Managers are the engines that turn intentions (mission, strategies, goals) into performance and into results. It has never been harder to be a middle manager and we need great middle management more than ever.
Lisa Haneberg of Management Craft offers these six thoughts on improving the lot and the role of the middle manager.
1. Let’s reframe middle management. It is the best and most challenging job available! If you want to have maximum impact, be a middle manager. Doing so will require that you see dysfunction as a part of your reason for being (and not become a victim of it).
2. Great managers do what others don’t or won’t. How fast and smoothly the engine runs depends on deliberate and proactive choices you make each day, many times a day. Great managers approach and blast away barriers. They have conversations others are put off and they don’t let busy work get in the way of truly important tasks.
3. Management is a social act. Conversations are your currency to generate excellence and bring out the best in others. Erode relationships, erode results.
4. Let’s reframe results orientation, too. We can likely agree that to be results oriented is to drive to achieve results. Some of us, however, might need a new paradigm when to better describe managerial activities that most impact results. Think intrinsic, think inspiration, think connection, and then define it again. What managerial activities MOST impact results?
5. If you want to build business, build talent and partnerships. Selling – to internal or external customers – is often a push process but the most powerful way to expand your opportunities and impact is through creating pull. Pull is stickier. This applies to internal and external influencers.
6. Time is precious and expensive. Every conversation, every meeting, every IM, and every email has the potential to engage, excite, enliven, and explain. If you saw a ticker spinning and showing the mounting costs of time spent, would you change how you spent it? This is not an invitation to stop showing up at meetings or stop responding to emails, BTW, great conversations are worth their minutes spent in gold. Relationships = results.
Source: Lisa Haneberg Mangement Craft