How to Engage and Empower Middle Managers for Organisational Success
Middle managers play a crucial role in any organisation. In short, they are indispensable. Middle managers are the critical link between senior leadership and the front line and their customer/ consumer. They have the ability, unlike other leadership levels who are often focused on longer term strategies, to be able to operate in not only a strategic but an operational capacity.
Ultimately, middle managers are the main players in their organisations for their strategic execution. It’s normally their responsibility to turn strategic plans into practical plans, often providing practical experience on decisions. Thereafter they manage the implementation of this strategy, including change management, developing their teams in understanding broader organisation goals and managing success of goals set.
Middle managers are crucial for communication in the business. They will carry the organisations culture and important messages and are vital in sharing insights into performance, employees or consumer back up to leadership.
They often manage the largest grouping of employees. A good middle manager will drive employee effectiveness (engagement and enablement), develop talent through coaching, skill development and will provide the organisation with important data in terms of high potential employees and succession planning.
However, it can be common feedback to hear that middle managers feel overlooked in their organisation.
In examining this, it’s important to first set out that middle managers very often find themselves promoted into management roles, for the first time in their careers, as they have shown to be industrious, technically skilled and loyal to the organisation.
They have succeeded in their previous roles and then, quite often an organisation believes the next natural step is promotion.
This can be a great opportunity for the employee and an obvious solution for the organisation to try to engage the high performing employee. But from experience, I have seen, for those middle managers, particularly those who have come from technical type roles, then they often find themselves now responsible, without prior experience, for the people management of a sometimes-large team, some of which may have been previously their peers.
Organisations by nature are often hierarchical, with notably less opportunities as an employee progresses upwards. Unless middle managers move into a different role laterally, they often find it difficult to progress upwards through the ranks. This means that they can feel often overlooked and undervalued. Turnover in senior roles is often low and more often, organisations approach hiring of vacant leadership roles by seeking external expertise then promoting internally.
If a middle manager believes they are undervalued, this can have a harmful effect for the organisation. The first area that will be noticeable is a drop in not just their performance but the potential of the team and business unit they are responsible for.
Ultimately middle managers drive team engagement and motivation and if they feel undervalued this will then have a detrimental impact on that. Inefficiencies will creep in and turnover will increase due to lack of mentorship or coaching from the middle manager of their team.
The middle manager may disconnect from the organisation’s strategic objectives and goals causing operational inefficiencies and may begin to align themselves with their reports, thus potentially creating what could appear as an, us and them situation with higher leadership in the organisation.
Upwards communication to leadership will be impacted and the organisation may see challenges to change and innovation from a team that has an undervalued manager.
When an organisation values their middle managers and recognise their efforts, it can transform not only the managers engagement but that of the team.
The organisation, culture, vision and strategy will be carried by the middle manager to their teams due to their engagement. This motivation level can have a ripple effect in the organisation. Team morale will increase and thus performance will improve as a result. There will be lower turnover rates due a happier working environment and higher levels of trust and support.
There will also be a stronger pipeline of candidates for manager roles, as they will see a management team that are valued and looked after by the organisation. Therefore, the organisation will achieve clear career paths into these roles.
Middle managers are important conduits in an organisation. People work for people and people often leave an organisation because of their manager. Therefore, the engagement of this group within an organisation is critical and often incorrectly overlooked.
Therefore, having an engaged manager is critical to not only set the standard of culture and behaviours in the organisation through their own approach but also managing and measuring their team’s engagement levels and managing same when required.
If a middle manager is highly engaged and can recognise engagement levels within their team, this is hugely beneficial for an organisation.
This is why many organisations involve their middle management in formal engagement programmes, whether it’s developing questions to measure engagement, or actioning points that arise from surveys. They are a critical part of measuring and driving engagement.
Breath of expectations is a huge challenge middle managers face. Middle managers often feel that they are being pulled in all directions daily. They can be responsible for people, performance, culture, product, budget, quality, health and safety, customer service. They can feel very overburdened and at times undervalued and this can lead to burnout.
Leadership can at time be seen to set unrealistic challenges for middle management and often the goal post can be moved on targets and expectations of these middle managers without consultation.
Enablement of a middle manager to complete their job can be a huge challenge. Often, they may feel they do not have the people resources within their teams and team absence and turnover can hugely challenging. Managing a team of varied levels of contribution, expectation of work or from different generations can be very challenging.
The concept of a player manager role, which organisations regularly use, meaning that the middle manager may have to deliver not only supervisory and management type duties can be detrimental to the success of this role as the manager will find themselves regularly stepping down into carrying out their team tasks and can quickly feel overburdened.
So how can you, as a Business Owner or a leader of a business support your middle managers
Invest in their people management skills - Quite regularly middle managers have had no prior experience or development on managing a team and this is a huge part of their role.
Invest in coaching for the manager - Often this is something overlooked and offered at senior level. However, coaching for this management group could be hugely beneficial to support them with people management, decision making, self-awareness, overcoming self-doubt, managing uncertainly and big picture thinking.
Creating a safe and supported environment where the middle managers can make decisions, regarding their departments and team with confidence. Not only does this make these managers accountable, but it gives them a sense of being a stakeholder and a part of the organisation’s successes.
Develop an environment of innovation and creativity - Encourage cross functional learning for the middle manager with other teams. Involve in developing the Company strategy. Provide tools to develop cross functional collaboration. Recognise and reward innovation amongst this group.
Ryan HR can provide coaching to business owners on harnessing their team’s talent and creating robust structures that underpin employee performance and engagement. For more information and a call back to discuss, please click the contact button.
