Leadership Training – Leading From the Middle

Posted July 20, 2010 in Leadership Training Blog by Andrew Sisley

Leadership is all about influencing others and you achieve this through the way in which you interact with others.

Leadership is not just a privilege reserved for those at the top. In fact, everyone is in a position to positively influence those around them by managing from the middle.

To improve your ability to manage from the middle you can focus on three key areas:

1: Managing Yourself

2: Managing Your Manager

3: Managing Others

1: Managing Yourself

Self awareness is the foundation for self improvement, which leads to professional credibility – a leadership essential. By following a four phase process you can increase your professional credibility, which is particularly important if you want to influence without authority.

The four phases are:

Phase 1: Develop Self Awareness: you need to know your strengths, weaknesses, communication style, learning style, working style…

Phase 2. Establish a Direction: through increased self awareness, you can develop a personal profile which you can use to identify the areas you need to improve.

Phase 3. Develop your Capability: take action to develop your skills and reduce your weaknesses.

Phase 4. Optimise your Conduct: leaders are measured by their conduct…so improve your skills, improve your performance and increase your credibility.

2: Managing Your Manager

Managing from the middle naturally means managing without authority and this is very much the case when managing your manager.

You might have a great manager, or you might not and you can’t change that. What you can change about your manager is the relationship you have with them. You don’t need to like them, or even respect them, but you do need to learn how to work effectively with them.

To do this, instead of self awareness, you need to learn manager awareness. Learn as much as you can about them…their strengths, weaknesses, communication style, learning style, working style, priorities and perspective.

The more you know about them and how they operate, the better equipped you are to adjust your working style to better match theirs. Remember, you can’t change your manager, but you can change the relationship you have with them…and it is your job to do so.

3: Managing Others

When talking about managing from the middle, without authority, “others” refers to your colleagues or peers.

The rule here is the same as above – you can’t change them, but you can change the relationship you have with them. To do this you need to:

do your job well first, so they can’t question your credibility or performance, and
consider their perspective and what is important to them, adjusting your working style to better match theirs.

Leadership at any level is all about them, not you!