Understanding the Power of Leading From the Middle (OPINION)

John Maxwell’s “Law of the Lid” asserts an organization cannot outperform the leadership ability of its managers.

A key leadership skill of every successful C-suite leader is his or her ability to recruit and empower all-star mid- to senior-level managers who can create the massive innovations and advances that dramatically strengthen the brand and improve profitability.

Consider this response from Paul Trylko, CEO of Amplify Credit Union, when I asked how CEOs can accelerate their results: “Focus your efforts on getting the right people in the right seats, and develop them. Manage the organization with a high-level metric dashboard and give your team [the right people] flexibility and accountability for the dashboard results.”

Trylko and leaders of his caliber understand the importance of building leadership in the middle of the organization, and I want to give you an example of leading from the middle, the characteristics of middle-focused all-stars and advice on leading these high performers.

Arvest Success

While managing marketing analytics at Arvest Bank, my team and I created a project that helped our branch sales force strengthen customer relationships, improve profitability, and increase employee productivity. Leading from the middle is what allowed my four-person team to make this project a huge success across 16 banks and 250 branches.

What made it successful? My team’s expertise with analytics and technology was certainly a factor, but we were just four people, and our success required the engagement and cooperation of thousands of employees who didn’t report to us. Here are the six success factors that gave us stellar results:

Big picture thinking: Diminishing customer branch visits reduced employee productivity and risked customer relationships.

Intuition: We had a feeling customers would welcome customer service calls.

Influence: Contact with key internal influencers who supported our efforts.

Buy-In: Bank senior management teams bought in to the project with the help of the key internal influencers.

Momentum: We promoted early successes and established best practices.

Leverage points: We focused exclusively on people, ideas, technologies, and processes that could produce explosive growth.

Middle-Focused All-Stars

To achieve results like those in the example above, middle-focused all-stars share these personal characteristics in addition to mastering their functional areas:

Fully understand the enterprise, its business and support units, and the industry; be practical visionaries who think creatively, independently, strategically, and tactically; be bold, courageous, thick skinned, and don’t easily give up; build consensus among all levels of management, including executive, support, and front line areas; bw people developers who understand nothing gets accomplished without great teams; be impatient, sometimes impulsive; and have little regard for unnecessary rules, procedures and bureaucracy.

Congratulations if you have managed to recruit and develop middle-focused all-stars. The challenge for C-suite-level leaders is keeping these all-stars happy and performing at high levels.

While their talent brings extraordinary results, their aggressive search for the “next big thing” can frustrate and bore them if they perceive too many insurmountable obstacles exist, or if they sense executive management is becoming disengaged, overly conservative, or not moving fast enough.

To lead these folks, challenge them with new ideas and problems and regularly demonstrate you believe in what they’re doing. 

Scott McClymonds is the founder of Fayetteville-based strategic consulting firm CEO Velocity. His expertise integrating leadership, strategic marketing, and technology builds competitive advantages for his clients. Subscribers to this magazine can receive a free one-hour strategic marketing consultation and assessment by contacting him at [email protected], 479-263-0774, or on LinkedIn.