Management – James Osborn

Power to the Middle

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.

Manager as Coach

Manager as Coach is an introduction to the OSCAR coaching model. This is an evolution of the simple GROW model that’s especially useful to coaching in a management context.

The model is broken out to consider the Outcome, Situation, Choices, Actions and Review. The focus on Actions and Review is the main difference for the model when compared to GROW, and this is what slants it towards a more management focused approach. GROW looks at the Coachee’s Will to commit to change, but the Coachee will not necessarily sign up to a firm agreement to make that change.

In OSCAR, Actions and Review build an agreement to both what will be done and how it’s going to be reviewed. This is familiar in style to SMART objective setting, hence the power of this model in a management coaching relationship.

As well as an introduction to the model, the book covers applying it to Coachees in various mindsets. It also walks through different types of relationship that can benefit from coaching, how you can show the value of coaching to an organisation and how you can build a coaching culture.

There are lots of examples spread throughout the book, with case studies and testimonies throughout every chapter. This really helps to bring to life some of the considerations raised in the main text.

The book may be a little bit long in some places, attempting to apply OSCAR to too many situations beyond the core coaching conversation. There’s certainly sections that are less valuable once you’ve picked up the core model, so don’t be afraid to pick and choose your reading after the first few chapters.

Other than that, it’s a worthwhile read for managers new to coaching approaches and is deserving a place on your coaching bookshelf.