Lifelong professional development and the importance of upskilling middle managers

Upskilling squeezed middle managers is an important step for organisations to take. Adam Kingl explains why.

Middle managers are the glue that holds a company together, and an important way to let your employees know that their development matters is by upskilling them as their career progresses. Our online leadership and management courses are delivered completely virtually and place focus on soft skills crucial to effective communication.

In the following article, Adam Kingl explains the plight of the middle manager and what can be achieved by employing some EQ in your inter-departmental conversations.

Gen X middle managers deserve not only sympathy but empathy

My recent book, Next Generation Leadership, explores how to engage and better manage Generation Y, the most junior segment of the workforce. In researching generational theory for the book, my sympathy for my own generation, X, grew exponentially.

Gen X is crammed between two huge generations, the Baby Boomers and Gen Y, unable to enjoy the privileges and prerogatives of the Boomers and at the same time managing the most difficult group that the workforce has seen in the Ys.

Unthanked and overworked, Gen X is the perfect metaphor for middle management

Gen X is currently our sandwich generation and is a perfect metaphor for middle management – pushed from above and pulled from below, unthanked, unloved and overworked.

The importance of middle managers must not be overlooked

We all acknowledge that our middle managers make the gears turn, hold the culture and need to pivot and have to adapt faster than anyone else in the company.

If our organisations depend upon middle managers, what paradigms about this critical segment might we need to revise?

Why communication between customer-facing employees and leaders is crucial

I firmly believe we must challenge the assumption that the executive suite decides on new or revised products or services, and middle managers are responsible for executing those decisions.

One of the greatest difficulties implicit in a hierarchical organisational architecture is that the more we are promoted, the less we talk to actual customers! Yet in too many companies it is the enterprise leader who decides the customer offer, and that leader’s concept of what the market may want could be years or even decades out of date.

Instead, perhaps the external-facing employees and their managers should be incentivised to develop new and adapted products and services and submit the evolved prototypes and business plans to executives for sign-off.

We need to provide upskilling opportunities to support middle management with professional development now

We must offer professional development to the middle management layer for what they require now, and not only what skills they need at the next level.

In my many years of working in executive education, I find that too often organisational learning is around the skills that one will need at the next level, yet I observe so many capabilities that the employee needs right now!

If we consider the areas that will help to ‘uncrunch’ the squeezed middle management layer, they would be themes that would free capacity for expanded exploration and empowerment.

How creative adaptation fuels purpose in middle managers

Increasing capacity for professional development and empowerment for middle managers should work towards the following themes:

Customer-centric innovation
Trends we perceive in the market and the consequences of those trends
Experimenting and prototyping in order for the organisation to enjoy a constant pipeline of adaptations and creative outputs
Articulating one’s purpose in work
Enabling one’s team to do the same.

This last theme is perhaps the most critical in a world that is wracked with disappointment about the role of business in society.

In these manners, learning initiatives are directed towards:

Including the customer voice
Enhancing the agility of the organization
Focusing intent
Engaging and retaining the largest segment of the workforce.

A little dose of extra empathy for the squeezed middle manager wouldn’t go amiss, either.

Perhaps my favourite phrase that I’ve ever heard from a colleague is ‘How can I help?’

Our levy-funded online mangement courses develop your junior and middle managers with an empowering approach to lifelong learning that will tangibly benefit your organisation from day one.