The role of middle managers in organizational change

The most successful modern organizations rely on middle managers to promote change management. The role of middle managers today has become the link between senior management and employees like never before. What used to be sporadic in terms of incremental changes is now almost permanent in every company.

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Organizational change occurs continuously. Through technological advances and more efficient organizational designs, employees are often expected to produce more with fewer resources. The result is a new role for middle managers. They are now in charge of ensuring that the advantages of organizational change are communicated to those who implement it.

The objective of this article is to address the new trend of recent years that involves the role of middle managers in organizational change and how it influences the growth of companies by managing leadership.

The evolution of middle management in companies

Traditionally, middle managers acted as the vital link connecting the small group of executives at the top of a company with the various ranks of employees who were responsible for most of the production.

The nature of this legacy role was highly transactional, with managers receiving strategic briefings and directives from executives. They then translated the strategic directives into friendly tactics and finally passed those tactics on to individual contributors or resources.

Workers then implemented those tactics, so this continuous vertical flow of strategy, tactics, and action in the companies was then replicated repeatedly throughout the organizational scheme by each vertical entity.

The role that middle management will have to play is changing precisely because the nature of organizational change itself is changing. Until not long ago, external changes affecting organizations and internal changes represented single or isolated events.

These types of one-off events allowed companies to prepare as well as possible for change management, often with a more successful outcome. However, the current change is made up of many of these events occurring simultaneously, and most of these events are independent in nature, creating a change of greater complexity.

In this sense, individual changes are much more difficult to manage because they cannot be separated from each other to be managed independently. This combination of changes has created a pervasive sentiment that all members of companies feel but don't know what to do with because they can't bring it to a collective level.

It is into this organizational imbalance that middle managers are now entering that they can find their true niche and add their greatest value. They are emerging as mid-level leaders who successfully lead change precisely because of the skills that were honed when, as middle managers, their authority and responsibility were lopsided.

When a manager has to accomplish something, with all the responsibility but without the authority over the resources to get the job done, the successful manager typically develops:

• Networking skills help gain access to the widest range of resources possible.
• Influencing skills because if you can't force someone to do the job, you have to convince them that by doing the job, there's something in it for them.
• Effective communication skills that capture the attention of those above and below them.
• Alignment skills, or the ability to get people from different places to see an issue in a similar way that resonates with what's important to them.

And it turns out that these talents and skills are precisely what is needed to manage and lead the kind of ongoing change that organizations face every day.

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Adoption of middle management change

The objective of any change introduced within a company is to go from point A to point B. Therefore, it is about implementing the adoption of an organizational change with all that this implies for the members of the company. Adoption is the process of planning and then producing a change.

Many companies do the planning part well enough but miss the assume part because there is often confusion between the terms implement and assume. The difference is that a change can be implemented without assuming it. In this way, many companies spend time planning for a change but do not expend energy on adopting that change.

In other words, adopting organizational change implies breaking with certain mental structures beyond the physical implementation. An adoption mindset is a state of mind and attitude of real beneficial use that continually focuses on the desired future state.

Ownership and responsibility mentality

Middle managers play a very important role in developing the mentality of ownership and responsibility, since, being at an intermediate level, they moderate between senior managers and employees, but with a collaborative awareness of leadership.

Once the intent and need for change are communicated from the executive level to the rest of the company, mid-level leaders no longer act as translators of change, but rather as a hub for creating insights about what change means at a global level, within the organizational networks it influences on.

It is proven that the best way for people to change is for them to develop their understanding of what change means to them as they live and operate with the company daily. Middle managers work in their networks reiterating the change articulated by the executives and dialoguing with the people involved to establish their point of view on the position of those people concerning that change.

Find advantages in organizational management from middle management

Companies make changes to obtain greater advantages in the long term. However, some companies are not clear about the benefits they are seeking through change, and often no one takes explicit responsibility for ensuring that the benefits materialize. Also, if the benefits were stated at the beginning of the change, they are usually described in a lofty way, rather than in a way that is understood on a more personal level.

Since middle managers occupy a middle position in the organization, they are the fulcrum for reaping incremental benefits. On the one hand, they help the rest of the employees to understand how they will be affected; on the other, they help measure actual benefits as they are realized.

This is where middle managers can make a difference by becoming responsible not only for communicating the benefits of change but also for making them come true.

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In short, the role of middle management in organizational change is to convey change management knowledge in a way that is understandable and easy for employees to adopt. Implementing a change, with a little practice, can be done in no time. But adopting a change requires a resignification of the mental schemes that supported old business structures.

Here the middle managers play a fundamental role in promoting the appropriate transition between the old structure and the new one. Then, the power between staff and senior management finds its point of balance, adding intermediate positions of power with responsibilities as a mediator and communicator aware of executive decisions, but seeking to be more empathic and closer to employees.