Mastering Middle Management: A Playbook for Succeeding in a Complex Role
Being in middle management is hard: You’re always in the middle between lower- and higher-level leaders who have drastically different motivations, purviews, and contexts. And your job is to translate and balance between them, and align them all to business goals.
This playbook is for you:
To give you the tools to navigate and thrive in this important, but often overlooked role. In each article of the series, I bring together the different contexts, motivations, and goals of everyone at these levels to give you the tools to be more effective as a middle manager.
Balancing and translating is your job.
Your boss is a senior leader, e.g. a CEO, CTO, VP, or Head of Engineering. Their role is to optimize for what’s best for the business as a whole.
The people reporting to you are line managers like Engineering Managers, Team Leads, as well as more senior engineers like staff engineers or Tech Leads. They typically have important low-level context but often struggle with connecting to the bigger picture.
And you’re in the middle, with low- and high-level context, and a mandate to deliver.
I know, because I’ve been there.
I understand where you’re at, because I’ve been there myself: As a co-founder, CEO, VP Engineering, Engineering Director, and Line Manager; I’ve been a middle manager, reported to one, and managed many middle managers (and learned how to be a better boss for them).
Now, in my coaching and workshop facilitation practice, I often hear from many middle managers who are expected to deliver results, but aren’t getting a lot of support, context, direction, or feedback. That’s why I created this playbook.
Enjoy reading it, and if you have feedback or would like to read about a specific topic, let me know!
I co-created many of these articles with Maggie Litton, a seasoned and formidable Engineering leader who’s held various Engineering Manager and Director roles (and I had the pleasure of being her boss for two years). We’ve both experienced the joys and challenges that come with it, and share with you what we’ve learned in our joint 35+ years of leadership.
