be most helpful to develop, and taking the time to truly identify how we want to use our time. For the mid-manager who seeks upward mobility, we need to make it clear that the only way this will happen is if they engage in the kind of learning that helps them move from activity to influence, and from flailing to the masterful ownership of their time.

This kind of professional tribe derives extraordinary value through consistent self-inquiry and mentoring. I find that it takes years to produce change when we simply tell someone that they must change. Transformation is far more rapid when we ask people the questions that connect them with the life they want to lead. Give them the questions that will help them connect with the habitual behaviors and beliefs that are keeping them stuck in the middle.

A few examples:

• Who most needs my attention and inspiration?

• What is the most critical problem to solve today?

• What is today’s ideal blend of tactical and strategic work?

• What am I being asked to do that offers little value to the organization?

• How can I get rid of these useless, meaningless tasks?

• Which stakeholder needs my attention?

• Who deserves my praise today?

• What can I do to sell my ideas and solutions?

• How can I best take care of myself?

• How can I grow my support system?

This takes five minutes a day and it establishes priorities before the onslaught begins.

One of the real wedges against creating emotionally engaging mid-managers is the common practice of asking them to do work that doesn’t advance the cause of the organization. A senior executive asks for reports and projects that are only about checking old boxes or covering one’s behind. They are called into meetings that drone on and on without any real progress to show for it. Learning how to masterfully turn this work away can be nothing short of transformational. A few examples of taking a stand for use of time help us envision a better future:

“I would be happy to do this report, but I need you to know that if I do this the deadline for finishing your client fulfillment project can’t be met. Can we discuss some alternative scenarios?”

“I would love to help you, but I’m on a critical project for the president. Who else can we find to help you?”

Some will say that they could never respond to their boss like that. Well, then this is a good time to start learning how to do that. Initially, you might have trouble with the energetic and emotional feel behind the words. Smile warmly and take a deep breath. You want the persona of someone who is there to contribute, rather than someone who is upset or uncertain.

CEOs could improve many cultures by making it clear that needless reports, superficial projects, and other wastes of time are to be set aside. Let everyone know that supervisors and managers are free to discuss the value of a project, to work with their superior in defining if it is really necessary, and if they are loaded up with work, to identify another colleagues to take on the project.

In our leadership programs, it has become clear that many people are afraid to say anything that appears to be a message of “no” in environments in which mid-managers are at risk. Once again, making individual and organization behavioral changes can only come out of collective responsibility. But the payoff, if we can do this, will be managers who are awake, energized, enthused, and fully present. If you are simply surviving by pushing them to work faster, technology is either available now or on its way that can help do that for you. The machinelike worker is rapidly becoming a thing of the past and organizations that don’t see this are squandering one of the great opportunities in The Workplace Engagement Solution.

Train Your Managers

We need to give extra support to managers during our culture revolution. Our managers hold the biggest key to the quality of relationships with customers and frontline employees. Managers execute policy, solve emerging problems, and influence brand ambassadorship in substantial ways. If an organization doesn’t get this, there may be big trouble ahead. Bad stuff can happen.

Whenever we move, the most painful portion of that move tends to be the cable company. Two years ago, we were changing locations with the same cable company, but it took four days, almost five hours of phone calls, and two visits to the local branch office to make the transition. At each step of the service change, someone wasn’t paying attention, which led to interrupted service and surreal losses of time, all at the hands of a staff that seemed to be counting the minutes until they could go home. This level of disengagement is so enormous that we had factored in the insanity to our overall move.

It seems that when CEOs come to the conclusion they have a captive market and their business is a commodity, employees and managers alike are also treated like commodities, where work is “just a job” with no value to their ability to connect because they are more like machines. When this notion moves into knowledge-based companies, the need for engaged managers reaches epic proportions.

To that end, Wharton management professor Ethan Mollick has a message: “Pay closer attention to your middle managers. They have a greater impact on company performance than almost any other part of the organization.”³

His studies point out that mid-managers contribute far more to the bottom line than the innovators, who knowledge- and technology- driven companies tend to revere. The best of the mid-managers are not just good in one organization; they are good in a wide variety of settings. This is because the best mid-managers have the interpersonal skills and discipline that impact all stakeholders in positive ways. The ones who do not have the skills of high engagement and the ability to change tend to remain glued in one place, hoping the human resources “death angel” has others to visit. But the managers with highly portable skills will leave if we don’t give them the value and attention they deserve.

Our best and brightest workers are gone before many of us have come up with effective strategies for retaining them during upheaval. Mid-managers are often already so overwhelmed, they become less effective with retention during these difficult times.

Stop taking your mid-managers for granted. Teach them how to take better care of themselves. Give them the change and engagement skills, and never treat their development as remedial. Provide it to them because they deserve it. If they are starved for attention, correct the problem by giving them your attention. Look them in the eye. Many of them are your hardest workers. Many of them were happy with the recognition of that first promotion. Many are disenchanted because we stopped paying attention. We stopped giving them what they most needed: nourishment, respect, and kindness. They watch technology threaten their jobs, but we forgot how valuable they were the moment we assumed they could or would not change. We thought of them as the workhorses down the hall and forgot the truth. They need what we need. This is the truth and, as Joe Klass famously once said, “The truth will set you free, but first, it will probably piss you off.”⁴

Love your managers back to wakefulness and many will become your most effective change agents. If we want the best from our work-place, this is our collective responsibility. Some mid-managers will respond to development with enthusiasm and gratitude. Some will have enthusiasm and gratitude after they experience the work. Some will have to leave because the mind blocks are so deep, they cannot hear you. One of my great joys is to visit with an intact team that has just gone through our program. The moment I walk in the door, the energy is different, the enthusiasm is palpable, and the relationships transformed. As we invest the needed energy and development in our mid-managers, this type of experience will become the norm.

In moving forward with The Workplace Engagement Solution, make mid-managers your priority. Remember that they touch everything. And, even if they leave, remember that tomorrow’s employer will not be evaluated on how much they paid employees, but rather they will be judged by how much they grew them while they were there.