What is collaborative leadership in the middle management community?
Collaborative leadership in the middle management community is the challenge for middle managers to build purposeful collaboration with their peers out of their complex role and position – instead of extending divisional silos and internal competition. Within the middle management team it can be clarified together where and how collaboration creates synergies, and where it does not.
The capabilities
Because of their position, middle managers can act as creators, networkers, coordinators and integrators. In this process, they cooperate and manage a complex space between their own operational base, top management and laterally, with their internal colleagues and external partners. Through proactive modifications, interpretations and adaptations they translate strategic plans and visions into strategic action up and down the hierarchy and create the necessary conditions for the innovation of products, services and performance processes.
The challenge
In their sandwich position, a middle manager is often confronted with pressure to implement and faced with conflicting demands from all parties. The reaction is often “pushing into the middle and trying to please everybody”. The results are overload, competition, bureaucracy, silo mentality and the drifting apart of middle management. How can the conflicting demands of this role be reconciled and role conflicts minimized? How can we strike a balance between self-directed and other-directed leadership? How can collaboration instead of competition with other middle managers be fostered, synergies created and silos removed? How can middle managers have an active strategic influence?
Our consulting services
Based on your issues we can support you in the following areas:
Self-management
Creating clarity of roles, tasks and responsibilities through reflection and feedback. Developing new strategies for organising and leading from the middle: flexible coordination of disciplinary and lateral leadership, supporting self-organization of employees through situational leadership and feedback, proactive “upward” leadership to change own circumstances. Developing new courses of action to adress stress and work load more effectively.
Interconnected leadership
We will help you create the right balance between integration and re-divergence of middle management teams and identify where collaboration makes sense. We will put implementation structures and processes in place and will help you coordinate activities and resources and will support you in setting up a peer-to-peer advice system.
Examples of collaboration tools & methods
With the collaborative simulation LeadLab you will experience first-hand which rigid processes and modes of thinking are blocking solutions, self-organisation, innovation and change processes between the different hierarchical levels and business units.
You will also learn how to use simple strategies to build and shape productive work relationships between business units and hierarchical levels.