Questions Middle Managers Ask: Ways of Seeing Everyday Work

This past semester, I participated in a professional development program at my institution targeting middle managers. My cohort included about a dozen such folks from across the university. While the size of our respective departments as well as the nature of our work varied, our shared experience as middle managers gave us a strong foundation of common responsibilities, opportunities, and challenges from which to work. 

Each session seemed to highlight the balancing act that middle managers frequently have to strike. Like in our session about management and leadership skills, for instance. A typical framing presents the roles as distinct — are you a manager or a leader? the articles ask. Often, that framing elevates leadership as the more desirable role and positions management as inferior. Yet our discussion in this session positioned the skills as complementary. Instead of distinguishing management and leadership as separate roles, our facilitator acknowledged that department heads must lead and manage at the same time and that both are essential responsibilities. 

We middle managers know this. Management is about planning, organizing, and coordinating. Management means attending to workflows, staffing, training, timeline, and resources. Leadership is about creating a sense of purpose and providing direction. Leadership means attending to vision and culture. Department heads use leadership skills to shape the environment for success and management skills to execute the work.

Yet managing the work can carry a particular sense of urgency. Without management, chaos can ensue. A staffing gap or a workflow problem requires attention now. Leadership is also essential, no doubt — developing culture, creating shared understanding, envisioning the future — but it’s quieter and slower. The busy-ness of management and its many demands can crowd out opportunities for leadership, continually pushing it to the back burner. The daily work of management can make it feel like there’s no time left for the big picture thinking of leadership. If you don’t create room for leadership, our facilitator said, you’re never going to get room for non-management work. So what’s a middle manager to do? 

This next bit is where I really felt the light bulb turn on. What are the questions that management asks versus the questions that leadership asks?, our facilitator posed. 

Framing management and leadership as questions to ask offered a simple yet significant shift for my thinking. It helped me see them as lenses to apply to any situation, habits of inquiry to bring to any opportunity or challenge. If my department is overwhelmed, a management lens could help me ask: What resources and support do we need? What processes or workflows might we improve? What timelines or expectations can we adjust? At the same time, a leadership lens could help me ask: What needs are most important? What work has the most impact on our mission? What assumptions are we making? What can we stop doing? How can we acclimate and support the team through changes we make? 

Instead of being categories of work to carve out time for, this shift frames management and leadership as complementary ways of seeing my everyday work. This makes leadership feel less abstract and more actionable, positions them both as routine practice, and enhances their complementary nature, too. In fact, it’s helped me recognize the ways I already employ both regularly, and often in the same moments, with different lines of inquiry. This strikes me as an effective and sustainable way to carve out a bit more space for leadership practice, to strike a better balance between management and leadership.  

What lenses do you apply to your everyday work? What questions do your lenses help you ask?