“We’ve been talking about empowerment in this company for YEARS” says Alex, a thoughtful People Director in a big company of knowledge workers. “..those of us in the top couple of layers of leadership have been living and breathing it: I would never attempt to solve the problems of my direct reports. My role is to coach and champion them - it goes without saying that they are capable of finding their own solutions.
"We thought this empowerment was mirrored across the company. But the shift to home working revealed a much less progressive mindset among our first and second line managers. This reveals itself in many of the anonymous town hall questions about remote working including:
- ‘How do I know what they’re doing when I can’t see them?’
- ‘How am I supposed to manage performance and quality when we’re not in the office?’
- ‘Am I allowed to share this information with my team?’
Smart people with decades of experience seem to be waiting for instruction whilst resisting using their own judgement. And managers seem to regard their people as vulnerable children. I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve unconsciously cultivated a culture of learned helplessness”
Versions of this conversation are cropping up with senior leads in a wide variety of companies we work with across financial services, manufacturing, retail, advertising and media.
There are some nuances and a lot of commonality around the same challenge:
Top leaders want and value innovation, adaptability and collaboration across and throughout the organisation. They know this is achieved by trust and empowerment in environments where people feel safe to speak up and to take risks. The company values and desired behaviours espouse collaboration, adult to adult communication and reduced hierarchy, and yet what they see is:
- Paternalistic behaviour among first and second line managers, who feel responsible for having all the answers and for supervising and protecting their people
- Permission-seeking, reactive and risk averse behaviour among those same managers and their people - where everyone passively waits for instruction rather than using their judgement and taking appropriate action.
- Customer facing teams and their line managers feeling frustrated and blocked by slow decision making, red tape or unhelpful process. Complaining about it in private, but often feeling unable to raise it with senior leaders and so the business and people in it have to live with the consequences of inaction.
The problem seems to have been amplified by the pandemic. Or maybe the new ways of working have simply made these underlying issues more evident. The challenge is definitely more marked where a business needs to move from one ‘mode’ or phase to another. We see this clearly when a business or team has been in an intense period of survival, crisis management and cost focus and now needs to pivot to one of growth. In this situation senior leaders might think that they have done what is needed by communicating the change in focus and direction, making resources available or creating new opportunities. But that is often not enough to change entrenched beliefs and behaviour, so despite best efforts around communications, the bulk of people stay stuck in their old ways.
Achieving a change from learned helplessness to proactive progress is not easy, but it is possible.
What’s needed is an environment where everyone on the team thinks for themselves and feels able to contribute ideas, take appropriate risks and move themselves to action. With less hierarchical mindsets, managers don’t feel pressured to have all the answers, and their people know that their POV is respected and welcomed. As a result, middle managers can step up and lead because they don’t feel stymied by a feeling of lack of support or crushed by the weight of dependency of their team.
Ultimately this will create conditions for growth – tapping into collective talent and potential.
If this is a shift you’d like to make happen on your team, here are three places to start:
1. Drop the Judgement and Impatience
Understand the good intention behind parent-child styles of leadership. People mean well and it doesn’t help to create defensiveness. Controlling behaviours are usually the by-product of driving for excellence. They are also an inevitable result of historical periods of crisis management and cost control: There are consequences of focusing too hard and too long on controlling costs, risk, time and efficiency. Avoid falling into the trap of demonising and judging middle managers as many of them have been on the receiving end of this behaviour themselves for a long time - so they believe the mother hen approach of 'I'll protect you' makes them a good manager.
Learn about the real constraints and blockers for your team. In highly regulated environments, for example, hierarchies and process obedience are often baked into compliance. Suggesting that first line managers should trust their people to use their own judgement will sound nonsensical in a process driven, compliance focused environment: especially where large numbers of employees are inexperienced. Senior leaders need to listen and lean into the detail to understand the nuanced realities of empowerment vs risk control.
Be patient. If you want people to stop waiting for permission, you have to build their trust. It takes time and constantly repeated reassurance for people to believe that it really is OK to take risks and to use their judgement. Expect that. Don’t get critical when the change doesn’t happen overnight. Stay the course, expect to be on repeat for at least twelve months. Be consistent.
2. Be Intentional
Create awareness of the change in the external environment, and how that necessitates change in your workplace. Talk with your people about that change and what it means for them.
Have clear expectations that are frequently discussed, and always captured in writing. Recent Gallup and Mautz research revealed a shocking disparity in understanding of expectations between middle leaders and their bosses, in over 50% of cases. Encourage everyone to be having the same conversation with their teams.
Ensure your messaging is crystal clear and being reinforced by role modelling and by consistent comms. Talk about where you personally are making mistakes in this area too - and seek feedback and challenge from everyone around you to help you stay aware. Examine your own practice – its normal to default to old habits under pressure
Identify the benefits to your middle leaders and talk about them. How will the new behaviours create a more positive experience, for them and for the team they are loyal to? How will it make their lives easier? What new skills will they learn? Encourage leaders to be having these WIIFM conversations at the individual level.
Make sure the supporting mechanisms of the organisation are aligned to the empowered culture you want to create: for example, sign off processes for authorising decisions and budget. When you’re trying to change behaviour, this is especially important for mechanisms that underpin reward and recognition. For example, if you want a focus on team performance, an individual bonus scheme is unlikely to help. If you want to support the message that every individual contributor is responsible for driving her own performance, then it should be each individual’s responsibility to capture and record her goals - not the line manager’s job.
3. Offer tailored support and skill development
Offer tailored support and skills development for every middle leader you want to influence. This is best offered one to one, so that every person can be met where they are. This is vitally important, not just because middle leaders in large companies are a notoriously diverse population, but also because we all have different beliefs, expectations and potential.
And talk to us before you rule this out based on assumptions about cost – we focus on making one to one leadership coaching affordable and scalable!
There are huge benefits to externally provided coaching - but make sure your supplier has a deep understanding of the culture change you are driving. It's also critical that the coaches are set up to blend coaching with direction where needed, so that they can bust myths, impart knowledge, and challenge assumptions.
Avoid jargon and check understanding. Your middle leaders, especially those with a highly technical focus, don’t have time for extensive leadership reading and they have no idea what you mean by ‘growth culture mindset’ ‘empowerment’ or ‘psychological safety’.
You don’t need to be stuck complaining how your middle leaders ‘don’t get it’. You have a huge opportunity to unleash a whole layer of untapped potential in the middle of your organisation, so they become the transmission, rather than the blocker for successful change.
At Nkuzi Change we unlock the potential of Middle Leaders through coaching that is focused, directed, inclusive and scalable - so organisations and individuals can thrive.
