Middle management can sometimes feel like the oft-forgotten middle child of leadership. But treating this stratum of leadership like an afterthought has severe consequences on your organization, which is why middle-management coaching is essential.
If executives are the brains, your middle management is the spine. It connects every facet of your business and ensures it can function. Break the spine, and your company will be stuck in paralysis while the competition passes you by.
At Consilio, we have worked with countless business leaders across industries, from bootstrap startups to Fortune 100s, and empowered them to bring out the best in people. Read our blog to learn how to unlock potential with middle-management development.
How to Unlock Potential with Middle-Management Coaching
Middle-management development is an exercise in self-actualization, so it is a never-ending process. To unlock your managers’ full potential, training should include honing emotional intelligence, mastering performance management, and leveraging situational leadership as a management style. Read on to learn more.
The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Middle-Management
It is impossible to understate the importance of emotional intelligence (EQ). This intelligence dictates your ability to form and maintain healthy relationships.
Excelling at your job technically is not enough. If you cannot communicate with your team or collaborate, your entire team will suffer. EQ is your ability to understand and control your emotions and understand and respond to the emotions of those around you.
EQ has four core components:
- Self-awareness
- Self-management
- Social awareness
- Relationship management
Middle managers are the connective tissue between the front-line employees and executives, and EQ has a direct impact on the buy-in from employees when doing things like implementing policies or procedural change.
Having a high EQ is also important because it enables management to have a positive influence on their people, create a positive work culture, increase efficiency and productivity, promote strategic thinking, and instigate growth, innovation, and creativity.
Middle management coaching helps develop EQ by:
- Getting to know their team and determining how they like to engage with others
- Taking a self-assessment of their emotions
- Understanding how their emotions impact their actions
- Learning to provide constructive criticism and positive reinforcement
- Understanding employee needs and wants
“Middle management is where your leaders have the most contact with your internal staff and external clients and vendors. It’s a bridge between the executive level and the staff. EQ is the foundation of trust and the only way to motivate people. EQ entails adapting how you engage with employees depending on their mood and personality to get results and create the right environment. Leadership is about connecting with people, and without a strong EQ, that’s impossible.” – Stacey McKibbin, Consilio CEO
Strategies for Effective Performance Management
Performance management is how your middle managers maximize the performance of your workforce, which is the primary force behind achieving business outcomes.
This strategy motivates, measures, and develops the performance of employees to maximize retention and support big-picture goals by outlining expectations, establishing targets, providing feedback, and providing developmental opportunities.
Success doesn’t just happen – you have to nurture it. Effective middle management coaching teaches several strategies to foster this skill in your leaders, such as:
- Starting with clearly communicated company goals and performance expectations
- Setting, measuring, and assessing check-ins on targets
- Tying performance to everyday work
- Establishing a culture of (frequent) 360-degree feedback
- Recognizing big and small efforts (and offering rewards as incentives)
- Mentorship through one-on-one meetings
- Gauging the employee experience
- Prioritizing trust, respect, and inclusion
- Prioritizing continuous learning
- Having ongoing (open) discussions about impact, growth, and retention
“A lack of performance management results in unclear expectations and lost motivation. By learning and implementing effective performance management strategies, you can identify vulnerabilities within the workforce and guide employee training and recruitment, raising employee morale and support. You can only reach your organizational goals as a team, and this ensures cohesion so you operate as a finely tuned machine.” – Stacey
Leveraging Situational Leadership for Middle-Management Development
This approach emphasizes adapting and tailoring your leadership style to the situation and ensuring the right people are working on the right tasks. This style maximizes productivity and efficiency, facilitates growth, and helps your people actualize their full potential.
- Diagnose the talent an individual brings to the table and evaluate the gap between that potential and how they are currently performing.
- Adapt your leadership and influence approach by identifying what style aligns with the diagnosis and gives them the greatest chance of success.
- Communicate and implement this approach, focusing on the employee’s strengths, talent, ability, and potential.
- Advance their team by honing and transforming raw talent, natural strengths, and potential into task-specific ability and engendering a willingness to rise to the occasion and add value.
“Situational leadership Coaching fosters a bond of professional intimacy that creates a stronger connection and sense of transparency between a manager and their people. By recognizing and acknowledging your people’s innate strengths and coaching them, you achieve true motivation and engagement to unlock the treasure trove of talents and strengths your people possess because – and here is the beauty of this style – your people will also start identifying these things within themselves.” – Stacey
Premier Middle-Management Coaching and Development
Your company is greater than the sum of its parts. If those on the front lines and in C-Suite positions are excelling individually, but there is no cohesion, it’s all for naught. Middle managers provide essential cohesion while bringing out the best in your people, which is how your company can transcend the competition.
To learn more about our middle-management development and training program, visit our Contact page and fill out a contact form to schedule a consultation.
