with an eye on the three c's: competition, capacity, and the customer. Too often I've seen well‐intended middle managers develop plans in a silo. They don't consider key competitors' potential reactions, they ignore capacity and try to do far too much while not making enough choices (the easy thing is to do everything), or they fail to truly understand the customer's needs and habits when developing the plans and tactics.
3. Strategist
The best in the middle aren't just tacticians, they also play an active strategic role. No one is closer to changing market dynamics, has more access to new information coming in, or has a closer pulse on what the organization would rally behind. So often I hear, “Strategic thinking is the last thing I have time for” from middle managers. But it should be the first thing you make time for as it impacts every other role you play.
The Role Play: Toggle between the three strategy jobs to do (many mid‐level managers stop at the first job). First, cascade top‐down strategies to fully implement top management's intentions. Start by fully understanding the strategies, then share perspective to gain commitment when converting the strategies into operational tactics. Second, shape top‐down strategies in advance by analyzing information available to you, assessing opportunities and threats, and sharing your perspective and recommendations with decision makers above you. Finally, champion “on the ground” strategies, ones that you and your team create and implement given what you know by being closest to customers, consumers, and competitors. This last strategy job to do is the most often missed or underserved, which is a travesty, as one study showed that a whopping 80 percent of strategic projects initiated by top management failed while 80 percent of those initiated by mid‐level managers succeeded.11
4. Catalyst
Almost by definition, if you manage up, down, and across, you're the one who makes things happen. If it is to be, it's up to thee. It's easy though to get caught up triggering a flurry of activity that's not necessarily the right activity.
The Role Play: Try the powerful question that follows; I used to ask myself this as a filter before initiating anything: “Am I about to make the right thing happen at the right time for the right reason?”
5. Designer
This means designing structures and processes to support macro‐organizational designs.
The Role Play: Don't design in a silo. Enroll the people who will do the work in the structures and processes you design. What looks good on paper often doesn't translate in the real world. More structure and process are not always the answer; the mortal enemy of the Designer is the Overengineer.
6. Implementor
Sometimes your job is to simply implement someone else's strategies or plans.
The Role Play: But even then, think about this role not as order‐taking, but as closing the gap between intention and implementation. In other words, fully understand what the strategy or plan is intended to do, but don't just execute it blindly. To meet that intent, make adjustments and adaptations along the way based on the circumstances. While situational leadership is most certainly a thing, so is situational followership.
7. Decision Maker
All. Day. Long. That's what those in the middle do, make decisions. Key is to ensure you're deciding on the maximum number of things that make the biggest impact.
The Role Play: Negotiate your level of authority to avoid ending up a victim of what researchers call the Karasek model, which says stress is maximized in conditions of high responsibility with little authority to make decisions.12 Be bold. Get clear on where your decision‐making power starts and ends and push the boundaries. Craft an agreement for autonomy with your boss where you spell out the scope of what you get to make the call on and how your boss will be kept up to speed and can input on what you decide.
8. Resource Allocator
Some of the most frequent decisions those who lead from the middle make is how to allocate their resources.
The Role Play: Many things go into good resource allocation, but the most important play is to not underestimate the cost of getting it wrong. For example, poorly allocated resources mean employees are underutilized, projects are delayed, margins drop as more last‐minute contractors are hired, and key projects are under‐resourced or staffed with the wrong skillsets or equipment. Work as hard and carefully at allocating your resources as you did at obtaining them.
9. Synthesizer
Mid‐level managers are at the intersection of the horizontal and vertical information flow in the company; it's easy to get overwhelmed. But the best middle managers avoid analysis paralysis while carefully processing the most important information and using it to trigger action.
The Role Play: The key to being a good synthesizer of information is to listen carefully and be critical of everything you read and hear. The opposite is all too common. For example, it's not unusual to see those leading from the middle take new information and run straight out the window with it because they were in a hurry to decide, because they were overwhelmed with information and just making the call was the easiest way out, or because they weren't skeptical and analytical enough about what was being presented to them. Missteps here also include missing the things not being said or written, failing to keep the motivations in mind of the presenter and getting overly swayed by emotion, and failing to spot discrepancies in data or questionable data sources.
10. Intrapreneur
This refers to taking the initiative to advance innovation, to act like an entrepreneur, within your company.
The Role Play: Deloitte research shows the key to doing this well is to avoid the most common intrapreneurship trap—favoring familiar ideas close in proximity to existing solutions over unfamiliar, new ideas (ones that could result in far more meaningful innovation).13 This may mean taking calculated risks, breaking some rules, and working “underground” (away from broader scrutiny) with your innovation as long as possible to achieve your goals.
11. Bridge Builder
Everything meets in the middle, by definition. And the middle manager builds the bridges to connect all sorts of groups, up, down, and across the organization to make things happen. Bridges are built and maintained on trust, the subject of many books, so I'll simply laser in on one aspect of this here.
The Role Play: Remember that every action you take will be put by observers (even if subconsciously) into one of two classifications: something that builds trust or erodes it. Research shows the three best ways to visibly reinforce trust are revealing your thoughts about important issues and encouraging others to raise issues, admitting mistakes, and acting consistently with company values.14 The opposite of any of these things can destroy the trust you've built up in the blink of an eye. In the middle especially, every action produces a rippling reaction of trust built or broken.
