The times have changed, rapidly. It came suddenly, it’s challenging. Some people talk about black swans, others talk about black elephants…. whatever we call it, the fact is the change was sudden, unexpected, and reality changed substantially for most of us. It also changed for every organization on the planet, and especially for enterprise businesses.
If we take the perspective of a typical enterprise organization of our time, and if we focus further on the role of a middle manager in such an organization, we can even see a pattern (or a specific “signature”) of things that changed.
A “middle manager” in this context would be a person responsible for functioning of multiple teams within a business unit of the organization. For sure, that’s not an easy job these days. These people are caught between a rock and a hard place – trying to preserve business continuity and efficiency, be flexible and empathetic for special circumstances their employees found themselves in (in business and private lives) and be innovative about new ways of working, all at the same time. It calls for a lot of empathy!
We’ve spent recent weeks coaching a large number of teams into finding their new stability, and we have a good set of tools and practices to be able to help you remotely. If you are one of those middle managers and are having a difficult time navigating through this time of crisis, get in touch to see how we can help you find your new stability or keep reading as we take a deeper dive in our guide on Leading Through the Crisis.
How to be a leader in a time of high complexity and chaos?
Traditional command-and-control management does not work well anymore. Instead, you should focus on managing constraints of the environment, and to enable running of multiple parallel experiments in order to find new practices that work well. LEARN MORE
How to be a leader of remote and dispersed teams?
What used to be daily face-to-face stand-ups, planning and review meetings, now happens differently. Or it still doesn’t happen at all?
There are still deadlines and deliveries to be met, but the environment changed. Do you revert to micro-management, and start calling around asking for reports every hour…? Or do you keep the existing trust levels and do nothing, believing that everything will end up being fine? LEARN MORE
How to lead organizational culture in this new reality?
And finally, there’s your organizational culture. How does it change in this new reality? What do you do as a leader about it? Do you try to prevent and fight the change? Can you sense in which direction the change happens? People now feel a different kind of overwhelming emotions on all levels, both personal and professional. LEARN MORE
None of these topics are new. Those challenges are normally present in most of the organizations today. You’ve probably already experimented with some of the approaches mentioned here, or at least thought or read about them.
But what’s new now is these special circumstances the whole world ended up in.
And it happened suddenly and it happened very fast so you don’t really have time to ponder on how to cope with it and eventually adapt.
So, let’s have a chat and see what are your specific challenges and how can we help you overcome them. Book a time slot and let’s talk!
