Kim was bright, hardworking, collaborative and ambitious. She was a great corporate citizen. She was also exhausted. And excited.
Kim and her team had just finished two days together, spending time on exploring the new business strategy and creating their version of it for her function. She was delighted at how the team had engaged in making the organisation’s strategy their own. The alignments between the two levels of plans were clear and the team had started to take the strategic imperatives and design a plan that was executable at their level of the business.
That work of translation had only just begun and would take some time to complete but Kim was hopeful about the coming year and the results they would produce as a team because they had made the organisational strategy their own and translated it into a plan they would deliver locally. People could see the connection between their contribution and what the business was trying to achieve.
Delivering positive impacts
Fast forward 10 months and I had the chance to catch up with Kim. Her tendency was to focus on the gaps in what they had achieved rather than everything that had gone well. So, we spent some time looking at what she and her team had achieved. It was a lot. And it had gained her and her team recognition across key parts of the business who could see the connections between their work and the progress of the business. The team had produced positive impacts that pushed the organisation forward in the direction it was looking to go.
If the business could clone many Kim’s it would thrive.
Kim is an amalgam of so many middle leaders I have worked with over the years. A cog in the bigger machinery of large corporations, whose contribution can be overlooked because they do not sit at the top table. But one thing is for certain, without the Kim’s of the world, organisational progress would be impossible. She and those made in her likeness, are the critical layers of an organisation that translate strategy into action. Theory into practice. Aims into impacts.
Not too many, not too few, the middle needs to be just right
The balance for organisations to strike is having a critically large enough layer of middle leaders whilst not over-inflating it and producing inefficiencies of cost. There are many ways of doing that, central to which is recruiting and developing A* middle leaders, like Kim, who if such a thing could be done, would produce an ROI far in excess of their salary.
Middle leaders and managers are the unsung heroes of your organisation and my job is to help your realise that and turn your attention to supporting their rise.
