In the war for talent as well as the war for new business, there is one common battleground. The "battle of the middle layer" represents a vital crossroads between the needs of client-delivery and the needs of business-development.

 

It’s the middle managers who often have the greatest influence on day-to-day delivery of value. When this group are working effectively, partners and directors are free to focus on strategy, while the talents of all team-members are bring harnessed and developed to the full. Clients are being looked after … and the show goes on!

 

All too often, senior people get bogged down in delivery or client-management … sometimes even fixing the IT! The captain is spending too much time in the engine-room, and too little on the bridge.

 

This middle-layer is particularly vital in the fog of a downturn, when the captain needs to spend more time on the bridge. The "minders" not only have a key role in client / team relationships, but they also play a key role in the protection of existing revenue and the cultivation of new business.

 

During times of uncertainty, the "minders" are particularly vulnerable. Put simply, if you can retain and develop the key middle-managers, business-development gets simpler and growth gets more secure.

Let’s start by looking at the key spheres of a middle-manager’s role in a typical consulting firm:

 

When times are tough, these are the people that a professional firm needs to look after. These are the individuals that are targeted by head-hunters. They are the hardest to find, they take the longest to cultivate, and in terms of development and coaching, they usually represent the best return-on-investment.

 

If a service company loses its director of strategy, life will go on. But if a vital middle manager leaves - and takes with him two colleagues and six key accounts - the loss to the business will be tangible and immediate.

In reality, such departures happen all the time. Whether this is due to the overwhelming ambition of the manager, the unappreciative culture of the firm, the unresolved recruitment issues or the inadequate systems … it’s generally too late to close the stable door when the horse has bolted.

 

Firms are inventive when creating convincing explanations of why this happens; explanations which usually tend to rewrite history in favour of those who are telling the tale. In other words, we all have a habit of showing ourselves to be right. “She would have left sooner or later”, “he never really shared our DNA”; it is easier to say these things that to address the causes of departure up-front.

 

Having interviewed at least a hundred middle-managers over a three year period, here is a summary of the factors quoted when leaving their previous firm. The quotations are real-life examples, suitably disguised to protect confidentiality.

1. Going nowhere – lack of progression – dealing with more of the same. “Christmas came around again, and I realised that it had just been another year of day-to-day project-management. I don’t want to be saying this when I’m forty.”
   
   
2. Recurring overwhelm – often with a sense that nobody cares. “After the cutbacks and the redundancies, there were lots of promises but nothing changed. I got fed-up of taking work home and cancelling holidays. Enough was enough. By the time the promotion came, I had already made my mind up to go. If I’m going to work this hard, it might was well be for myself.”
   
   
3. Boredom. “When the head-hunter called, I initially agreed to the interview out of mere curiosity. When I got there, I realised that here was an opportunity to do something interesting, rather than keep slogging away at the same old issues. It was really the work-content rather than the salary that clinched it”
   
   
4. Inadequate remuneration. Strictly speaking, this comes further down the list, but cultural factors sometimes cause this to be understated, particularly in mainland Europe. Many professionals don’t want to say they left because of the money. It is usually combined with some of the other factors e.g. recognition, boredom or the desire for flexibility. Most middle-managers make more money by changing jobs than by staying-put.
   
   
5. Not developing. Middle-managers in particular are keen to develop leadership and (sometimes) business-development skills. They are constantly meeting others who are getting support and development in this area, and feel left-out if they are not. They don’t want to be so constantly in “task mode” that there is no time for their career-development.
   
   
6. Lack of appreciation. “Any time I am called into the office, it’s because something has gone wrong. Never because I caught up a backlog over the weekend, never for appreciation of initiative. At first, I wanted to prove myself, so I was happy to keep a low profile, and just enjoy client appreciation when it came. And then I thought: why am I putting up with this?”
   
   
7. Personality clash – sometimes with the boss, sometimes with colleagues, often with a new manager or director. Often shows up post-acquisition. Can sometimes be secretly enjoyed by certain personality-types. Can prompt revenge and resentment, e.g. ad-hoc sick leave, gossip, (and in one extreme case, sending leads to a competitor!). 
   
   
8. Sense of being left out – isolation. “As the company grew, we lost that family spirit that we had in the early years. I missed the contact with Chris (managing partner), whom I could now rarely meet and chat with. Everything had to go through Barbara. And I never had the same relationship with Barbara as I had with Chris.”
   


9. Lack of freedom – comes up less frequently, but very forcefully stated when it does!  “I could not stand the way she wanted to micro-manage, to control everything my team did. This is just choking the entrepreneurial spirit that we had started with. In the end, I said “To hell with this” and just resigned”.
   


10. Lifestyle. “I looked at the partners and asked myself “is this what I want?” Do I want to be checking my emails on holiday, getting home late on Friday evening, and on the computer all weekend. And the answer was No. My kids are young and more important to me. So I thought I would look elsewhere, and find a more family-friendly firm”. 
    
    
11. Company politics and administration – inundated with procedure, 360 degree feedback, meetings, forums, all perceived as tangential to the role. This covers a multitude: and often is related to others changes (e.g. organisation) during periods of rapid growth.

There are four crucial dimensions to securing “minders”, all of which are closely bound up with the strategic development of the business. This is the top-level summary:

 

	Interior	Exterior
Individual	Development (usually of Awareness)	Behaviour / Action
Team	Appreciation	Structure for progress & reward

 

 

Interestingly, if any one of these quadrants is missing, it may negate the effect of the others, and sharply reduce the value delivered. Specifically:

1. If development is missing, managers get bored. Boredom is the single most often-quoted problem of successful professionals, for whom mental challenge and stimulation is vital.
   
   
2. If appreciation is missing, the culture suffers and the manager may see all the worthy initiatives of the other quadrants as an imposition, another burden to cope with.
   
   
3. If the desired behaviours are not role-modelled, the manager perceives either a culture of “all-talk”, or worse still a culture of hypocrisy. In either case, trust is diminished.
   
   
4. If there is no structure, the criteria for growth become subjective and/or invisible, and even a benign paternalism will be seen as career-limiting by an ambitious professional. Or essential systems are not implemented, and therefore the words never make it into reality

The key to developing the middle-layer is to work on all four quadrants together, in an integrated way.  By doing this, even the smallest beginning in each quadrant is often all that is needed.

 

Improvements are far-more-likely to be seen as genuinely authentic, as opposed to “lip-service” or another imposition. For example, when behaviour change is linked with regular appreciation of the behaviour, the change is powerfully reinforced … much more so than by any workshop or training session.

 

A positive spiral is easiest to achieve by pushing on four points simultaneously.

Let’s take a quick look at each of these:

 

Development

There are two parts to the development of middle-managers. On the one hand we want to capture those development-needs that they are already aware of. On the other hand, we need to deal with the “unconscious incompetency’s”, the areas in which they are not well-versed … to which some may even be averse (e.g. cross-selling, networking).

 

The magic lies in developing programmes with managers, rather than for them. These are intelligent people, and resent being sheep-dipped. They enjoy being able to define their destiny. And one of the added-benefits often quoted to us is that such programmes create a new “esprit de corps” in the management team, precisely by allowing them to be (partially) self-determining regarding their development needs. If they can do that, that can also solve other problems together.

 

In a value-centred culture, leaders will also want to link all development to the values the organisation stands for, and the value it brings to the marketplace. Many “competency initiatives” are not really value-centred: they are there to gain qualifications, meet individual aspirations, or simply work through the list. The key value-question is always “what difference will it make?”.

 

Behaviour

A single action from a senior manager can often negate weeks of vision-building or culture-change.  In the end, value is built by individuals, and is closely tied in to the actions that they take. Indeed our internal dialogue is often changed more by our actions than our thinking. Confidence, for example, grows more from the legs up than from the head down.

 

Some form of one-to-one support (and accountability) is essential for behaviour change. Whether this comes from inside or outside, it needs to be there. Otherwise the desired change will be lost in the first emergency. Whether we want to inculcate weekly planning, initiative-taking or direct communication, the habit-forming process is all too easily short-circuited.

 

In practice, this will include challenging both partner-level and manager-level actions, speech-patterns, procrastination, communication habits and time-management practices. For change to be sustainable, it is usually important that the partners be working on this as well as the managers.

 

Structure

Many firms now have sophisticated feedback mechanisms and remuneration schemes. Some have some catching up to do. Some have even gone too far, and the extrinsic rewards (and associated structure) have now become more important than intrinsic interest in the job!

 

Middle-managers are generally structured people; and they too appreciate structure. Particularly when it comes to career-progression, they like to know what they can aim for, and how they can get there.

 

Structure is important in other ways, too. Some structures (e.g. well-run review meetings) can make the value of what we are doing visible, and encourage everyone to work well together. On the other hand, a badly run review meeting can facilitate bickering and/or debate that does not always add value.

 

Areas that require systems:

• Planning: weekly, monthly, quarterly, workload tracking
  
  
• Systems: contact-management, communication, connection of virtual teams
  
  
• New client meetings: value-questions, budgeting, fees, proposals
  
  
• Client management, the customer journey, review, signoff
  
  
• Recruitment, evaluation
  
  
• Retention, development, coaching, culture-development, leadership
  
  
• Service development, research
  
  
• Marketing, building awareness, recognition, evoking response
  
  
• Profitability, cashflow, asset-management

Appreciation

If there was a single culture-change that would represent a gigantic leap-forward for most professional firms, it would be the practice of specific, regular appreciation of the value that an individual brings. Middle manages are bright and intelligent, so there are not fooled by fake flattery such as “you are doing a great job”.  Most complain of a huge shortage of moments such as:

 

“What I particularly appreciate about the way you are managing that project is ….”

“How exactly have you succeeded in turning around John’s performance?”

“Of all your achievements such as x, y and z, which for you has the most meaning and significance?”

 

Sincere appreciation is not just specific; it is coupled with genuine interest in the manager’s job. If not, it will not only fail, it will breed mistrust. One of the biggest complaints that I hear from every level of the organisation is that “the managers are just not interested in what I do”.  They are perceived to be only interested in the results, the key numbers, - not in the value that the person is bringing.

 

This of course takes us back to value … the single most important word in this report. In preceding chapters, you have read how a genuine focus on value transforms client relationships. Now we see that it also reinvigorates internal relationships, motivates key people and provides a common focus for the entire team.

When it comes to the vital middle-layer, it’s the integrated nudge - across all four quadrants above – that binds these vital people to the interests of the business, and the value being produced. A positive spiral of motivation and engagement comes about via a blend of development, support, appreciation and behaviour change; all combined with a structure that makes the growth-potential both evident and fair.

 

In downturn as well as upturn, the middle-layer is particularly vital to maintain growth and value in the business. These are the people who have the most-trusted relationships with the clients. These are the professionals who see the potential for new services and products. These are the people who can (with some development and support) open doors to new divisions and new sales.

 

In a very real way, these are the people who are the future of the firm.

About the author

John Niland works with management teams to develop value sustainably, and hence earn more fees in less time. For related articles, see www.success121.com.

© John Niland, Success 121, November 2008.