Why Middle Management is the Hardest Job | Simon Sinek

Middle

management

is the most difficult job in any organization because when you are a junior. Their only job is to actually do their job, that's all and they receive training on how to do their job. I mean, everyone should have a license, go to school, and learn how to do the job of being an accountant, and if they're really good. In that you eventually get promoted and you eventually get promoted to a position where you're now responsible for the people who do the work that you used to do, but the problem is they don't give us any training on how to do it, you know, and the people at high level they think about completely different things, they are thinking about the company, they think about the strategy and the problem is that you have this

middle

group that is in a kind of strange mix where they are not there, they have to be strategic, but not strategic majority. and they have to be tactical, but they are not mostly tactical and they have to translate what happens up here down and down here up and most things break in the

middle

because I run into companies where the leadership is.

Amazing and they're visionary and they care about people and they want to do the right thing and then I go to the front lines and they're like, yeah, this place is the worst, so I think about what happened between here and there. and it's the middle, most things break in the middle, so I think there's two, there's two, there's two factors, one is we don't train people how to lead correctly, so like I said before, when you were junior, we have to know what to do, we just do our job, we would be good at it and as we become leaders in this middle

management

, now we are transitioning to this job, now we are responsible for the people who do the job we we used to do. but no one is teaching us how to listen, no one is teaching us communication skills, no one is teaching us how to effectively confront, no one is teaching us how to give and repeat, receive feedback, no one is teaching us leadership, that's why we have managers and not leaders, and like you would never ask someone to do it. anything in accounting without showing them how to do it, is never a bad idea, so why do we think that we can just promote someone to a leadership position and expect them to know what to do without showing them how to do it, so that's a problem.

Number one is that the rule is a complete vacuum in some cases or just minimal amounts of leadership training and it needs to be robust. The other problem I run into quite often is that I find some really wonderful mid-level self-taught leaders. management, they're reading books, they're going to conferences themselves, they're watching TED talks, I mean, there are leadership students, they have mentors, I mean, they're really trying and they're complaining about top management all of them. What we care about most is quarterly profits and the problem we have is that they are trying very hard to do the right thing, but management doesn't really care, so that's the opposite and in those cases I recommend that they do the right thing. correct.

I mean quitting is always an option, but it's not necessarily the best option or the first option, but I always recommend being the leader that you wish you had, which one is. They'll ask me if it's one of the, if not the The most common question I get is what do I do when I'm trying to do the right thing and my boss for my boss's boss or my boss's boss just doesn't get it, you know, the only thing that They care about money before people. and the answer is that you can't control what you can't control, so worried about the people around you, worried about the people next to you, the level below you, even a level above you, and be the leader that you wish you had.

What you start to find in those pockets are these little magical diamonds in the rough here. We worked with a large technology company and we worked with a group where that's exactly what we did. We developed this whole leadership thing just for this. small group in the middle and yes, they started doing better and their numbers improved and the group expanded and blah blah blah, all the things you would expect to happen, but one thing we didn't expect is for the phone to start ringing. hook from other people in the company asking if I can get a job in their group because when people who worked in this group went out to lunch with their friends who work in other groups, you know what work is like today, amazing different stories, stories different and everything Suddenly, word spread throughout this 80,000-person company and this was just a group of 150 people.

Word spread throughout this company of 80,000 people that everyone was trying to get into this group because they wanted to work in it because it had good leadership.