Leading From the Middle
Charan, Drotter, and Noel, in the seminal work The Leadership Pipeline define the "passages" a typical manager might experience in their career progression. One of the passages that creates the greatest challenges for leaders is when going from leading others to manager of managers. According to the authors, there are five critical signs of the misplaced manager of managers:
People who are struggling with the manager-of-managers role usually are having problems with core leadership skills…Difficulty delegating; Poor performance management; Failure to build a strong team; Single-minded focus on getting the work done; and Choosing clones over contributors.”
Additionally, leaders in the middle often have some of the largest spans of control, and multiple teams, and are accountable for large budgets and developing pools of talent while wielding significant influence in the organization. Their leadership reality includes the ever-increasing complexity of being “caught in the middle of the crossfire to execute for all their internal customers”.
To address the unique development needs of this crucial audience, BTS developed “Leading from the Middle” as a customizable leadership experience, leveraging best-in-class experiential learning content and based on best-practices research. Leading from the Middle addresses the unique challenges of balancing the need to effectively influence up, down, and across the enterprise.
- Learn How Leading
from the Middle Drives Strategy
Rather than taking a “one-size-fits all” approach, Leading from the Middle is a flexible, modular content approach that is easily customized to the unique needs of our client organizations. Leading from the Middle is also not a traditional subject matter expert lecture/case study-driven approach to manager of managers development. Leading from the Middle leverages our experiential-based learning approaches of Business Simulation, Scenario Simulation, Engage Map™ learning and blended on-line systems—tools that change behavior—to provide exceptional leadership development.
Execution and Learning Journeys
Developing leaders who grow others to accomplish at increasingly higher levels of performance does not occur through single-event training. BTS Execution and Learning Journeys address building leadership and managerial capability through a holistic approach. The journey starts off with a “prime” phase. This prime stage is about establishing the business and personal relevance for participating in learning—creating a personal rationale for achievement and a line of sight with desired business outcomes. Leaders and managers then engage in learning and grow new capabilities (whether that is delivered through group workshops or delivered to groups of learners through virtual technology). This is followed by learning sustainment, which is about enriching, continuing and reinforcing the primary learning.
Learning and Execution Journeys are especially positioned to address the learning style and needs of generations X and Y (better known as the Millennials). They are the first generation in human history who regard behaviors like tweeting and texting, along with websites like Facebook, YouTube, Google and Wikipedia, not as astonishing innovations of the digital era, but as everyday parts of their social lives and their search for understanding. These generations take simulation and interactive learning as a given. Our use of learning portals leverages, and emulates on a professional level, their natural tendency toward networking and collaboration.
Discover what our many clients already know about having a partner like BTS: These approaches, and our experience in developing leaders of today, can propel your strategic execution forward.
- Learn How Leading
from the Middle Drives Strategy