Lyons was a middle lineman sandwiched in between outside linemen Mark Gastineau and Joe Klecko, who along with Abdul Salaam, made up the famous “New York Sack Exchange,” a group that led the NFL in sacks three times between 1981 and 1984.6 Lyons told me on leading from the middle, “You have to know and embrace where you are and realize that being in the middle is a blessing. It means you have the opportunity to lead in all directions.”
Lyons knew that his role as the middle lineman was to lock up the guys on the opposing front line so that the speedy outside linemen Gastineau and Klecko could get the edge in rushing the quarterback. He wanted to lead from the messy middle so the entire team could lead on the scoreboard. Later on, as Klecko, the locker room leader, got older, Lyons began stepping up to passionately yell and scream and psych his fellow players up before a game. Being in the middle always means the chance to lead, it just requires a keen awareness and understanding of the conditions around you, so you know exactly what actions to take at what time.
And like in football, it requires a playbook. This playbook.
Of course, you don't run every play in this book all at once and you might not even use all the plays. To succeed in leading from the middle, use the right play in the right situation that's just right for you. The plays will take many forms of specificity: examples, frameworks, checklists, pointed advice, questions to ask, powerful acronyms, and much more. But before you run any plays, let's make sure you understand the field conditions.
Why Is the Middle So Messy?
I asked more than 3,000 managers who lead up, down, and across their organization what the most challenging thing is about their position. Nearly three‐quarters of responses had to do with the scope of their responsibility. Within that broad, daunting scope lie five categories of unique difficulties those leading from the middle face, captured in the acronym SCOPE and illustrated in Figure 1.2.
Figure 1.2 The Messy Middle
Leading from the messy middle means dealing with Self‐Identity, Conflict, Omnipotence, Physical, and Emotional challenges. Let's first spend time illuminating each of these difficulties, then in the next section you'll get plays to overcome each one.
Self‐Identity
When you lead up, down, and across you wear more hats than you can keep track of. It requires constant micro‐switching, moving from one role to the other, all day long. (I'll talk more about the expanse of required roles in the “Rock Your Roles” section of this chapter.) One minute you're adopting a deferential stance with your boss, the next you switch into a more assertive mode with your direct reports, then into collaborative mode with your peers. You might switch from moments where you're experiencing tremendous autonomy and a sense of control to moments where you feel like a mere cog in a giant wheel with lots of responsibility but little authority and too little support. You make lots of decisions but maybe not the big, shaping ones. The range of issues and responsibilities is ever broadening, creating still more micro‐transitions. Role switching fatigue is exacerbated when you have to perform in front of different levels of management or different functions within one meeting or when you unexpectedly have to jump into one of your roles you weren't mentally prepared to play.
The net result is exhaustion, frustration, and confusion about who you really are and what you should be spending your time doing, which is further exacerbated if you're working in a poorly defined role with unclear expectations and uncertainty about how far your authority extends. And to cap it all off, all the micro‐transitions that force you to be spread thin can leave you feeling that while you're certainly busy, you're uncertain of the impact you're really having.
Conflict
When you're surrounded on all sides, it's impossible not to experience conflict. But the leader in the middle has the dubious honor of trying to manage it all. There are natural tensions in the role and pressure that comes from all sides. Your boss cajoles, your employees resist, your peers won't collaborate. You absorb discontent from all around. You deal with conflicting agendas, conflicts of interest, and interpersonal conflicts. If you hear the mantra “more with less” one more time, you might more or less lose it, desperately wanting to counter with “How about we do more with more for once?!” You're inundated with the busywork that comes from being in the middle and being tied to processes and systems and yet you're subject to the time‐sucking whims of your chain of command.
You constantly make trade‐offs relative to expectations and reconcile priorities with the capacity and talent you have to do the work. You're rewarded for great work with more unexpected work. You're constantly putting out fires but are expected to consistently put up the numbers. You must fiercely compete for and flawlessly allocate resources while fending off those who want more resources from you. You disagree with or didn't have a say in some of the biggest decisions from above and yet have to respond to a lack of understanding and agreement to the direction from below.
Mary Galloway, an Industrial and Organizational Psychologist and faculty member of the Jack Welch Management Institute, told me, “Middle managers are like the middle child of an organization, often neglected by senior managers and blamed by their reports. However, they're still expected to be as charming as the youngest and simultaneously as responsible as the oldest. We end up with middle child syndrome, enshrouded in conflict, wanting more of a say, and not sure how they fit in.”
Omnipotence
No one expects frontline, lower‐level employees to know everything; they're too inexperienced or too new. Senior managers are excused from this standard because they don't need to know everything, that's what they have their middle managers for. Besides, they make big bets all day, which means big mistakes, which among senior leaders are often seen as a badge of honor.
So where does that leave those who lead from the middle? Like you're expected to know everything, like omnipotence is written into the job description. You have to keep one foot in strategy and the other in day‐to‐day operations and tactics. You should know your business inside and out and know your competitors just as well. Your market share ticked down in Peoria? You should probably know why. You have to explain the what, how, and why and decide who. You must know how to handle the changing nature of work with remote work, global conference calls at ungodly hours, and scads of contracted work the norm. You're expected to know how to grow others despite a lack of investment in you, and without time to grow yourself.
Physical
You've probably heard the term “monkey in the middle.” Researchers from Manchester and Liverpool University studied this exact subject, spending 600 hours watching female monkeys in the middle of their hierarchy.7 They recorded the range of social behavior, including aggressive behavior like threats, chases, and slaps, submissive behaviors like grimacing and retreating, and nurturing behaviors like embracing and grooming. They then measured fecal matter for traces of stress hormones (I'll pass on that duty). They discovered that monkeys in the middle of their hierarchy experienced the most social and physical stress because they deal with the most conflict, you guessed it, up, down, and across their organization. This directly corresponds to what researchers find in the monkeys' slightly brighter cousins, the human beings. In
