10 Habits Middle Managers must have

When people grow to assume middle management positions, their lives at work take on a drastic shift. Not only must they care about themselves and their growth, it’s time to take care of other employees.

Glassdoor provides a succinct description of what middle managers do, which includes overseeing daily operations, setting team goals, reporting employee productivity, creating team budgets and setting good examples.

Middle Managers must adopt new behaviours

Newly minted middle managers must adopt a set of behaviours they may not be accustomed to. The same Glassdoor article also lists a handful of tips for being an effective middle manager, which we agree with 100%.

With the Covid-19 pandemic showing no signs of abating, it is clearly becoming more difficult for managers to exert control over themselves and their teams. Both they and their employees are continuing to face challenges of working from home; dealing with family concerns; and not benefitting from interacting with one another at the workplace, just to name a few.

Despite this, managers must continue to lead themselves and their teams, and must continue to deliver on promised targets.

10 tips for success

1.Keep learning from people up, down and around

2. Keep your ego in check

3. Be prepared to be wrong – and take the blame

4. Let team make decisions and take charge

5. Challenge employees to stretch more

6. Reinvent

7. Inspire and lead by example

8. Think empowering, not controlling

9. Think investing, not spending

10. Think possibilities, not outcomes.

Here are 10 tips for middle managers to succeed in their positions.

1. Keep learning from people up, down, around

The manager’s learning journey is a never-ending one. Once she has assumed the new position, she must realise that lessons come from a variety of sources including online and offline trainings, and all directions – managers, peers and employees. She must be willing to keep her mind open, which relates nicely to the next tip.

2. Keep your ego in check

The manager cannot succeed if she assumes that can lord over her employees. Being a manager is not about bossing people around. Instead, it’s about enabling people to do their best, and leading a team towards the decided goals.

3. Be prepared to be wrong – and take the blame

A manager who keeps her ego in check is also one who is willing to admit that she has made some wrong decisions. As leader of the team, she can’t throw her employees to the lions. A true leader is one who stands in front and accepts blame for what went wrong, and takes the initiative to right the wrongs.

4. Let team make decisions and take charge

A middle manager does not have a monopoly on ideas. With so many balls to juggle and keep in the air, she won’t be doing herself – or the team – any favours if she took it upon herself to think of all ideas on behalf of the team. She should let her employees take charge of some decisions, which she plays the role of guide and leader.

5. Challenge employees to stretch more

We don’t mean exercise stretches, of course! The manager must encourage her team to reach beyond what they’d normally be capable of in their roles. Setting stretch targets or projects reveals to the manager how much she and her employees are truly capable of.

6. Reinvent

There’s no fun in letting projects run the same way year after year, is there? The manager must look at ways to improve and inject new life into projects or processes, even before they start to become boring and mundane.

7. Inspire and lead by example

If a manager wants her employees to think of new ideas, take charge of projects or challenge themselves with stretch targets, she must first lead by example and take on those challenges herself. Climbing into the middle manager seat doesn’t mean sitting on her laurels and taking it easy while bossing the team around. Leading from the front is a much-talked about strategy which encourages managers to walk the talk.

8.Think empowering, not controlling

Be the manager to practices autonomy and enablement, instead of the one who breathes over her employees’ shoulders and has the desire to know every micro-detail of every project under her nose. The effective middle manager is one who empowers her colleagues to manage their tasks without giving instructions at every step. She must be clear what’s expected from the project…but she must allow her employees to manage how the project is done.

9. Think investing, not spending

An effective manager is one who has the knack of managing costs effectively. While managers cannot let costs spiral out of control, she has to develop the knack of choosing where to spend wisely, and thinking of them as investments that will enable herself and her team do more, and do their tasks better. Useful investments include training programs for herself and the team, and tools that will deliver better results or reporting data, and could improve efficiency and effectiveness.

10. Think possibilities, not problems

After World War 2, Winston Churchill said the famous line “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. Managers will constantly face crises in their roles in all possible forms. An effective manager is one who is able to rise to the challenges by seeing them as possibilities for change, improvement or development, instead of regarding them as problems that prevent her and her team from doing what their team has been expected to do.