How to Solve the Intermediate Management Crisis?

How to Solve the Intermediate Management Crisis? For twenty years a thesis that intermediate management represents a brake for the development of organizations is spreading widely. If some people think that the liberated company is the archetype par excellence, it is not the case: without managers the company (liberated or not) cannot survive. On the contrary, it is the intermediary management which radically supports and boosts innovation and performance within organizations.

Solve the Intermediate Management Crisis

Intermediate management is in crisis, however, for many reasons. The first is the lack of clarity associated with this role. Indeed, many do not really know what the manager does of his days: since he is neither in the operational nor in the strategy, it is difficult to define clearly what his tasks and his perimeter of activity daily.

Financial management in times of Crisis

The second is the lack of valorization of intermediate management in the organization. Indeed, they are the most neglected group of the company (study Boston Consulting Group), in terms of resources allocated and training; Which is the cause of a significant loss of employee performance because it is also the largest group in the company (for 50,000 employees, BCG has calculated that there are on average 7,000 managers Intermediaries who are responsible for about 43,000 people). So it’s not surprising that they’re also the least happy employees in the business. The reasons are as follows:

1. Bad management: this is the main reason for dissatisfaction of an employee in general, and not just a middle manager. Poor management is usually synonymous with bad leader. This reveals a lack of transparency, lack of skills and / or lack of interest in its employees.
2. No prospect of advancement or evolution: usually combined with a lack of meaning in the work; They do not see any impact on their work for the company or any impact of the company in society, which is a source of disengagement – hence the need to clearly define the company’s missions and involve Employees, and, a fortiori, managers).
3. Lack of appreciation of their person and their work: in fact the intermediate managers still suffer from a reputation as counter-masters, guardians only of the performance of their teams and perceived simply as supervisors.
4. Discordance in business discourse: advocating a healthy balance between pro and personal life on one side and at the same time increasing workloads. This situation is a source of frustration: it is the role of the company to empower its employees to implement its recommendations.
5. Yet middle managers have a key role in the organization: they see the difficulties of the field in setting up the strategic vision of the company.

6. They are the first levers of employee engagement and performance.

So What are the Solutions?

The first step is to clarify the role of middle management, both for employees and especially for the manager himself. Because its functions change from one company to another, so there is no standard job description for intermediate managers. It is possible, however, to outline this role, and it is then realized that they are indispensable to the organization:

• They are largely involved in the organization’s communication strategy
• They are the ones that help employees prioritize their goals
• They facilitate collaboration
• They paved the roads of progress and evolution by supporting the deployment of trades / careers
• They take care of the alignment between processes, tools, software and the overall strategy of the company (and its objectives)

The middle managers are the smugglers of the company, in charge of two large pillars supporting the entire organizational structure: the transmission (vertical link between different groups) and execution (implementation strategy).

The Application of Commitment and Commercial Performance

With Incentive we do not offer you a miracle solution, but a new way of motivating and valuing your teams (managers and salespeople). The ideal underlying our approach is to drive with our customers the transformation of their sales organization towards a more efficient and autonomous management; A management of commitment and motivation of the sales teams.

An application of Commitment and Commercial Performance makes it possible in particular to:

• Giving power back to your intermediary managers: a common interface that simplifies the management of goals and numbers allows them to extract precious time that they can use to coach their teams. They will also be more autonomous and will have more visibility on their actions – and therefore on their responsibilities.

• Include them in strategic decisions: especially those related to the animation of their teams. Intermediate managers need transparency and visibility on strategic objectives since they will be in charge of transmitting them and implementing them in the lower layers of the organization. Incentive enables you to centralize on a platform all the means (key indicators, figures, results, objectives, etc.) that managers need to effectively coach their teams.

• Improve and facilitate their training: often middle managers lack training. Indeed, bad management is the main cause of turnover of the salesmen. It is therefore essential to invest in their training to retain your teams. With Incentive you train your managers in commercial coaching and you can dedicate training resources to them with disconcerting ease.

• Facilitating information sharing: intermediary management is often denigrated because, as an intermediary, it makes it more difficult for the organization to be agile. But for the agility of the organization it is important to reduce intermediaries. However, the origin of the problem is often misidentified: it is more the sharing of information that is not sufficiently effective.