Stuck in the middle? What a great place to be

Do you sit somewhere in the middle in your organisation’s hierarchy? If you do, how’s life? Do you feel like you are constantly in a work pressure sandwich with frequent demands from above and below? You may be trying to understand what your development path is and stay motivated to continually progress your career. Life pressures away from work could be significant and you might be struggling to manage the cross-over between work and the rest of your life. This begins to build into quite a depressing scenario, but life in the middle doesn’t have to be this way.

Let’s paint an alternative picture. As a middle manager you can see across your organisation, above, below and all around you. This puts you in a position where you can have an impact and influence in all directions. You have a myriad of developmental options across your organisation. Your life is rich and varied and you can blend your work into the rest of your life in a way than enhances both. This isn’t utopia. It is achievable, but often requires that we radically rethink life in the middle and, just as challengingly, change our habits and behaviour.

Challenge your thinking

We need to start by ensuring we avoid a state of learned helplessness. Martin Seligman defines this state as ‘the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter.’

Working with a wide range of mid-level people in businesses and organisations, I frequently see signs of this. For example, I often hear managers say that they feel they cannot do anything because they are completely overloaded. However, there is plenty of evidence that other factors such as the level of perceived control people have, or the extent to which they feel supported, can be just as important as workload for determining effectiveness. Facing extreme pressure in one area that can feel overpowering to the point that we no longer believe we can make a significant difference in any aspect of our life.

Change the way you perceive your reality

There is very little doubt that to survive and thrive in the middle, you actively need to manage a range of pressures and work to create a positive trajectory for yourself. One perspective that is very useful in understanding how we can make this happen is to focus on how we frame or perceive our reality.

To move towards a positive position from which you can make the most of your mid-level position, you may need to reframe your reality. Reframing requires us to be aware of and challenge our thoughts and beliefs. The first stage in challenging such beliefs is to probe to find out what real evidence there is that supports them. For example, you may believe you are too busy just doing the day job to have any real impact beyond this. But what evidence is there for this belief? Yes, you will be busy, who isn’t? That doesn’t automatically mean you can have no influence. When was the last time you stopped just reacting to work demands and considered how to have an impact on others? These may not be easy questions to answer, but challenging  your assumptions and default thinking is the starting point in generating a different view of reality you can commit to.

Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses

Another important aspect of having a positive impact in a mid-level role is the capacity to understand and play to your strengths. It is very easy to get drawn into lengthy negative spirals of thinking and behaviour where you begin to wonder if you have any strengths at all.

At mid-levels in organisations you may have a set of development needs that are primarily focused on your weaknesses. How many of those development needs are strengths? Identifying and developing strengths is much more likely to unlock new potential, and you will feel much better than when you are constantly trying to improve in your weakest areas.

Strengths thinking has been strongly informed by ideas from positive psychology in recent years. Barbara Frederickson adopts a useful broaden and build approach. This argues that positive emotional experience can open out our thinking (broaden), leading to better problem solving and coping strategies which ultimately further enhance positive emotions (build).  Understanding and playing to your strengths is much more likely to unlock such a spiral than constantly being dragged down into negative, weakness dominated, behavioural cycles.

Play the role of central connector

Connecting from a mid-level position should be easier than from any other place in the organisation. The relatively new field of Organisational Network Analysis provides insights here. From a mid-level position, you are ideally placed to play the role of central connector.

Central connectors serve as core exchange hubs and have the highest number of direct connections in the network. If you play this role you will be seen as the go-to-person by others when they are uncertain about where to access information or key knowledge sources. This could be very beneficial in terms of career progression because your value is likely to be visible across the organisation and you will be readily thought off as a key player.

To sum up:

So, to make the most of being in the middle:

• Challenge your thinking – what can you influence and when was the last time you tried?
• Play to your strengths – this will energise you and help you realise your potential
• Connect – use the advantage of your middle position to connect with people all around you

Want to find out more? I’ve developed these ideas further in a recent book with Professor Cary Cooper – The Outstanding Middle Manger published by Kogan Page.

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