Power to the Middle is a McKinsey book that tries to “bust the stereotypes of the middle manager”. It’s a fair departure from some of the familiar consultancy cost cutting practices, and a lot closer to the ideas presented in Slack, around building resilient organisations in the ever faster changing world of work.
It’s research backed, with a wide range of stories around the central message. Middle Managers really are the glue in your organisation. They are the ones that connect up the people on the ground with the Executive direction, and the ones that bring strategy to life.
Each chapter of the book addresses a specific topic, and leaves you with 2-3 key points to help make sure that you are making best use of the vital Middle Manager role. From moving them into the coaching and development role they need to occupy, to crafting the role as an attractive destination, to allowing Middle Managers to take on strategy and craft it to fit their own specific needs and circumstances.
Command and control approaches through brittle structures are not going to give you the flexibility and innovation needed to survive in the modern world, and unlocking the power of these connectors is key to a successful future.
The key takeaways ensure that you are able to give some actions to your managers, while also making sure you are taking the right actions to support them, it’s a nice balance to show that everyone has to put the effort in to realise the value.
It’s overall an easy read, well broken down into contained chapters with those key messages to enable you to summarise quickly. It’s also great to see this kind of thinking coming from a major consultancy, transforming the manager role and unlocking all the potential held within it is much more refreshing than seeing it as waste that can be cut.
As the world changes ever faster, we must be effective, and recognise that that costs more than a perfectly efficient machine created for an unchanging purpose. We can’t optimise for now, we have to optimise for the change we know is coming, and we’ll do that with flexible, empower managers able to shape their teams to deliver on the overall strategy of the organisation.
James Osborn 