Middle Management and Where to go?

  Many good performers in the teams will progress in the career from one role to other, which is considered to be normal. People grow in the corporate ladder and eventually play middle management role. This role is critical to Client, Organization, Team and individual.

 The success and failure of any team, product and organization largely depend on its capable middle management success. Careful planning and grooming mechanism for this would help the organization’s success. In the course of middle management life any individual needs to practice priorities on various aspects and few important aspects as ;

• Client
• Organization
• Team
• Individual(Self)

  As a middle manager priorities goes among Client, Organization, Team and he as an individual (I). The concept of COT-i is about explaining the critical role that he/she plays and the equilibrium that he supposes to manage among the given priorities. The middle management needs to keep long term and short term needs of the environment and act on the situations.

 The beauty of these priorities is; few are very explicit and most demanding and few are feeble with less voice.

• Client will set the expectations explicitly and has lot of voice in putting their thoughts out.
• Organization through its policies and other mechanisms it will be more vocal and sets clear expectations.
• When it comes to T part of COT-i which is Team, it has less voice normally and at times the middle management pay less attention to it.

 The middle management style, team success and Org success largely depend on the kind of mix he falls under.

• The more tilt he has towards client will be more deliverable oriented
• The more tilt towards organization goes to pull things for the organization
• The more tilt towards Team considered to be people oriented
• The more tilt towards him self will be self centered

 There is no right and wrong mix that we can fit for all the cases, it is just that people need to cautiously practice and find the place where every one is happy and contributive.

The question that can be asked by middle manager for himself is Client, Organization, Team and where am I?