Blog Posts - Middle:Managed

March 8, 2020March 8, 2020

How to Stop Undermining your Leadership By Being a People Pleasing Manager

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Communication in a leadership role is nuanced. It’s a balancing act between two subtly different leadership communication styles. One of them is being generally agreeable as a leader to keep the peace, but picking the battles where we will push back. The other is to stay agreeable as a leader and being run over by your staff because you will not stand up because you want to people please. This latter is a very dangerous practice. You need to stop undermining your leadership by being a people pleasing Manager.

Your leadership is undermined when you are too focused on people pleasing. In Management, it is our job to keep operations going, not to be everyone’s friend. It’s always nice to be friendly, but boundaries need to exist.

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March 7, 2020March 10, 2021

Creating a SWOT Analysis – On Your Own Leadership Skills and Abilities

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Let’s do the opposite of a performance review. A performance review is done annually with your boss where you highlight all of your accomplishments and minimize (but provide lessons learned) of any shortcomings. Instead, you’re going to take an honest and confidential look to assess your leadership skills and abilities using the SWOT analysis tool.

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March 1, 2020March 1, 2020

Apologizing as a Leader: the Necessary Step to Keep Your Team on Track

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Leadership is all about the art of the apology. As a Manager, apologies will be directed towards customers, your boss, and absolutely must go to your employees. Apologizing as a leader towards your staff is very difficult, but a necessary process for the health of your team.

Apologizing to your staff is not a sign of weakness as a leader. Think of all of the authority you have and the decisions that you need to make on a daily basis. As discussed in the post, Identify the Top Management Decision Traps That Anyone Can Fall In To , we all have the ability to make mistakes.

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February 27, 2020February 27, 2020

Identify the Top Management Decision Traps That Anyone Can Fall In To

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Decision making as a Manager is full of risk. Too often decisions have to made quickly – which can lead to decision making traps in the form of hasty decisions based on incomplete information or generalizations. These decision making traps that we can fall in to as Managers have a fancy name – Logical Fallacies.

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February 26, 2020March 3, 2020

Addressing Team Performance Issues when the Previous Manager Avoided Conflict

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Are you a new or experienced manager coming on board to an established team? There may be some unspoken rules or team norms that require your time to sort through. It becomes a challenge when these team norms are undesirable and cause issues with quality, service, organization, or interpersonal conflict.

This dysfunction creates an unproductive environment and needs to be addressed for the health of the team. The challenge comes with what to do with a team that has such firmly established poor dynamics – because their previous manager let them get away with it!

After you have finished cursing the previous manager’s name, you need to come up with a plan to get the team back on track. Standards for professionalism need to be clear, boundaries need to be set, and quality work needs to be set as the expectation.

Read on to find out the risks of doing nothing and tips on how to address these deeply rooted behaviors.

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February 23, 2020March 3, 2020

Why You Should Care if Employees Think Decisions Are Fair

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If you have ever had employees grumbling about the fairness of work assignments, distribution of work, vacation approvals, or amount of shift work then you are not alone. Unfortunately for middle managers, this is not an exhaustive list of complaints that can lead to the perception of unfairness.

An employee’s perception on what is fair is all that matters, not your attempt as a manager to make things equitable. Human brains are wired to perceive the fairness of how financial rewards are distributed. It’s not much of a stretch to apply this brain function to decisions that occur around them in the workplace.

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