Building Connective Leadership and Management in the Growth Stage Technology Enterprise

1. MIDDLE MANAGER
DEVELOPMENT
Building Connective Leadership and Management
in the Growth Stage Technology Enterprise
NOV. 22, 2017
DAVE LITWILLER

2. MIDDLE MANAGER
DEVELOPMENT
CHALLENGES
“Our Mid Level Managers are really the muscle and bone of the organization. We
are responsible to provide them the tools for their success.”
– Andy Grove, past CEO of Intel
Challenges:
• First time middle managers often want to stay with the formula that got them
promoted in the first place as successful individual contributors and first level
supervisors. Individual contribution and first level supervision is usually mainly
concerned with tactics and predictable execution, in a single function
• Middle management operates at the interface between strategy and tactics,
usually with significant cross-functional implications and complexity
• Rapid scaling naturally breeds uncertainty, unfamiliarity, irreproducibility and
diminished yield which middle management has to counteract

3. THE THREE POLES OF
(MIDDLE) MANAGEMENT
1) Achieve results
2) Build values
3) Develop people
• Middle management strength is vital to sustain
adaptability, market leadership, visionary capability and
surmount challenges
• Carrot: Good middle managers will help the business get
where it wants to be one step at a time, decision by
decision, issue by issue
• Stick: The opposite is also true

4. IMPETUS TO BUILD VS.
BUY MIDDLE
MANAGEMENT
• Much easier to achieve alignment of mission, goals and
values
• Fewer, less costly mis-hires
• More cost effective to scale than relying upon a
succession of externally sourced candidates
• Building from within
• Develops loyalty, ambition and talent throughout the
business

5. THE NUMBERS
• Natural selection over time will produce a portion of the
middle managers a rapidly growing technology business
will need, but usually not enough
• An active program to create more strong middle managers
is needed to build a strong enough stable
• General rule in high growth tech (3-in-3 Rule):
• Need to develop three strong candidate managers in a
three year window for each middle management role
expected during that forward time period
• 3-in-3 provides sufficient coverage for departures, and
non-linear growth requirements, to still build sufficient
breadth and depth of middle managers

6. GOAL
Give Middle Managers in High Growth Technology
Enterprises the Tools to:
• Facilitate adaptability, champion alternatives, down-select
best options
• Interpret circumstances and information with sufficient
perspective
• Influence up, down, across and outward
• Communicate effectively
• Support the development and work of staff
• Implement rapidly with dexterity and attention to detail

7. DISTINCTIVE ISSUES IN
GROWTH STAGE
TECHNOLOGY ENTERPRISES
• Initial success through the start-up phase on the strength of
the ideas and performance of the small early team can lead to
skewed attribution for success
• Early success can compensate temporarily for
• Missing management skills, in some cases even at the
executive level
• Underdeveloped organizational framework
• At the extreme, early success can lead to
• Diminutive view among leadership toward some of the
enduring principles of high performance management
• Deeply held beliefs that the business has devised or struck
upon new, sustainable management techniques which may
be largely head fakes

8. INEVITABLY THOUGH
• The fundamentals of good management, sound leadership
and the need to build middle management return to the fore
in rapidly growing technology enterprises
• Middle manager development requires not just building on
the enterprise’s traditional strengths, but also addressing
active or latent shortcomings in the scaling technology
enterprise, the lack of which may have had modest
discernable impact to date
• The test comes when a scaling company has to navigate a
turning point, and the company is larger or more complex
than what the founders and near founders can solely steer

9. OVERVIEW
Foundations of Middle Management
Basic Leadership
Bringing it All Together Fast (Fast Start Guide)
Use of Peer Groups, Mentors and the CEO

10. FOUNDATIONS OF
MIDDLE MANAGEMENT
• Communications
• Engaging and Influencing People
• Basics of Management Accounting and Finance
• Presentations
• Running Meetings
• Self-Regulation, starting with Time Management
• Team Building
• Management Skills – hiring, training, and performance
evaluation
• Decisions
• Project Management Skills – single, multiple

11. COMMUNICATIONS
• When informal communication gives way to more formal:
• Proposals
• Problem Solving
• Status Updates
• Competitive Analyses
• Circumstances to use written vs. oral
• Medium selection: The medium is the message
• Circumstances to correspond with smaller groups over
larger ones
• Combatting overload

12. COMMUNICATIONS
• Up, down, and peer-to-peer
• Target # of strong connections for optimal adaptability
• Too few, insufficient information, lack of diversity and
information
• Too many, information overload, contradictory messages
• Visualization tools
• Ease of human miscommunication
• Importance of probing across organizational layers and
boundaries to test if messages have been Tx’d and Rx’d
correctly
• Understanding that the same words can have widely
different meanings to different people

13. ENGAGING AND
INFLUENCING PEOPLE
“It’s important for people to understand persuasion for what it
is–not convincing and selling but learning and negotiating.” –
Jay Conger, Harvard Business Review, May-June 1998
• First shore up any shortcomings in expertise and data
• Invoke highly respected, tested and objective 3rd parties as
authorities to your cause
• Use pilot projects to demonstrate merit and capabilities
• Meet one-to-one with all the people you need to persuade, in
advance of any larger group presentations or deliberation
• Keep in mind that many people critical to your effectiveness
are people who do not report to you
• Nurture relationships and invoke colleagues having strong
relationships with stakeholders

14. ENGAGING AND
INFLUENCING PEOPLE
• Emotions are often won over as much through stories and
images as with data and facts
• Match your fervor to the audience’s capacity to absorb it
• Expect to have to be persistent; be optimistic, but credible
• Compromise is essential; frame for common ground
• Keep your promises
• Don’t:
• Up front hard sell
• Believe great arguments will win the day in one volley
• Delay, obfuscate, or assassinate character

15. MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING
AND FINANCE
• Reading project and department level financial reports
• Local linkages to overall corporate financial reporting
• OpEx vs. CapEx
• Basics of the income statement
• Cash vs. non-cash charges, cash conversion cycles
• Balance sheet issues
• Trend and comparative period analysis
• RoI, payback time and cost of capital (incl. hurdle rate)

16. MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING
AND FINANCE
• Project and product cost accounting
• Currency fluctuation impacts
• Inventory transfer cost policies
• Production: Tracking of value add during WiP, variances in
production cost and yield, and standard cost adjustment
process
• Budgeting and budgeting process: zero-based, top-down
and bottom-up; re-budgeting thresholds
• Finance and accounting as the basis for centralized-
decentralization of management decision authority
• Business case development

17. PRESENTATIONS
•
• Handling difficult Q&A
• Structure and detail of situation-specific presentations
• Proposals
• Project kick-offs
• Status updates
• Troubleshooting reports
• etc.

18. RUNNING A MEETING
• Overall, how to get the right blend of:
• Participation
• Brainstorming
• Action focus
• Keeping the meeting on track
• Getting it to an outcome

19. RUNNING A MEETING
• General: Meeting/decision owner, agenda, time mgmt.,
size, multitasking policy
• Process: Start with a clear Why for having the meeting
• Share knowledge
• Drive accountability
• Make a decision
• Relate final conclusions to original intent
• How to focus on contribution

20. RUNNING A MEETING
• When to talk, and when to listen
• How to get input from everyone at a meeting; how to
manage the loudest who unchecked can overwhelm the
proceedings
• How to drive output work items, assignments and
deadlines
• Protocol for notifying those affected, and those who
should be informed
• Related Matter: Overwhelming number of meetings
• Signals misallocated work, responsibility and information
flow
• What to do about it

21. RUNNING A MEETING
• One-on-One
• Principal way to develop and maintain supervisor-subordinate
relationship
• Used to disseminate skills, know-how and learn about activities and
concerns
• Requires a defined protocol for preparation and written follow-up,
usually by the subordinate
• To make them effective, keep asking questions to get at obstacles,
frustrations and potential problems
• Goal: Never let there be surprises at formal performance reviews
• The meeting is for the subordinate to get at thorny issues
• The meeting needs to be long enough to get beyond the superficial
• Frequency can vary depending on pace of change and task relevant
maturity
• Requires skill in delivering criticism, without being hostile, and
retaining a degree of personal detachment to be emotionally casual
when communicating disapproval

22. RUNNING A MEETING
• Staff
• Peer collaboration
• Art of managing group decision making
• Agenda formulation, action itemization and call-down of
past action commitments
• Mission
• Ad hoc, infrequent, usually to reach a major decision
• Objective, chairmanship, decision authority, minutes,
follow-up

23. RUNNING A MEETING
• Operating Reviews
• Cross-functional reviews
• Presentations by middle management, with executives
present but in listen mode only unless called upon by
meeting chairperson
• Comparison of plan vs. actual
• Questioning, comments and discussion – the fine art of
being tough enough to get at real issues, but not so harsh
that issues get concealed
• Actions to improve and tracking of close-out

24. SELF-REGULATION AND
TIME MANAGEMENT
“…Your time is your one finite resource, and when you say
‘yes’ to one thing you are inevitably saying ‘no’ to another.” –
Andrew Grove
Target Allocation:
• Very different in middle management than as an individual
contributor or first level supervisor
• Typical:
• 25% to top activity, and 15% to second most impactful
activity
• Build in several blocks of white space for ad hoc issues as
well as heads down individual work

25. SELF-REGULATION AND
TIME MANAGEMENT
Adaptation Process:
• Periodically journal time by the main 6-8 activity
categories
• Analyze which activities add the most distinctive value,
and which do not
• Trusted peer review can be helpful, as frequently as
monthly
• Look for how to increase the former and decrease the
latter
• Alternatively: Log and review how much of each day is
spent doing more than one thing concurrently

26. TEAM BUILDING
• Individuals
• DISC and Myers Briggs personality indicator models
• Task relevant maturity (different from subject matter
competence)
• Teams
• Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing-Adjourning
• Conflict management
• Group dynamics and group decision bias
• Building on group strengths while diminishing group
liabilities

27. BASIC MANAGEMENT
SKILLS
• Situational leadership
• When to lead, observe, expedite, question and decide
• How to guide so that subordinates do most of the lifting,
and not delegate unduly up
• How to deal with:
• Challenging employees
• High performing employees
• Employees who don’t have great communication
• Diversity of employee backgrounds, communication styles
and learning preferences
• Remote workers

28. BASIC MANAGEMENT
SKILLS
• How to Handle Inter-Personal Disagreements
• General: Is conflict rooted in respect for each others’
capabilities, or, is it based on presumption of intellectual or
effort inferiority?
• Class 1 Conflict: Neither belligerent can explain to the
other’s satisfaction the other’s point of view
• Class 2 Conflict: Both can explain to the other’s
satisfaction the other’s point of view

29. BASIC MANAGEMENT
SKILLS
• How to Handle A-plus players vs. B-players
• A-plus players, who have tremendous drive and capability
and capacity for breakthroughs, influence them toward a goal,
but don’t try to control them
• B-players, who are solid citizens, more direction is possible
and usually desirable
• Performance management
• Transparency
• Goal setting
• Frequency of performance reviews
• The importance of regular less formal feedback, especially
during face-to-face 1:1s, so that more formal performance
reviews don’t surprise reviewer or reviewee

30. DECISIONS
• Many people have input, but leaders decide
• Spectrum:
• Intervention (start with discrediting current state)
• Participative
• Persuasion
• Edict (should be used least frequently, but can be most
important)
• Decisions that can and should be made with data, and
those which have to be made beyond data
More
Work to
Make
Stick

31. DECISIONS
• Decisions which must be made right away, vs. those
which can wait
• The importance of making personnel decisions slower than
most other decisions
• Merit of disagreement in run up to decision making
• Organizing disagreement
• How vigorous to let disagreement become, without
inducing permanent harm
• Drilling into why people disagree and going to the source
• Using alternative measurements of success to drive
optionality

32. DECISIONS
• Drawing out and confronting passive dissent, as well as
overly convenient reinterpretation of decisions
• Setting deadlines for decisions, and sticking to them
• Moving decision authority to those who can handle
specific subjects the best
• Incorporating the conversion to action cycle
• Time, resources, opportunity cost

33. DECISIONS
• Providing case studies of good and bad past decision
processes
• Demonstrate how to make decisions in the face of uncertainty
• Show how good decisions are tolerant to other things going
less than perfectly
• Sensitivity training that treating a series of related issues
requiring decisions independently only leads to mediocrity,
futility and frustration
• Training that the administrator model of preferring to split
decisions down the middle may be OK for routine matters,
but leads to mediocrity if applied to the bigger issues

34. DECISIONS
• Building the next generation of managers
• Never let a subordinate approach the boss with somebody
else’s unevaluated conclusions
• As the subordinate if (s)he has personally looked into the
matter
• Make the subordinate justify everything (s)he is proposing,
even if his/her individual views are contrary to the
recommendations being put forth for approval

35. DELEGATION
• Delegation without abdication
• ’nuff said
• Delegation framework needs to be based on a clear
understanding of whether senior leadership’s role is
• Limited mainly to talent and capital allocation, with the
middle running the major programs and processes
• Or, whether leadership runs the major programs and
processes
• The answer often varies by function

36. PROJECT
MANAGEMENT
Single Project:
• Task breakdown granularity, i.e. 0.5 day, to illuminate all
required work
• Task, timeline, budget and key resource review; projections
thereof
• Reporting cadence, informal and formal; status reporting,
transition protocol as project risk changes
• Work queues as a leading indicator of delays
• Control rules: i.e. All causes for delay shall be immediately
communicated in writing to the PM by the person anticipating
the delay, as well as several potential recovery
recommendations
• Post project review, learnings, actions and timely close-out
of actions

37. PROJECT
MANAGEMENT
Multiple Projects:
• Requires accurate and stable capacity to execute individual projects
• Why? There is almost always disproportionate reliance on a few
critical resources (people, equipment, contractors) causes cascading
effects from late breaking delays within and across projects
• Adherence to intermediate dates and milestones is critical to
managing multiple programs with precision
• Otherwise, large capacity and schedule buffers are required, at high
fixed cost
• Deft ability to dynamically reallocate resources
• Push notification of changes from source to receiving projects
• Portfolio review, sequencing, prioritization, and reallocation
• Understanding the (usual) futility of trying to multitask resources to
solve resource bottlenecks, because of high switching costs and
times and diminished sense of responsibility to the success of any
one project

38. MANAGING
CONTRADICTIONS
• Delegation and trust can only really be invested in those
who have proven they can:
• Operate at high tempo
• Rapidly exploit opportunity
• Maintain the right overall objectives, even though the
particulars will change
• Use right re-optimizing criteria as conditions evolve, which
inherently have multiple dimensions

39. MANAGING
CONTRADICTIONS
• Drivers of distinctive strategy and culture, that distinguish your company from
others:
• Where to move fast/boldly, and where to move slow/empirically
• Balancing confidence with constructive paranoia; retaining the appropriate humility
during good times
• Areas to be willing to spend $, and where to be more frugal
• Places to spend time, and places to save time
• How to hold people accountable for success, yet be tolerant to the right kinds of
failure
• Where to be iconoclastic, and where to benchmark, borrow and reverse engineer
• Circumstances to focus on increasing resources vs. yielding more from the
resources in place
• The complex pathology of successful organizational communication along with the
simplicity of effective communication tools
• Situations to respect hierarchy, and where to be willing to push back
• The ways to be someone or be something
• Achieving results and living the values, all the time
• What changes, and what is immutable: values, mission, tenets
• At scale, the only job security is what customers provide

40. BASIC LEADERSHIP
- Break -

41. BASICS OF
LEADERSHIP
• Building Essential Leadership
• Effective Coaching
• Hiring the Right People

42. BUILDING ESSENTIAL
LEADERSHIP
• Management is about planning, monitoring and
influencing along predictable lines to keep an organization
on time and on budget
• Leadership is about producing useful change and
movement
• Management is not the implementation side of leadership
• Leadership has its own execution process
• ~20% of people are capable of routine supervisory and
management roles
• But only ~2% are capable of true leadership

43. BUILDING ESSENTIAL
LEADERSHIP
• Leadership and driving useful change is more demanding than
management, in terms of:
• Inductive vs. deductive thinking
• Communication, to get people aligned, and overcome obstacles
• Integration of objectives and resources
• Building and sustaining motivation, which is hardest over the long
term
• Setting and adapting direction
• Managing conflict and resolution, since leadership attracts conflict
• Multiplexing, to both lead and management within finite time
constraints
• Leadership development in managers comes down to providing a
steady stream of context-appropriate challenges

44. EFFECTIVE COACHING
• You win with people
• Don’t assume people automatically respect you because you’re the boss
• Listen and learn from others; let people voice contrary views
• It’s not about the coach; it’s about the team
• Lean into hard problems
• Take action quickly
• Improve continually; always seek better than the status quo
• Lead by example, with energy and high personal standards
• Do what is right, even if it is not in fashion
• Lead people to opportunity
• Level with people and help them improve themselves
• Have frequent face-to-face communication to make things happen
• Resiliency is essential; leadership is a marathon, not a sprint

45. HIRING THE RIGHT
PEOPLE
Target Traits:
• Smart
• GSD
• Conscientious
• Humble

46. HIRING THE RIGHT
PEOPLE
Process:
• Strong tie referrals from proven high performers
• Active sourcing of referrals from proven high performers
• Use of structured interview questions to de-bias candidate
qualification process
• Use of serial interviews to reduce groupthink
• Requirement to achieve strong consensus among
interviewers to make an offer, and to build suasion among
team to contribute to the success of a new hire
• Use of bar raisers during hiring process: Employees with
a proven strong sense and filter for suitable talent

47. BRINGING
MIDDLE MANAGER DEVELOPMENT
TOGETHER FAST

48. RAPID ISSUE WORK-
OUTS
• The crucible of middle manager and high potential designate
development is rapid issue work-outs
• They test and temper the people and the organization; they
are both an assessment and a development vehicle
• They show what people are to achieve, and how to achieve it
• Speed, simplicity, self-confidence and self-education are
essential to leading them, there’s nowhere to hide
• Reinforces ownership of both the creativity to find practical
solutions, and the outcome
• Cascades the same tensions from the task level to sub-tasks
• The organizational imperative for getting very good at rapid
issue work-outs: Big things can change quickly and well only
if smaller things can

49. RAPID ISSUE WORK-
OUTS
• Issue resolution is the closest thing to the molecular form of
middle management
• Middle management to a great degree is about the
willingness and ability to be at emotional and intellectual risk,
to be open to new ideas
• These traits come through at high speed when a major issue
emerges which has to be lead and resolved quickly
• Requires working through people, providing high speed
relationship-based leadership training
• Provides the fastest path from evolving through single
leadership events to the most productive repeatable patterns
of behavior
• Tend to cut across functions, geographic and any sub-cultural
divides in the business, building cross-boundary savvy in
leaders and teams

50. RAPID ISSUE WORK-
OUTS
• Basis: Engaging staff closest to the work
• Examples: Kaizen (Toyota, continual) and Work-Out (GE, discrete)
• Common process and documentary frameworks: PDCA and A3
• PDCA method to challenge status quo
• clarify the problem
• break down the problem
• set a target
• analyze the root cause
• develop countermeasures
• see countermeasures through
• monitor both results and processes
• standardize successful processes
• A3 communication tool
• Encourages employees to capture the most essential information
needed to solve a problem on a single sheet that they can
disseminate widely representing all relevant functional points of view

51. RAPID ISSUE WORK-
OUTS
• A Few Cautions about Issue Resolution Teams
• Conditions to use them
• Transient issues, not steady-state
• <25% of management time, otherwise larger product and
organizational issues likely need to first be addressed
• Importance of strong team management and leadership
• Otherwise chaos will eventually reign
• Why they have to be used sparingly
• Otherwise, they set up a dependence loop for organization, stunting
the development of more capable routine operating methods and
management disciplines
• Need to prune teams periodically
• So they don’t become standing committees inadvertently, hardening
organizational thinking

52. RAPID ISSUE WORK-
OUTS
• Rapid issue resolution teams are the most succinct
microcosm of the state of the business, and the quality of
its management
• High performing issue task forces provide a concise
example for others to learn from
• Sampling the performance of a range of task forces
provides a quick barometer of how well the business is
doing developing middle management
• It becomes quickly clear which managers and task force
leaders can walk the talk, and which ones cannot
• Intervening to improve the performance of uninspiring
issue resolution teams provides the fastest action-based
learning to improve management practices (akin to
molecular re-engineering for management)

53. RAPID ISSUE WORK-
OUTS
• Rapid issue resolution teams are the most succinct
microcosm of the state of the business, and the quality of
its management (cont’d)
• The speed of feedback and visibility of issues to more
senior management provides a unique environment for
rapid, contextual middle management learning
• The speed with which challenges have to be resolved
tends to force cross-boundary thinking, both laterally and
vertically in the enterprise
• Speed and boundarylessness reinforce knowledge and
rapid learning as the bases of authority, rather than title or
position

54. RAPID ISSUE WORK-
OUTS
• Other Middle Manager Development Benefits:
• Easy setting to use as contextual demos for trainable up-and-
comers to experience as observers
• Temporary nature of issue work-out teams makes it
straightforward to appoint up-and-comer HiPots to be task
force leaders, not just previously appointed mid-managers, as
part of the proving ground to ascend managerially

55. RAPID ISSUE WORK-
OUTS
• Desired Traits
• Tempo and controlled urgency
• Efficient use of all available resources
• Good judgment about when to make bold leaps vs. when
to be more analytical
• Leadership of sessions conducted in such a way to get the
best thinking and fastest action out of all contributors
• Versus others that are more lax intellectually and in terms
of effort they exude and get from other contributors
• Fast ability to redirect counterproductive behavior
• Teach by example the right thinking and communication
style

56. RAPID ISSUE WORK-
OUTS
• Desired Traits (cont’d)
• Initiative, follow-through, crisp call-down protocol at start of
meetings accounting for past actions, and clear actions
summarized with names, dates and deliverables
• Kinetic follow-up with task force team members and
influencers
• Demonstrated systems level thinking about the business,
in addition to the narrow form of the issue at hand; good
trade-offs between technology, operations, employees,
customers and shareholders all in the mix
• Authority and influence born of knowledge and judgment
• Ability to anticipate future change

57. MANAGING CHANGE
• Useful change is all about increasing productivity and
competitiveness
• The importance of change capacity in rapid growth high
technology businesses
• Most highly successful companies have very strong cultures
• Eventually, parts of that culture become a liability because of
the rapidity of external technical and market change
• Change capacity is intrinsic to maintaining a high commitment
culture over time and circumstances
• Change capacity underpins the ability to maintain the required
tempo of activity and to attract the right kinds of talent at scale

58. MANAGING CHANGE
• Requires larger cohesive time blocks from a middle
manager than merely sustaining the status quo
• Corollary: Insufficient time pushes people to do more of the
same
• Basics - Temporal:
• How to initiate change
• How to accelerate it
• Making it stick

59. MANAGING CHANGE
• Basics – Functional:
• Working across boundaries:
• Top-down (intellectual)
• Bottom-up (behavioural)
• Side-side (cross-functional, cross-enterprise)
• All three need to be in sync to have lasting success
• Process mapping – present state, future state
• Building a team
• Caution: Words that don’t match behaviours create
cynicism

60. MANAGING CHANGE
• Getting change moving:
• Figuring out what works
• Understanding why it works
• Knowing when to change
• Knowing when not to

61. MANAGING CHANGE
• The hardest part of change: Overcoming resistance
• Habits
• Relationships
• Learning new – unlearning old
• Evolving bases of prestige and status
• Handling active and passive dissent
• Linking the individual case for change with the
opportunity to maximize opportunity and security
• At the same time, how to impart this message without
making promises that the business may not be able to
keep

62. MANAGING CHANGE
• Making change stick:
• Talent pipeline
• Performance management
• Training and development
• Communication, and public commitment
• Budgeting
• Modelling desired form of leadership
• Organization processes, and removing the lifeboat

63. CHANGE
ACCELERATION

64. ADVANCED MIDDLE
MANAGER
DEVELOPMENT TOPICS
• Growth and Business Strategy
• Innovation Leadership
• Segmentation
• Sales Management
• Crisis Management
• Negotiating
• Senior Management Development of Junior Management
• Introduction to Employment Law
• Introduction to Contract Law
• Proximate International Issues and Legal

65. USE OF PEER GROUPS,
MENTORS, AND THE CEO
TO DEVELOP MIDDLE MANAGERS

66. INTRA-COMPANY
MANAGER PEER GROUPS
Pros
• Builds social bonds and contextual learning
• Strong groups pull people up
Cons
• Crises can roil group and create loyalty challenges
• Weak or declining groups pull people down

67. INTRA-COMPANY
MANAGER PEER GROUPS
Issues
• Role clarity for individual middle managers, and quality of their
managers
• Peer group cohesion
• Attitudes toward company, and level of personal commitment to the
enterprise
• Misaligned expectations of individual middle managers with
organization’s vision, mission, values and integrity
• Consonance of the peer group’s capabilities with the individual’s
self-image
Opportunities
• Leadership self-assessment completed beforehand to help set
context and build self-awareness
• Facilitators and Moderators to keep peer groups on track

68. MENTORSHIP
• Mentorship to help fill in gaps in resources, tools and
techniques available to developing middle managers
• Mentorship is not as a substitute though for a
comprehensive middle manager training program
• Group mentoring
• Helps with rapid scaling of middle management ranks
• Amplifies the reach and influence of the most effective and
exemplary leaders

69. FULCRUM OF
PROGRESS
For middle management development to work at scale, there
needs to be consistency about the vital ongoing necessity of:
• Constructive conflict, based on strategically linked ground
rules
• Listening being the only way to encourage people to think,
to win their involvement and commitment
• Integrity, starting with leadership by example
• Boldness of action; being willing to take risks intellectual
and emotionally
• Owning the outcome
• Moving quickly, but not recklessly

70. CEO INVOLVEMENT IN
MIDDLE MANAGER
DEVELOPMENT
• The CEO’s personal participation is a necessary and
highly beneficial component of middle manager
development
• No one can impart culture and values the way the CEO
can
• Removes layer(s) of filtering which might otherwise distort
critical development issues
• Provides bi-directional communication for mutual benefit
• Demonstrates and reinforces candor, integrity, and
personal commitment to outcome

71. CEO INVOLVEMENT IN
MIDDLE MANAGER
DEVELOPMENT
• At the same time, some of the sessions and programs
need to have excitement without the CEO for scalability
• Action based learning is best
• Teams of ~five
• Concrete current problem of company to work on
• Explicit discussion of technical, political and cultural issues
• Development of desired future state, and concrete action
plans
• Presentation to executives about solution and
implementation, with public commitment of leadership to
go/no go with completion dates

72. KEEPING
PERSPECTIVE
In the larger scheme of middle manager development, a
general guideline is:
• ~90% comes from self-development
• Putting the manager in a position where she can learn
from the work and stretch over time
• Managing to achieve negotiated and mutually agreed
objectives between manager and superior
• MBO is the foundation, which through self-regulation and
self-starting encourages the development of skills,
knowledge and acquiring targeted experience

73. KEEPING
PERSPECTIVE
Guideline (cont’d):
• ~7% comes from what the manager’s superior imparts
through coaching
• Moreover:
• The business is what it promotes to senior levels,
whatever the mission and values statement may say
• Middle management will emulate the behaviours of their
supervisors and favoured senior managers
• ~3% comes through formal training

74. CLOSING THOUGHTS
To Develop Middle Managers in High Growth Technology Businesses:
• The importance of persistent mission and values, even though
strategy and tactics evolve rapidly
• Provides for consistent company-wide tenets and dialect for the
desired form of management
• Use early warning monitoring tools to detect significant deviations
between stated and practiced core values and principles
• Otherwise, skepticism and cynicism can undermine efforts
• There is value to consistent training and coaching terminology
• Always reinforce that sustained authority comes from knowledge,
not from position, and keeping up participation from people of
different temperaments, training and attainments

75. CLOSING THOUGHTS
Success in management development boils down to just a
few things:
• Speed and decisiveness of decisions and actions have to
be learned and reinforced daily
• They can’t be turned on after a period of relative laxity
• Having a cultural conviction that productivity is an attitude
• Adopting the view that the only path to ongoing success
is ever rising productivity of people, capital and resources
• Focusing on self-starters
• They most often have far greater potential as middle
managers than people who need an external catalyst for
action

76. CLOSING THOUGHTS
Success in management development (cont’d):
• The best middle managers are also usually people who like
being measured
• But, only those with the capacity to let better judgment
override the quantitative and the previously agreed upon as
some issues unfold in a high speed environment
• Issue resolution task forces are the most rapid place to
intervene to understand and transform how up and coming
leaders think and act
• Developing middle management is a bar raiser for executive
management
• Efforts to develop other managers is a force for improvement
at the most senior levels
• Nothing reinforces sound fundamentals like teaching others

77. UPCOMING SEMINARS
2018:
• Onboarding: High Speed to Quality from New Arrivers
• Invention Sessions to build the Vanguard of Intellectual
Property
• Strategic Intelligence in Fast Changing Competitive
Environments
• Multiple Business Units – Conditions Under Which and
How to Organize Them

78. FURTHER
DISCUSSION
For arrange further private discussion of any of today’s
topics or related matters:
dave.litwiller[at]communitech.ca

79. SEMINAR FEEDBACK
EMAILS APPRECIATED
• What did you find in today’s presentation that was
constructive and clarifying?
• What did you find confusing or troublesome?
• What do you regard as your most important takeaway?