Why Middle Management is the Hardest Job | Simon Sinek

Middle management is the hardest job in any organization. Because when you're junior, your only job is really to do your job. That's it. And you get trained how to do your job. I mean, you all have to be licensed and go to school and learn how to do the job of being an accountant. And if you're really good at it, eventually you get promoted. And you eventually get promoted to a position where you're now responsible for the people who do the job you used to do. But the problem is, they don't give us any training how to do that. And senior people are thinking about entirely different things. They're thinking about the firm, they're thinking about strategy. And the problem is, so you have this middle group that's in this sort of weird mix where they have to be strategic, but not majority strategic. And they have to be tactical, but they're not majority tactical. And they have to translate what's going up here to down there and down here to up here. And most things break in the middle. Because I'll meet firms where the leadership's amazing and they're visionary and they care about people and they want to do the right thing. And then I go down to the front line and they're like, yeah, this place is the worst. And so I'm like, what happened between here and there? And it's the middle. Most things break in the middle. And so I think there are two factors. One is, we don't train people how to lead, right? So as I said before, when you were junior, we have to know what to do. We just do our jobs. We have to be good at it. And as we become leaders in this middle management, we're now transitioning to this job. We're now responsible for the people who do the job we used to do. But nobody's teaching us listening. Nobody's teaching us communication skills. Nobody's teaching us effective confrontation. Nobody's teaching us how to give and receive feedback. Nobody's actually teaching us leadership. So this is why we get managers and not leaders. And you would never ask somebody to do anything in accounting without showing them how to do it, ever. Bad idea, right? So why on earth do we think that we can just promote someone to a leadership position and expect that they know what to do without showing them how to do it? So that's problem number one, is the total vacuum in some cases, or just really minimal amounts of leadership training. And it needs to be robust. The other problem that I come across very often is I get some really wonderful self-taught leaders in middle management. They're reading books. They're going to conferences themselves. They're watching TED Talks. I mean, they're students of leadership. They have mentors. I mean, they're really making a go of it. And they complain that the senior management, all they care about is the quarterly earnings. And so the problem we have there is they're trying so hard to do the right thing, but management really doesn't care. So that's the opposite, right? And in those cases, I generally recommend that the right thing to do, I mean, quitting is always an option, but that's not necessarily the best option or the first option. But I always recommend to be the leader you wish you had, which is, I get the question, it is one of the, if not the most common question I get, which is what do I do when I'm trying to do the right thing and my boss or my boss's boss or my boss's boss's boss just don't get it, you know? All they care about is money before people. And the answer is you can't control what you can't control. So worry about the people around you. Worry about the people to the sides of you, a level below you, even a level above you, and you be the leader you wish you had. And what you start to find in those pockets is these magical little diamonds in the rough appear. We worked with a large technology company and we worked with a group where that's exactly what we did. We developed this whole leadership thing just for this little group in the middle. And yes, they started to do better and their numbers went better and the group expanded and blah, blah, blah, all the things you'd expect to happen. But one thing we didn't expect is that the phone started ringing off the hook from other people in the firm asking, can I get a job in your group? Because when the people who worked in this group would go out for lunch with their friends who worked in other groups, you know, how's work today? Amazing. Different stories, right? Different stories. And all of a sudden, word spread across this 80,000 person company, and this was only a group of 150 people, word spread across this 80,000 person company that everybody was trying to get into this group just because they wanted to work in it because you had good leadership. Right. ♪