Читать книгу Leading from the Middle - Scott Mautz - Страница 10

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.”