Manager Sandwich: The Middle Manager's Survival Blog

As Labor Day approaches, I again have been contemplating what it takes to be a valuable middle manager.  I grew up in the Detroit area and have worked in Michigan for half of my adult life.  As an engineer I was attracted to heavy industry.  The first third of my career was spent at a large integrated steel mill with 3500+ employees organized by the United Steel Workers of America.  As a 28 year old general foreman, nothing prepared me for the daily confrontations of an organized environment.  My father, taught me important lessons relating to why companies become organized by unions, and how it has been usually the fault of poor management.  Poor management directly correlates with the poor treatment of the workforce.  During the middle third of my career, I joined a newer steelmaker that was a vibrant and growing leader in the steel industry.  The management of the company were also its owners, and fully understood the integral part that the w...

Everywhere you go, you will find people who are just dying to be in charge, that is until they have to do something with all that sought after responsibility.  Being a leader, for those of us slugging it out in the middle manager slit trenches, is all about making decisions; mostly the unpopular kind.  The easy decisions, are well, easy. As an old boss of mine would say, "That's easy, it's a no brainer!" Of course, that is assuming easily enough that I was a complete dumbass when I came to him for his infinite wisdom.  The simplicity of my challenge completely eluded my simpleton nature. I would always tell him that if it was easy, the guys doing the job would have already fixed it.  I was trying to get him to understand a much bigger problem that he was conveniently trivializing. So we all have had a boss, a middle manager who reigned over our even lower level of management, who thought our challenges and decisions were easy.  What is worse is when we are ...

from www.advertlog.com These past two days have been a bear for me.  As much as I have gotten better at reading my surroundings and coworkers, I completely went off course.  I went as far off course to say that I have been in a two day silent freakout!  Only this afternoon did I get the opportunity to reconcile my understanding of a serious work situation, but not until after it felt like my head was going to split in two pieces like a ripe melon.  It was an experience of misplaced expectations, so alarming that had accelerated my pace enough to be farther ahead in my work than I realized. The most repeated advice I have given at work is managing the expectations of others.  This doesn't mean controlling or manipulating other peoples' expectations. To me it means gaining an objective mapping of what others expect me to do, say, or deliver.  The difference between knowing what is wanted by others, and giving them what is needed is the pro...

 from www.tonywublog.com       Until recently, I honestly hadn't realized how much I have learned over the last 20 or so years.  In my current position as a department manager, I am now responsible not only for my actions but also the actions of the team.  It certainly is a departure from the days when I was a management associate (trainee) where I was told by another project engineer that my position with the company in the scheme of things was lower than whale sh*t.      The other day I called up the old co-worker that I worked with during that time as a trainee.  We laughed about the hours we spent filing drawings like clerks, the days we spent on top of a coke oven battery watching smoke (yes, I said watching smoke), and the months we spent working fourteen hour nights, seven days a week during the summers of 1993 and 1994 on blast furnace rebuilds.  We were young, stupid, always clowning ...

from ebonfire.wordpress.com  Recently, I accepted a position with a competitor.  The new position was a step-up in responsibility and pay from my previous employer.  Don't get excited, I am still middle management, just another bloody, sweaty rung higher.  My father would tell the joke, that management was like a tree full of monkeys;  if you look down all you see is smiling faces, when you look up, all you see are a**holes.  Not always 100% true, but true enough I suppose. I now have an opportunity to manage a larger group of co-workers that are comprised of both hourly and salaried employees.  This opportunity allows me an exposure to experiences that I wouldn't  have otherwise.  But there was something that I did four years ago that made it all possible.  My previous job, although not new in responsibility, was in a different facility than that which I had worked in before. Same company, similar job, but a whole dif...