The stories that make us powerless in the messy middle of management

One of the strangest things about the messy middle of management is this:

You can have considerable authority and feel remarkably powerless.

I see it often in leadership development rooms.

Managers who lead teams, make decisions, influence culture and have considerable authority of their own will talk about the people above them as though there is almost nothing they can do.

• You don’t understand how senior this person is.
• That decision has already been made.
• You can’t challenge that.
• We just have to do it.

And sometimes they’re right.

There are consequences attached to authority. There are leaders who do not welcome challenge. There are cultures in which disagreement is costly.

But sometimes something else has happened too.

We have responded to authority before the person holding it has even exercised it.

• We have anticipated the no.
• Imagined the consequence.
• Decided what cannot be discussed.
• Made them bigger.
• Made ourselves smaller.
• And surrendered influence without ever discovering how much we might actually have had.

Everybody has some authority

In some context or another, there will always be someone with more authority than you.

Your manager has authority you don’t have.

Their manager has authority they don’t have.

The Exco. The CEO. The Board. The regulator. The client.

But here’s the interesting bit.

Even the people who report to you have authority you don’t have.

They have authority over themselves.

They get to choose their compliance, their defiance, their contribution, their discretionary effort, or some complicated combination of all of these.

• You can instruct someone to attend the meeting.
• You cannot instruct them to care.

• You can require the report.
• You cannot mandate their best thinking.

• You can demand compliance.
• You cannot compel commitment.

Nobody has complete control.

Which is precisely why influence is such an important form of power.

No human being has all the resources, permissions, relationships, information and authority they need.

We need other people.

A life without influence is a powerless life. It restricts the size of the life we can create and the impact we can have.

Authority is real. And we made it up.

Authority is constructed.

That’s not the same as saying it isn’t real.

We create roles, titles, reporting lines, mandates, policies and decision rights. We collectively agree that these confer particular permissions upon particular people.

And the consequences of those agreements can be very real.

They are still agreements.

Change the agreement and authority changes.

A CEO becomes an ex-CEO.

A mandate is withdrawn.

A reporting line changes.

A policy is overturned.

Someone who once had the authority to decide practically everything that happened in a building may one day discover that they no longer have the authority to enter that very building.

• Authority is conferred.
• It can also be taken away.

Which makes it a fairly fragile place from which to source all of your power.

Authority without influence walks on very short legs.

The inner game of influence

We tend to think of influence as an interpersonal skill.

And it is.

Communication matters. Listening matters. Rapport matters. Negotiation matters. Knowing how to have a brave conversation matters.

And long before any of those skills become useful, there is an inner game.

Because we don’t only have stories about their authority.

We have stories about our power.

• I can’t.
• I’m only the middle manager.
• They won’t listen.
• It’s pointless.
• I could lose everything.
• People like me don’t challenge people like that.
• I don’t have enough influence.

Sometimes these are careful assessments of genuine risk, and sometimes they’re assumptions.

Usually, they’re some mixture of the two.

And this is where courage enters the conversation.

Not reckless courage.

Not speak your truth regardless of the consequences courage.

Leadership requires enough self-awareness to distinguish between the consequence that is genuinely possible and the catastrophe we’ve constructed around it.

And then enough courage to ask:

What could I do from here?

Maybe I can’t overturn the decision.

Can I question it?

Can I influence how it’s implemented?

Can I offer information the decision-maker doesn’t have?

Can I negotiate?

Can I make a request?

Can I find allies?

Can I offer an alternative?

Can I say what I think without demanding that I get my way?

Power isn’t always getting the outcome you want.

Sometimes power is simply recovering your ability to participate in what happens next.

And then there’s bossmosis

This is the part that particularly interests me.

Because the manager who feels powerless ‘upstairs’ eventually goes ‘downstairs’.

And unless we’re paying attention, we reproduce what we’ve experienced.

• A leader complains that their boss doesn’t listen. Then interrupts their own people.
• They resent decisions being handed down without consultation. Then announce the decision to their team as a fait accompli.
• They feel they cannot challenge upwards. Then become defensive when challenged from below.
• They carefully calculate what can safely be said in the executive meeting. And inadvertently create a team where everybody else is making exactly the same calculation around them.

BOSSMOSIS

The quiet transmission of leadership behaviours down the hierarchy.

Stephen Light of Light Leadership recently described silence as a risk calculation: when the perceived political or personal cost of honesty becomes greater than its benefit, people choose self-protection. He says that looks like:

• That can look like polite agreement in public and resistance in private.
• Withholding an idea to avoid scrutiny.
• Doing what was explicitly requested while withholding discretionary effort.

And I think he’s right.

But here’s the uncomfortable mirror for those of us who lead:

We can be victims of that calculation in one room and the reason somebody else is making it in the next.

We can be constrained and consequential.

That’s why leadership in the messy middle cannot only be about what they are doing to us.

It also has to include what our experience of authority is teaching us to reproduce.

Three questions for the messy middle

Perhaps recovering influence begins here:

1. What authority does this person actually have, and what additional authority have I given them in my head?

Separate the formal mandate and genuine consequences from the assumptions you’ve built around them.

2. Where am I assuming powerlessness instead of exploring influence?

Not How do I get my way?

What choices, conversations, requests, relationships and possibilities remain available to me?

3. What am I reproducing for the people who experience me as the authority?

What does disagreement cost around me?

What happens when someone challenges me?

Do people have to manage my reaction before they can tell me the truth?

Because leadership asks courage of us in both directions.

The courage to exercise influence when authority sits elsewhere.

And the courage to examine ourselves when the authority is ours.

The Over-Responsible Manager | 8 October

This is part of what we’ll be exploring in The Over-Responsible Manager on 8 October.

Because one of the peculiarities of being in the middle is that you can carry enormous responsibility while believing you have very little power.

You’re responsible for delivery, people, culture, implementation, communication and outcomes.

But the budget may sit elsewhere.

The strategy may sit elsewhere.

The final decision may sit elsewhere.

And when we confuse not having final authority with not having power, over-responsibility becomes an exhausting combination:

I am responsible for everything.
I control very little.
And I have forgotten how much I can influence.

We’ll explore power, authority, responsibility and influence, including where your responsibility genuinely begins and ends, where you’ve surrendered power, and how to recover influence without pretending the realities of organisational life don’t exist.

8 October | The Over-Responsible Manager

https://www.madeformore.co.za/messy-middle

Because authority will often sit elsewhere.

Your power doesn’t have to.