Middle Management Skills: How to Be a Good Middle Manager

Middle management positions exist to implement upper management’s orders through the work of individual teams. By traversing through different levels of management, middle managers play a key role in navigating the intricacies of a company’s hierarchy in multiple directions. They convey the high-level goals of upper management to their employees and work with their teams to hit required metrics and meet deadlines. Simultaneously, they also advocate for their team members to those in the executive suite of managers.

Before you can serve on a company’s middle management team, you need to exhibit a core set of competencies and strengths. Here are a few key skill sets to work on if you want to be a middle manager:

• Communication capabilities: Middle managers need exceptional communication skills to perform their jobs well. They need to accurately report the desires of senior management to their teams while also giving each of their employees an open avenue to voice concerns or ask for help if necessary.
• Leadership abilities: From establishing helpful training programs for new hires to bringing every project to completion, middle managers need leadership skills to get their jobs done. As a middle manager, you’ll be responsible for decision-making for your team. As such, you’re answerable for your team’s performance when reporting final results to executive management.
• Organizational competency: To a certain extent, middle management is project management—you’ll need planning skills to ensure your team members have enough time to hit their deadlines. It’s the role of middle management to provide a solid organizational structure for when things can and should get done for both higher-level and lower-level staff.
• Technical skills: Individual middle managers should have expertise in the same fields in which their teams work. Intimate, technical understanding of a given field helps you make strategic changes to boost productivity, making top-level management pleased with your team’s efficiency and success.

It takes a lot to truly excel in the field of middle management. Keep these seven tips in mind, and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a good manager:

1. 1. Advocate for other employees. Prepare yourself to make a direct report to your executive-level bosses about the concerns of any employee. This sort of hospitality and transparency makes for a welcoming and open company culture. As a middle manager, you serve as both a role model to your team members as well as their direct advocate to the highest echelons of the company hierarchy.
2. 2. Balance your workload. Middle-level managers are especially prone to burnout, so it’s important to balance out your workload for your own sake as well as your company’s. When you’re in a genuine place of well-being, you can better achieve the goals set out for you by upper management. Remember part of leadership development is knowing when you’re at capacity and when you can take on more tasks.
3. 3. Communicate consistently. It’s a middle manager’s job to keep lines of communication open between all levels of their company. As general managers of a specific team, they’re responsible for vocalizing the concerns of their employees to the executive suite while also clearly conveying those executives’ expectations to their team members.
4. 4. Practice active listening. To convey information to relevant stakeholders, middle managers must be able to hear and process it accurately. Otherwise, it can become a game of telephone that distorts the viewpoints of top-level managers and new employees alike. Whether a new hire has feedback on the onboarding process or you’re conveying news about company restructuring to your team, listen well to those you’re speaking with to ensure you can be a reliable messenger to other relevant parties.
5. 5. Prepare for lots of meetings. Since middle managers must be well acquainted with all levels of the organization, you’re likely to attend a wide array of meetings. Plan out your schedule to accommodate for the amount of time you’ll spend doing one-on-ones with your individual team members as well as sitting in on executive-level conversations at your company.
6. 6. Set team goals and milestones. Implementing initiatives requires giving your team definable targets to hit. Having these metrics in place helps you effectively evaluate your team members when it comes time for their employee evaluation. When executive management gives you a long-term goal, ask yourself how you can break it down into shorter-term goals for every member of your team. Along the way, place an emphasis on leadership development for your employees, so they can someday become middle managers or more someday.
7. 7. Schedule and budget effectively. Middle managers need to be able to look at the big picture provided by upper management and then translate it into a plan for the day-to-day operations of their team. You might work with separate project managers or financial officials when it comes to this sort of strategic planning. Still, it’s important to know your team’s limits and productivity rates when beginning those discussions.

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