Imagine your company as an inverted funnel. It might look something like this:
Each level of the funnel is responsible for cascading culture down to the next level. The CEO owns cascading culture to the executive team. The executive team owns the cascading culture to the management level below theirs, and so on until you reach the front-line leaders. The number of layers and levels will depend on the organization’s size. Regardless, the group of leaders between the executive team and employees is what I call the Mighty Middle, and they are the core of the organization, having one of the most challenging jobs in the company: translating and executing the Purpose, Vision, Values, and Strategies.
While the Mighty Middle might not be directly involved in establishing the company’s strategic and cultural direction, they are responsible for implementing it. Generally speaking, employees don’t interact with executives on a day-to-day basis. They do, however, interact with their manager daily. So, anyone responsible for managing other people in the company needs to understand and embody the PVVS. They need to behave in ways that align with the corporate values and support the strategies established by the executive team.
For this to happen, anyone responsible for managing other people needs to understand your cultural direction, be on board with it, and know how to support and communicate the direction to the people they are responsible for.
Create Ownership
In the previous blog post, we discussed how giving each executive ownership over one of the company’s strategic initiatives creates a more profound sense of commitment and buy-in. The same is true for the Mighty Middle.
The executive’s job is to take that multi-year strategic initiative and break it into pieces so that each manager knows what their responsibility is. For example, at one company, when I was in charge of Employee Experience, I broke that initiative down into talent acquisition, talent management, total rewards, and total wellness, and assigned a manager to be responsible for each of those. This not only breaks the significant strategic initiative into manageable and achievable shorter-term goals, but it also gives your managers that sense of ownership.
Giving managers ownership over and accountability for specific pieces of strategy gives them personal buy-in to those strategies, even if they weren’t part of the conversations in which those strategies were created. This creates commitment and allegiance, ensuring your managers are entirely on board, laser-focused, and aligned with the company’s vision.
Provide Necessary Information
All too often, people in middle management are not given the essential information to successfully cascade down. They are left out of the conversation. And even if they know what is happening, they are often not given the information to understand and communicate why it is happening.
Managers can understandably become upset when changes are made because they receive complaints and questions from the rest of the employees, and often, managers are not provided with the necessary information to address those complaints or questions.
If managers are tasked with executing strategy and cascading the vision and values to their reports, make sure they have the information necessary to do so!
Provide Proper Training and Ongoing Development
People are often promoted into management positions because they are high performers who are very good at their current job. Unfortunately, these promotions rarely come with training on how to be a manager. Just because someone is good at their job doesn’t automatically mean they have management skills. New managers need to be trained specifically on management skills and have experienced managers mentor and coach them.
Training isn’t a one-and-done prospect. Providing ongoing development and learning opportunities—through courses, coaching, assessments, and feedback—is also essential for aligning your Mighty Middle.
The Power of Management
Management is a responsibility, not an entitlement. Managers need to understand their responsibility and behave in ways that align with the company’s values. If you manage other people, you have a powerful position in the organization. To the people who report to you, you are the face of the organization. If executives want an aligned organization, alignment across the management level is essential.