Workforce Management Featured Article
Can Middle Managers Prove an Innovation Gold Mine?
While the middle manager of today's office is commonly regarded as something of a slow-witted villain drunk on his or her own inflated sense of self-importance—consider the characters from “Office Space,” “Demoted,” or “Dilbert” for all that's needed on the perception of middle manager—middle managers are often found quietly serving an unsung tactical liaison role between the strategic planning of upper management and the operational level of the everyday employee. Given that somewhere around 7.6 percent of the United States' workforce qualifies as middle management, it's worth considering how to get more out of this group. Indeed, some are looking to the middle manager as the next great center of innovation in business.
The idea of middle managers as innovators may be outlandish to some, but there are some great possibilities in terms of unleashing the true power of this often-overlooked group. The first thing to consider is a possible change in the organization's overall culture. Many middle managers' focus is on “doing,” on getting the job done, because that's a middle manager's primary role. Taking the strategic vision from the C-level and putting it into terms that the operational level of the everyday employee is part of the job; in many ways, middle managers are tactical thinkers, focusing on getting the job—that vision—accomplished, which requires coordination of the more customer-facing elements. But with this coordination comes the opportunity for innovation if it's sufficiently inspired. Maybe there's an element of the operation that can be improved upon, or otherwise changed; the middle manager is uniquely placed to have both access to issues at the strategic and the operational level, and can often be the first one to tell one side or the other when issues emerge.
This requires further changes to fully activate the middle manager as innovator; consider putting a focus on developing competency rather than sheer efficiency. Efficiency works well for the moment, but to coax innovation from middle managers, there has to be room for more in the job description than putting out fires and righting tipped apple carts, so to speak. Finally, put a focus on being “disruption ready,” as some call it, and allowing the middle managers to bring the C-level inspiration from the floor rather than simply interpreting the commands of the C-level down to the floor.
The middle manager has a great potential to deliver a whole new value; able to both understand the top-level vision and the overall status of the company as well as issues coming up from the customer-facing part of the organization, the middle manager can in turn synthesize the various concerns, forming a kind of alloy between the two levels of the organization which can in turn produce some impressive results. But middle managers need to be properly pointed in that direction, and that may take some changes within the firm itself.
There's room for extra value from just about every part of an organization, and middle management may have a whole untapped source of value in the form of innovation to provide. Getting access to that innovation may take some work and some new ways of thinking, but with these may come answers to questions that have plagued companies. The middle manager may well prove the unlikeliest corporate savior of all.
Edited by Maurice Nagle