Recent research shows that the number of people in senior specialist and middle management positions is growing. As organizations continue to flatten, the middle becomes the place where many will spend the majority of their careers. The Outstanding Middle Manager is the new guide to dealing with those pressures specific to the role and maximizing the opportunities to forge a fulfilling and balanced career in the middle. Drawing on the latest research into workplace trends, strategic management and work-life balance, Tinline and Cooper focus on middle management as an opportunity level. Readers can discover: strategies for managing upwards as well as downwards, how to deal effectively with generational differences and an evolving workplace, influencing, empowerment and team-building skills, and stress- and life-management strategies that bring clarity and purpose. With a focus on lateral development and progression as a career choice, The Outstanding Middle Manager empowers readers to take control of their mid-level career to become more fulfilled, more resilient and more satisfied.
An exceptional job of refocusing the middle manager's role?a mustread for practitioners and educators alike. --Jack Viega, editor, The Academy of Management Executives In their quest to become leaner, flatter, and reengineered,organizations have systematically cut out the very positions thatonce made them successful?mid-level managers. In The StrategicMiddle Manager,management experts Steven Floyd and Bill Wooldridgedraw on a decade of research involving over 250 middle managers todemonstrate that the success of future organizations restsdecisively on strong middle management. The authors present the tools managers need to: * Redefine their roles * Increase their strategic value * Secure their futures * Identify the top performers in the ranks...and much more! Far from lacking perspective, middle managers have a unique,pivotal perspective that places them at the forefront oforganizational change. They can play the role of champion,synthesizer, facilitator, and implementer--and this book gives theadvice needed to energize management. A must-read for trainingprofessionals, managers, and top executives, Floyd and Wooldridge'swork will radically redesign--and drastically improve--yourorganization's effectiveness.
Managing and leading a remote team of line managers is the most challenging aspect of the middle manager role. It is quite normal for middle managers to see line managers infrequently and when they do, middle managers very rarely see their line managers 'on the job'. On the occasions when middle managers attend a line manager's work unit, they can often be presented with a fictitious picture of how the line manager performs or behaves and how the business unit is truly performing. Not having day-to-day physical contact as a line manager would normally have with their employees, makes monitoring and managing line manager performance extremely difficult for any distance manager. To be effective in distance management and be able to overcome the many unique challenges distance managers experience, middle managers need to work to a clear strategy, learn and use a new set of skills and implement policies and procedures that all line managers must adhere to.Putting into practice the strategy outlined in this short-book will help middle managers be more effective in managing business units at a distance.
Fully a third of all library supervisors are “managing in the middle:” reporting to top-level managers while managing teams of peers or paraprofessional staff in some capacity. This practical handbook is here to assist middle managers navigate their way through the challenges of multitasking and continual gear-shifting. The broad range of contributors from academic and public libraries in this volume help librarians face personal and professional challenges by Linking theoretical ideas about mid-level management to real-world situations Presenting ways to sharpen crucial skills such as communication, productivity, delegation, and performance management Offering specific advice on everything from supervision to surviving layoffsBeing a middle manager can be a difficult job, but the range of perspectives in this book offer strategies and tips to make it easier.
Middle management" is a term associated with relentless downsizing, corporate drudgery, and career dead-ends. Bashed by management gurus, dismissed by social scientists, and painted as victims by the media, middle managers seem permanently relegated to the sidelines of corporate power. But is this popular picture accurate? Are middle managers really no longer valued by today's performance-driven organizations? The truth is surprising. MIT management scholar Paul Osterman has analyzed over thirty years' worth of employment data, interviewed a wide sample of managers, and uncovered a very different picture of middle managers today. Not only have their numbers increased dramatically, but middle managers are wealthier, more productive, more autonomous--and they gain real pleasure from their day-to-day work. But there's another side to the story: while managers have maintained their commitment to their tasks and to their colleagues, they are increasingly cynical and distant from their organizations. They are confused about their future and how to manage their careers. This comes at a time when the value of middle management is much greater than ever before. Organizations must rethink their understanding of this vital workforce segment--now. Understand the issues for yourself with The Truth About Middle Managers' refreshing and counter-intuitive look at what's really going on.
The definitive playbook for driving impact as a middle manager Leading from the Middle: A Playbook for Managers to Influence Up, Down, and Across the Organization delivers an insightful and practical guide for the backbone of an organization: those who have a boss and are a boss and must lead from the messy middle. Accomplished author and former P&G executive Scott Mautz walks readers through the unique challenges facing these managers, and the mindset and skillset necessary for managing up and down and influencing what happens across the organization. You’ll learn the winning mindset of the best middle managers, how to develop the most important skills necessary for managing from the middle, how to create your personal Middle Action Plan (MAP), and effectively influence: Up the chain of command, to your boss and those above them Down, to your direct reports and teams who report to you Laterally, to peers and teams you have no formal authority over Anyone in an organization who reports to someone and has someone reporting to them must lead from the middle. They are the most important group in an organization and have a unique opportunity to drive impact. Leading from the Middle explains how.
Middle Management Survival Guidec is intended to be a survival guide for anyone who calls him or herself a middle manager. All too often the wisdom that flows to the middle managers of this world descends from the lofty heights of academia. By point of contrast, Middle Management Survival Guide c flows from the trenches where middle managers carry out their craft. It is a book grounded in common sense and aimed at creating a world-view and mindset for middle managers that will enable them to better combat the daunting forces arrayed against them. From the perspective of a middle manager this survival guide describes the impossibility of the workplace and the paucity of the tools traditionally available to managers. Most importantly this book provides specific strategies, attitudes and values that will help managers maintain balance and sanity while improving their overall performance as managers. The author has worked as a middle manager for the past twenty years. Tasting both the sweet fruit of success as well as the bitter gall of failure he has acquired a unique insider's view of the daunting task faced by those who call themselves middle managers.
The middle-management perspective has produced a great understanding of the connection of middle managers involvement in strategy and organizational outcomes (Floyd and Wooldridge, 1992, 1996; Floyd and Wooldridge, 2000; Wooldridge and Floyd, 1990). Strategic role conflict has been identified in the literature as a hindrance, even an impediment, to effective middle-management involvement in strategy (Floyd and Lane, 2000). Despite a growing body of theoretical work by scholars on the strategy process, there has been limited empirical research of the antecedents of strategic role conflict. Drawing from the literatures of role conflict, middle management perspective, and social exchange theory, this dissertation hypothesized that demographic characteristics of middle managers, the nature of their position within the organization, the quality of their relationships with top management, and the degree of dissimilarity of their environmental perceptions vis-à-vis top management are associated with middle managers' strategic role conflict. A large, global manufacturing company based in the United States participated in the study. Survey data was collected from 249 middle managers at four organizational levels within two divisions. Two structural models were tested. Data showed that the more parsimonious model was not supported while the less parsimonious model was supported. Results indicated that key predictors of middle managers' strategic role conflict were the amount of boundary spanning that middle managers engage in as part of their jobs, the degree of disparity in their perception of the products and factors markets vis-à-vis top management, the frequency of their direct communication with their top manager, the amount of mutual trust between the top manager and the middle manager, and the amount of disparity in the feelings of mutual affect between the top manager and the middle manager. This study contributes to the strategy literature by demonstrating the applicability of role conflict theory to the strategy process in explicating links between strategic role conflict and its antecedents. A better understanding of strategic role conflict is important to the strategy process literature because of its theorized interference with middle manager's effective strategic performance and its possible negative consequences for the organization. An alternative model of strategic role conflict is presented.
The premise of this volume is that the complex social processes that animate strategic decisions involve not only top-level executives, but also middle managers distributed throughout the organization. Designed for doctoral students and others interested in middle managers and strategy process, the Handbook integrates the threads of scholarly work in this domain and charts a course for future research. Chapters are written both by scholars who have ‘paved the way’ for the middle management perspective and scholars who have done recent, cutting edge research from this point of view.
