Tell a middle manager they need to stop doing and start leading, and you may be giving them the wrong advice. Amy Seehafer, COO of OSMS, a physician-owned orthopedic, sports medicine, and rheumatology practice in northeast Wisconsin, sees the challenge differently.
For her, the struggle facing middle managers is not choosing between leading and doing. It is finding the “&.”
Middle managers still have work to get done. They still have operational responsibilities. And they still have problems that land on their desks every day. At the same time, they are expected to develop people, lead change, think ahead, work across departments, and solve problems that extend beyond their own teams.
They have to lead and do
That may be one of the hardest transitions from individual contributor to leader. And too often, we prepare people for it by teaching them leadership skills without helping them rethink what their job has actually become.
The people we promote are often really good at doing
Most middle managers did not begin their careers as leaders. They became managers because they were good at something. They knew the work. They solved problems. They were dependable. When something needed to get done, people knew they could count on them. Then we promoted them. But the instincts that made them successful do not simply disappear with the new title.
When a problem arises, they jump in. When someone is struggling, they take over. When work piles up, they carry more of it themselves. And when the organization needs to move faster, doing it yourself can feel like the quickest solution.
The middle manager eventually becomes the bottleneck on how much the team can accomplish
There are only so many balls one person can juggle. Seehafer describes the job as learning to juggle three balls, then four, then ten. The only way to keep increasing the capacity of the organization is to continually decide what someone else can own.
Delegate it. Teach it. Monitor it. Develop the person.
Then look for the next thing you can hand off.
That is not stepping away from the work. It is changing how the work gets done.
The harder problem may be having the courage to address what is really happening
There is another challenge Amy sees among middle managers that gets far less attention. They often know what the real problems are; they just do not raise them.
They are close enough to the front line to see where processes break down, where people struggle, where work gets stuck, and where frustration is building. But they are also busy responding to those problems every day.
Amy uses the image of someone sitting in a canoe that is filling with water. They are working furiously to bail out the canoe. Meanwhile, somewhere up the hill, a pipe is pouring water into the river. The manager can keep bailing. Or they can get out of the canoe, run up the hill, and turn off the water.
Too many managers spend their days bailing. That is what reactive leadership looks like
The challenge is helping them develop the courage and confidence to say, “Here is what keeps happening. Here is what I think is causing it. And here is what I think we should do about it.”
When managers bring Seehafer a complaint, she often turns the problem back to them: What is your idea for solving it?
That simple question changes the manager’s role.
You are not simply here to report problems.
You are here to help solve them.
Leadership gets harder when managers resent what comes with it
There was another part of my conversation with Seehafer that stuck with me. Leadership is inconvenient.
People problems show up at bad times. Priorities collide. Someone needs help when your calendar is already full. A plan that looked good yesterday suddenly stops working today. Those things are not interruptions to leadership. They are leadership.
Seehafer talks with her managers about learning to “love the game.” The hard parts are part of the job.
Instead of thinking, “Why do I have to deal with this?” the question becomes, “What do I get to do about it?”
For Seehafer, that might mean removing a barrier that has frustrated employees for months, creating greater clarity for a team, or making something easier for staff and ultimately better for patients.
That mindset matters. A manager who sees people problems, competing demands, and difficult conversations as distractions from their “real work” will always be frustrated by leadership. A manager who understands that those things are the work approaches the job differently.
The value proposition has changed. Their job is no longer simply to personally produce. Their job is increasingly to make it possible for other people to produce.
Developing middle managers requires letting them struggle
This creates a challenge for senior leaders too. If we want middle managers to become stronger, we have to stop solving everything for them. Over the past six months, Amy has been using a simple exercise with her managers: Pretend I’m on PTO.
When an issue comes up, she wants them to work through it without immediately looking to the COO for the answer. She compares it to a parent watching a four-year-old learn to tie their shoes. It would be faster to tie the shoes for them, but speed in that moment comes at the expense of capability later.
The same thing happens in organizations. Every time a senior leader steps in and solves something a middle manager could learn to solve, the immediate problem may disappear faster. But the organization has not become any stronger.
Eventually, that same expectation has to cascade. Middle managers need to stop tying the shoes for their team leads too. That is how leadership capacity grows.
And that means people need room to get it wrong
Empowerment and delegation sound great until someone makes a mistake. If organizations want managers to take greater ownership, speak up, solve problems, and make decisions, they have to accept that those managers will not always get it right. Seehafer believes leaders need psychological safety to fail.
In fact, her view is that if leaders are never failing, they may not be leaning in hard enough. That does not mean lowering standards or accepting poor performance. It means recognizing that leadership capability cannot develop without practice, and practice includes mistakes.
Managers need to be able to say, “I don’t know.”
They need to ask for help.
They need to try something that does not work and learn from it.
And they need senior leaders who do not take control the moment things become uncomfortable.
That may be particularly important in organizations that say they want empowered leaders but continue rewarding leaders who have all the answers.
Maybe we have made leadership too complicated
There are thousands of leadership books, models, competency frameworks, courses, and programs available to managers. Seehafer wonders whether we sometimes make leadership more complicated than it needs to be.
At its core, she believes leaders need clarity about a few things:
01 Where are we today?
02 Where are we trying to go?
03 What will it take to get there?
04 What am I good at?
05 Where do I need to get better?
06 What do the people around me need from me?
Then, as she puts it, set up the routes and run the routes.
That simplicity does not mean leadership is easy. Leadership is hard, but hard and complicated are not the same thing.
Perhaps middle managers do not always need another model for leadership. Maybe they just need more opportunities to actually lead: to make decisions, to delegate something they have always owned, to raise the issue everyone knows exists but nobody wants to discuss, to let someone else solve the problem, to ask for help, to make a mistake, and to learn from it.
…And then do it again
Finding the “&”
Middle managers occupy a difficult place in organizations. They cannot simply stop doing, but they cannot continue succeeding primarily because of what they personally do either. They have to find the “&.”
Lead and do.
Deliver today and build capability for tomorrow.
Solve problems and develop people who can solve them.
Move quickly and create space for others to learn.
Hold people accountable and give them room to fail.
Raise hard issues and bring ideas for solving them.
That transition does not happen because someone attends a leadership class. It happens through experience, practice, feedback, support, and senior leaders who are willing to stop tying their shoes for them.
If we want stronger middle managers, perhaps the question is not simply, “What should we teach them about leadership?”
A better question might be: “What are we willing to let them lead?”
Want to build stronger middle managers on your team?
LAK Group partners with healthcare organizations and business leaders to develop middle managers who lead confidently, strengthen their teams, and deliver better results.
Contact us at [email protected] to learn how we can support your leadership development goals.