Alliance for Leadership Acceleration

There’s a special place in my heart for middle managers – they are THE essential “hub” of everything in your organization and yet, they’re treated like Rodney Dangerfield “I don’t get no respect.” Why is that?

They have tremendous potential for high impact in your organization but they face several challenges (which are not their fault):

1. They are stretched too thin as “working managers” with a portfolio of ‘deliverables’ on top of managing a team of people and a function within the organization.
2. They are not what we call “professional managers.” They have not been provided the learning, development and tools to professionally lead others.

We see it in just about every industry: a graphic designer becomes an art director, a land surveyor becomes a project manager, an architect becomes a partner. In their entry role, they do a standout job and are quickly promoted up the ranks, eventually finding themselves in management roles where they are expected to [intuitively] delegate work, communicate across teams, bring in business, and coach and mentor others.

Yet, without training or support they have to rely on instincts and often poor role models for how to manage and lead others. One example we see play out over and over is their reliance on their technical expertise to solve problems rather than engaging those closest to the problem in solving it. This comes out of a desire to have a positive impact but being the ‘heroic problem-solver’ for their team actually has a negative spiral effect on their organization that they don’t realize.

In our LEAP-Leadership Acceleration Program, our coaches teach them one of the simplest and highest-impact shifts they can make… Think of yourself as a FACILITATOR not a problem-solver. The very definition of facilitate is “to make easy” and the shift in mindset makes life easier for the middle manager as well as their direct-reports.

Learning how to facilitate does take a little practice but it’s a VERY learnable skill that nets quick returns. Here are some tips for making the shift from Problem-Solver to Solution Coordinator:

• Check Your Ego at the Door: It feels good to be the ‘hero’ who saves the day but good facilitators make the people around them feel like they did it w/out the help of the leader/facilitator. Let your people and their expertise shine. It’s okay to admit you don’t have all the answers and facilitate the process of finding solutions.

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• Develop Your Ability to Ask Questions Rather than Offer Solutions: Step into a ‘curious but dumb’ mindset. Pretend you know nothing about the issue and have no judgment about it either. Tell your people that you believe they know more about the issue and how to solve it than you do and then ask questions such as “what is currently happening?”, “when did this start happening?”, “what will happen if it this continues?” “who else is impacted?”, “who else should we talk to?” “why do you think this is happening?”, “what are your ideas for fixing it?” and so on. There will come a point when you need to summarize what you have heard from the team and make a decision based on your authority but it will be a facilitated solution and likely a better solution than you would have developed on your own.

• Actively Involve Others: See above. Make it safe for people to offer their perspective and ideas. Ask them how they would solve this if they were ‘in-charge’ for the day?

• Manage Content and Process: a facilitative approach is concerned with both what the group is discussing or deciding and how they are actually doing it. They appreciate and understand that the team may need to use different processes to achieve different outcomes. Facilitative leaders work with the team to establish shared agreements for how participants will interact with each other and do their work – that is the group process aspect. Content is what the group is discussing or trying to achieve. Both are necessary and a good facilitator manages these rather than managing the problem solution itself.

Facilitation skills might just be the best kept leadership super-power and your middle managers the best way to create a strong, healthy organization. We’ve been developing leaders through an integrated methodology since 2002 and the notion of being a facilitative leader is by far one of the most powerful ‘ah-ha’ moments in their leadership journey and it’s a skill they leverage forevermore.

Professional literature often draws rigid lines between leadership and management, suggesting that one is right and one is wrong. In reality, we need individuals who both do the right thing and are capable of doing things right. We need middle-managers who can help individuals and groups do the right things right – the very nature of facilitative leadership.

Show me an employer with a distrustful workforce, and I’ll show you a ship headed for rough waters if it’s not sinking already. When employees distrust leadership to a substantial degree, it affects everything. Decisions are made more slowly, learning curves stretch out, engagement suffers, productivity lags and, these days, workers might just walk out the door.

Yes, as employers continue to grapple with the “Great Resignation”—the trend of many workers voluntarily leaving their jobs—trust is more important than ever. Organizations that can build and maintain a strong rapport with their employees are poised to have a competitive advantage in the months ahead.

In fact, one could say that employers are at a crossroads when it comes to trust. According to the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, an online survey of more than 33,000 people around the world, 56% of respondents believe that business leaders are purposely trying to be misleading by stating falsehoods. On the bright side, the survey found that “business” is now the most trusted institution, replacing “government.” Of survey respondents, 61% trust business, while only 53% trust government.

What this means is employers have an enormous opportunity to build and fortify their reputations as trusted entities, helping both themselves and their employees. Here are some ways you and your leadership team can build trust within your organization.

Talk about it.
Distrust arises from not only miscommunication but also the lack of communication. That is, when something isn’t talked about and is left to assumptions, those assumptions tend to lean toward the negative.

For this reason, employers should address trust openly. Tell employees explicitly that their trust matters to you and explain the ways in which you intend to build it. To do so, someone in a top leadership role—ideally, the owner of the business, CEO or another widely recognized leader—needs to issue a formal statement to this effect.

Be sure to keep any promises you make in such a statement. Moreover, if you outline various objectives, such as “Hire additional staff to reduce reliance on overtime,” update employees on these goals regularly until they’re achieved or revised. Perhaps the worst way to address trust is to say you’re going to do something about it but then let the effort slide into apathy.

Promote positivity.
Trust generally can’t exist in a negative working environment, so it certainly can’t flourish. When leadership establishes and actively encourages positivity, an “ecosystem of trust” can develop. This means that employees will more likely trust each other, as well as ownership and management.
Contrast this with working environments built around unhealthy competition and political (in the office sense) alliances. Pitting workers against each other, or looking the other way when this dynamic occurs, can produce some short-term results. However, in the long run, the toxicities that result from these experiences tend to lead employees to distrust each other and leadership.

To promote positivity, train workers to cooperate by teaching skills such as recognition of bias, active listening and effective communication. Reinforce your HR processes to resolve conflicts between employees quickly and fairly. Immediately investigate inappropriate behavior. Use 360-degree performance feedback to honestly tell workers how they’re doing so they can give you insights into leadership’s effectiveness.

To go the extra mile, check in with your people managers regularly to determine whether their teams are sliding into negativity. If necessary, confront the problem through team-building exercises or special meetings aimed at boosting employee morale and refocusing them on your mission.

Demonstrate employer expertise.
Sometimes the source of distrust within an organization isn’t so much that employees believe leadership is actively lying or unethical; it’s that they suspect those in charge lack competency as an employer.

This may sound harsh, but let’s face it, being a good employer today goes far beyond simply cutting a paycheck every couple of weeks. Particularly at a time when workers are leaving their jobs in droves, you’ve got to convey to them that you know what you’re doing. This includes:

• Engaging in a hiring process that respects applicants’ time and need for clarity.

• Providing an onboarding process that welcomes new hires to the organization and acclimates them to their working environments quickly and positively.

• Training employees thoroughly so that they can get up and running and feel good about their contributions.

• Administering payroll and benefits seamlessly with minimal complications or disruptions.

• Giving workers the equipment and technology they need to do their jobs well.

• Communicating frequently and transparently about the state and direction of the organization.
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• Recognizing employees as “whole people”—not just workers—who need work-life balance, mental health support and, every so often, some fun.
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When your workforce trusts you to care for them, they’ll also be more likely to trust your strategic plans and go the extra mile to perform their job duties at an optimal level. In short, engagement and productivity will likely rise.

The Power of Trust
Trust has always been important. Results of a 2017 study on the neuroscience of trust, published in a Harvard Business Review article of the same name, found that employees who work for “high-trust” companies enjoyed their jobs 60% more and were 70% more aligned with their employers’ purposes than workers at “low-trust” companies.
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The power of trust is only increasing. In fact, trust may be the X factor that enables some organizations to endure and thrive in today’s chaotic, shifting environment of pandemic-inflicted changes and evolving attitudes about employment. Work with your leadership team and advisors to put your organization on the right side of this trend.