Middle Management Excellence

What is the single most important thing a CEO can do to maximize his or her company’s performance?

The answer is to creatively, aggressively, and systematically build the capabilities of the company’s middle management team: the vice presidents, directors, and managers.

Regardless of what high-potential initiative the CEO chooses for the company, the middle management team’s performance will determine whether it is a success or failure. And if the middle management team is performing in high gear, the managers themselves will generate the right initiatives, and constantly adapt and improve them during implementation.

I recall several years ago reading a description of one major U.S. automobile company’s middle management team. The phrase that stuck in my mind was "the frozen middle." The essential idea was that whatever initiative top management decided the company would pursue, it would be slowed to a standstill by the unwillingness and inability of the company’s middle management team to carry it out. Ultimately, this company lost enormous market share to foreign competitors, and even now struggles to recover.

In education, it is well known that the quality of a school system is largely determined by the quality of the principals. If a school has a good principal, it will perform well. If the school has good teachers, but a poor principal, performance will suffer. In all sectors, middle management makes all the difference.

By Jonathan Byrnes (HBS DBA ’80) – Jonathan writes The Bottom Line, a monthly column that details innovative methods for increasing profit from an existing business without costly new initiatives.

Full Story: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=5126&t=dispatch