Hello and welcome to The Growth Workshop Podcast. In today's session, we'll be looking at middle management. Is it your best asset or a waste of resource? And as middle managers, how can you navigate this difficult space and be successful in your own career progression?
You think about a leader that sits in a position thinking, gosh, how am I going to hit target? The team are underperforming. I don't have enough bandwidth. Okay, I'll go and recruit a middle management layer because, they can do it or they can pick up the grunt. If we have a look at those important factors. The business must put a decent onboarding approach or be able to be aware of what are the capabilities before they start to open up those job roles.
For you is the right stage to start thinking about adding a middle management layer into your business?
Now I would go back to some effective research that suggests if you have competent and capable leaders that coach well in that middle management area, you're likely to see greater quota attainment and you're likely to see extra or even more upside in terms of your revenue growth. The second part I'd share briefly would be let's think about retention and attraction. It's not all about sticking in an organisation for the next 40 years and sitting through that or wait until that person retires.
Actually, what people are able to do is be agile across different organisations and options. So if you want to create an organisation as a destination of choice and having a middle management career path, might be a great way to attract some really good raw talent and give that opportunity for them to develop, to retain and attract wicked talent moving forward.
What types of things would you recommend a leader or a business to automate, to enable the capacity for a middle manager to do what they should be doing, which is leading and coaching and seeing that productivity improve?
Like we say, you can't manage what you can't measure. And so every business is looking at how do we measure performance? If we take a sort of account management team or customer success team, there are various measures, metrics, reports, information that you're going to track about your existing customers. The same in a sales team where you're looking at pipeline, you're looking at velocity, all of those sorts of metrics.
So often I've seen it where it's the role, it's a big part of the role of the middle manager's job to collect up that information, interpret that information and be able to share that up to the rest of the business. If you could automate a lot of that reporting activity so that the middle managers are delivered the information that they need to make calls, make judgments, lead their team effectively, but also have effective conversations up, then you take away some of that distraction.
What are some of the telltale signs for you and in your experience that you've seen either working with clients or running teams yourself of low and high performing middle managers?
The first would be identifying the approach towards skill and will. So if you think about the classic, the skill will matrix, you've got the four box grid, you've got skill on one side, will on the other. Ultimately, how are you going to define will? The way in which we hear often is through the levels of activity. So it's proven that people would like between three to five hours of coaching per month from their leadership.
If that's one of the key metrics, then let's analyse the amount of activity a middle manager is doing, for instance, one to ones, team meetings, and that might contribute to maybe 40, hours 80 hours a month of activity, brilliant, right, the will is high because they're achieving these activities. Great sign if they're doing it, it's a really good indication that they're
high performing underneath the will bracket . Defining performance in its simplest form as a lag indicator would be productivity or revenue, or you can look at it for a conversion, the ability to convert, anywhere from a lead or an opportunity that might be shared all the way to, win loss.
What for you are perhaps the reasons that middle managers might fail?
There's something called the Valley of Despair. And what that looks like is the classic curve where you're super excited, really looking forward to the job and all of a sudden you go down that big dip of going, Oh my gosh, I did not know what I didn't know, and is it really like this?
The point being is that everyone going through a change of role, middle management, senior management, or a sales professional will go through the valley of despair, which means that their motivation will be challenged throughout a period of time on their onboarding. So please be cognisant and aware of that. Because if you're not. And you don't develop your capability, you're more than likely to quit and revert back to type and go that wasn't for me.
It wasn't a great job, but it's actually about mentally being prepared for those challenges and obstacles ahead and your leadership around you should be able to support you in those things.
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