Why Middle Management is the Hardest Job | Simon Sinek

middle management is the hardest job in any organization because when you're jr. 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 you eventually you get promoted and you eventually get promoted to 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 you know and senior people are thinking about entirely different things they're thinking about the firm thinking about strategy and the problem is so you have this middle group that's in this sort of weird mix where they're not there they have to be strategic but not majority strategic and they 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 and most things break in the middle because I'll meet firms where the leadership is 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 frontline 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 there are two 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're we have to know what to do we just do our jobs we'd

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 is teaching us listening nobody's teaching us communication skills nobody's teaching as effective confrontation nobody's teaching us how to give and repeat receive feedback nobody's actually teaching us leadership so this is why we get managers and not leaders and like you would never ask somebody to do anything in accounting without showing them how to do it ever bad idea all 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 is that is the rule 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 of middle management they're reading books they're going to conferences themselves they're watching TED Talks I mean there's students of leadership

they have mentors I mean they're really making a go of it and they complain that the that the senior management all they care about is is the quarterly earnings and so that 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 recommend that they the right thing to do I mean quitting is always an option but that's not the not necessarily the best option or the first option but I always recommend to be the leader you wish

you had which is they'll 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 and my boss for 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 and the answer is you can't control what you can't control so worried about the people around you worried about the people to the sides of you the level below you even a level above you

and you be the leader you wish you had what you start to find in those pockets is these magical little diamonds in the rough up here we we worked with a large a large technology company and we worked with a group where that's exactly what we did we 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 works in other groups you know how's work today amazing different stories different stories and all of a sudden words 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 which is because it was they wanted to work in

it because he had good leadership [Music]