Power Underwhelming: Middle Management Edition
Tips on Minimising Your Lame-Duckness
What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate
Today we discuss an endemic middle management issue: namely, being in the middle. We all make are cognizant of the jokes about middle management: Let’s fire all the managers, says HBR. Why are there 11 steps between Zuck and a software engineer at Meta? Bonus content: middle management sucks.
On one hand, as a manager, you hold tremendous power over your line reports. You are the boss; they laugh at your rather unfunny jokes. You represent the company (i.e. the hierarchy) to them. True, your boss is a bigger boss, but they tend to be more of an abstraction for your reports (more on that in a bit).
More concerningly, your reports have incentives to hide things from you, lest you use it against them in a performance review. This is real Greek tragedy right here officer, but luckily (for me) it’s not the topic of this issue.
The reality is, most middle manager gigs have an aura of might while lacking any real power.
Promise pay raise or a promotion in the upcoming review? HR or your manager can veto it 🙅🏼♀️
Promise your team projects involving cool technical stuff? The company is in data stone age; does the PhD data scientist know Excel by any chance? 📉
Promise you will address a cross-functional issue? Your/their manager doesn’t take your side and tells you to drop it 🤦🏻
What’s the problem? Essentially,
your team thinks you are Darth Vader, who is a force (eyy) to be reckoned with.
The problem is,
the Emperor—insert power figure/your boss—also thinks you are Darth Vader, someone whom they delegate tasks and responsibilities to.
Meaning, you are quite strong locally, but have very limited global power. Also, I realised I forgot to include ‘On the other hand…’, so it goes here somewhere. This is the crux of the matter.
Be Transparent About the Limits of Your Power
It is prudent to expose the realities of your condition to your team. If your responsibilities involve more than just people management (>= department head), you probably do have some actual power—you bring in revenue, you oversee business-critical work, you are part of leadership etc…hopefully?
If you are a long-tenured employee (esp. in a startup context), it is likely that you amassed a certain amount of human and social capital. Maybe you even cultivated an exec to be the sponsor for your cause because you managed to move the needle on stuff they care about.
These are all various dimensions of having influence. You should explicitly share this context with your team as well, so they are aware of the positive extent of your capabilities.
Otherwise you risk creating dissonance with your team—you seem to have all the power (to them) while claiming to have no power at all? Be realistic, and more importantly—a team leader. This is crucial context for your team to be aware of; if they know where you are strong, your team can play to your strengths—a win-win situation.
Lastly, do you appear weak when you can’t make good on your promises? I’m not so sure about weak—the power asymmetry is in your favour—but it’s definitely not going to help your case. As I wrote in the previous issue, you need to engage in costly signalling over extended periods to create legitimacy in the eyes of your team. Your team will rightfully label you as a cheap taker if you frequently fail to keep your promises to them. It is better to promise nothing in such cases.
Focus on What You Can Control
You can address the tragedy of being in the middle in two ways: achieve alignment with your manager, or achieve alignment with your team. Why or instead of and? Well, ideally you strive to achieve both objectives. Realistically though, you will do much better in one of areas compared to the other.
Between the two, aligning with your team is where you have more control over both w.r.t. the process and the outcome.
Learn about in-group and out-group dynamics not just to leverage them, but also to step in and call it out when necessary—it can be exclusionary. In sociology and social psychology, in-group is a social group that one psychologically identifies as being a member. Simply put,
A member of your tribe. Your tribe is good (highly questionable)
A member of the next tribe is a fellow tribesperson in the general sense. Their tribe doesn’t have to be necessarily bad, but it’s not your tribe.
You need to have two minds about this, as it depends on the ‘zoom level’ you choose to have the conversation at.
On paper, the whole company is the in-group; you are all trying to achieve the same high-level objective—£££, social good. Within the company, organisations are the next logical fault lines—i.e. the classic Commercial vs. R&D divide. This goes on in a fractal fashion towards the bottom of the org chart.
However, beware of the Monkeysphere. This theory posits a cognitive limit on how many meaningful social relationships humans can hold in their brain. Although debated, ~150 tends to be cited as the maximum number before your colleagues start being abstract concepts rather than human beings with feelings, dreams and all that.
Why is this important? Unless you work at a small company, most of your colleagues—cognitively speaking—are abstractions for you and your team (and you are to them). Inevitably, there will be smaller but more meaningful social circles—fellow function/chapter members, cross-functional squadmates, supporters of the same cause (e.g. DEI) etc. Your boss is a Slack profile picture to your team (sorry, boss).
Equally important, if you are not in the right groups, you yourself are abstraction to in the eyes of the actual decision-makers. You are not going to get much done if you are perceived as an actual human being. Quarterly grab-a-coffee with a CxO won’t fix this issue—you need to make their lives easier (i.e. solve their pain points).
When discussing this issue within your team, try an approach like the following. I usually lead Data teams, so I will frame it from that perspective.
You: We are all on the same team, the whole company. Product managers prioritise work, engineers build software, [Design], [UXR]…SDRs sell, marketers market…Commercial is our best buddies, they make monies…
You: …but we are totally, 100%, no doubt, our own team. We are not abstract concepts to each other. It’s OK if you don’t really know the name of the salesperson who you sometimes sit next to during lunch. But this team right here, we are in it together.
A neat side effect of this is establishing your own team values. The company will have its set of values, and your team should broadly align to them. However, there is always one or two that either doesn’t fit your team or you simply don’t feel strongly about—that’s OK. Just adopt & amend as necessary.
As to whether your line reports can hold two somewhat contradictory stances on the same issue, don’t underestimate the human condition.
Sidenote—Ensure You Are Part of the In-Group
More often than I’d like, I hear from HR or Legal that the manager may not be privy to a situation that concerns one of their line reports. I’m always confused by this.
Always be that dependable person for your line reports. They should come to you before going to HR, Legal, your manager, or some other high-ranking person (usual disclaimers apply) because you fostered and invested in a safe environment for them to be able to do so. You look after your people and your people know this.
None of this matters if you are not that person 🤷♀️
No Lame Duck Checklist
The cop-out way to go on about this would be to simply not over-promise. However, being a human makes this a tad challenging. We are social creatures and as a result, highly susceptible to comforting others. It takes either a lot of self-discipline or a serious lack of empathy to control this instinct.
Still, there are certain things you can do to minimise being a 🦆
Regarding pay raises and promotions, be ridiculously clear that it’s not 100% up to you (if that’s the case)
Why? Hopefully self-evident.
Also, make the strongest case you can. Write ‘promo docs’, tell your reports to track their achievements on an ongoing basis, help them quantify their business impact (did X → Y went up by Z much)
Align individually with your line reports. What drives them—it may not be work? Where do they see themselves in
nyears? What are their areas of strength and improvement? Do you agree with their self-assessment? Where are they now in those areas? Where do they want to be? What do they need to prioritise in order to go from A to B?Why? This way, both of you are in control of the process and the outcome. People mostly care about themselves (which is fine). By investing in them—making them better, more efficient, and overall more competent at their post, you are helping them achieve.
Sometimes, your line reports may lack ambition or have low self-esteem. Pick them up and set them on their path.
If an entry-level data scientist/engineer tells you that they aim to master Git in two years, you should tell them that they should get it to a good place in the next four weeks and help them identify a better two-year goal.
For salaried jobs, contractual hours/week is a seriously lacking concept. Instead, align your expectations with your people, based on their seniority and familiarity with the task at hand. Otherwise, they will be inclined to fill their calendars with pointless meetings to appear busy. Let your ICs work uninterrupted and cap the number of let-us-put-a-weekly-hold-to-catch-up type of cross-functional meetings they are invited to. You can attend those meetings—it’s usually easier for you to cut them short or cancel them altogether. TL;DR: don’t do factory punch cards, focus on value-add.
Yes, this might mean that sometimes, they could have done a bit more if they worked their contractual hours. If this irritates you, you should see this as an opportunity to tame your inner late-stage capitalist1.
Finally, although tempting, don’t use upper/senior management as a jail-free card for yourself. If you screw up,
Own it—demonstrating accountability and vulnerability sets up good precedent,
Explain why it happened—to achieve alignment on what actually happened,
Share your learnings—to prevent a similar scenario happening again, and
Strive to not have this exact conversation again.
A familiar scenario where this happens a lot is disagree but commit situations, which I will cover next week. Abrupt ending! Until then.
Little red cookbook! Little red cookbook!