Unlocking the Power of Mid-Level Leaders
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts“I believe as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company. So if you don't have that consistent and significant sustainable growth, you've got some work to do.” — Mike Goldman
In this episode, I’m focusing on the often-overlooked power of mid-level leaders. These leaders are the essential link between your strategy and frontline execution, yet many aren’t given the tools or support to thrive. I break down eight practical strategies to develop and empower them so your entire leadership team—and company—can reach the next level.
The Unique Position of Mid-Level Leaders
They influence company culture just as much—if not more—than senior leaders.
They have to manage both upwards (to senior leadership) and downwards (to their teams).
Often caught between protecting their team or aligning with senior leadership, making their role challenging.
Challenges Faced by Mid-Level Leaders
Frequently promoted based on technical skills, not leadership ability.
Small/mid-sized companies often fail to provide them proper training or mentoring.
Struggle balancing strategic focus with day-to-day operational demands.
Limited growth opportunities may cause talented leaders to feel stuck or underdeveloped.
Eight Ways to Develop Mid-Level Leaders
1. Set Crystal Clear Expectations
Define what productivity, leadership, accountability, feedback, and cultural alignment look like.
Ensure clarity on leadership responsibilities beyond task completion.
2. Model the Way
Senior leaders must embody the leadership behaviors they expect from mid-level leaders.
Leadership development efforts fail if senior leaders aren’t walking the talk.
3. Focus on High Performers & High Potentials
Invest time and development resources in top performers first.
High potentials can set an example and are more likely to rise to senior leadership roles.
4. Challenge Them
Set higher goals, delegate special projects, and increase responsibilities.
Boredom drives top talent away—keep them engaged and growing.
5. Implement Leadership Development (Small & Focused)
Avoid creating massive, ineffective leadership programs.
Instead, deliver narrow, practical training in areas like one-on-ones, coaching, feedback, and accountability.
Reinforce training with action and accountability.
6. Refine Hiring Processes
Strong hiring systems ensure mid-level leaders have high-performing teams.
Use methodologies like “Who: The A Method for Hiring” to consistently hire top talent.
7. Create Transparent Career Pathways
Show mid-level leaders clear opportunities for growth.
Regularly discuss their career aspirations and how to support their journey.
8. Coach Out Low Performers
Keep team standards high by coaching or transitioning out low producers and low culture fits.
Set an example by addressing poor performance at all levels, preventing a domino effect of underperformance.
Final Thoughts & Call to Action
Ask yourself: How equipped are your mid-level leaders to step into leadership roles tomorrow?
Start by setting clear expectations and consistently coaching them in weekly one-on-ones.
Great mid-level leaders = Great leadership team = Great company.
Thanks for listening!
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[00:00:00] On this show, I focus every episode on how to create a great leadership team.
But what I wanna do a little differently today is to focus a level down from that. One of the best ways to create a great leadership team is to make sure that you're taking care of those mid-level leaders. Your mid-level leaders, your middle managers, if you want to call them that, and I'd rather call them mid-level leaders, those folks are the lifeline of your organization.
Without them doing their job at the highest level, you can't do your job at the highest level. They are the connectors between the strategy you work on as a senior leader. And [00:01:00] frontline execution. Strengthening mid-level leaders strengthens the entire organization. In fact, I would say that if they're weak, everyone in the company, including you, is doing the job of someone one level below them.
Now, what do I mean by that? And I was just having a conversation with a client last week on this.
Very specifically in this scenario, there was a vice president of service who couldn't do the job as vice president of service because his directors,the four directors that worked for him were not really doing their job. The reason they weren't doing their job is because the customer service team members [00:02:00] weren't doing their job.
So, so picture this is that if the frontline individuals aren't doing their job, and then you've got the folks that are supervising them, well, the folks that are supervising them, as opposed to doing what they're supposed to do, they have to actually jump in and do the job of. The customer service team members, and if they're jumping in and doing the job of the customer service team members, if the directors are doing the job of the customer service team members, well, who's doing the job of the director?
Well, the VP of service has to do that. So who's doing the job of the VP of service? Nobody.or, and, or the CEO needs to jump in, and that's not gonna work for very long. But if that, if those directors are doing their job coaching and [00:03:00] mentoring the team members, so they do their job. It impacts the whole companyin a positive way.
Now, in addition to. Productivity measures that are impacted, those mid-level leaders influence culture as much or more sometimes than the senior leaders do. They tend to see more of the organization. From day to day, they're working with the rank and file employees, and as a senior leader, you may not be every day, depending on the size of your company.
Now, the CEO or the senior leadership team could get up in front of everybody and talk about how important culture is, but the way. Your individual team members know you are serious is by how [00:04:00] your mid-level leaders act. And if your mid-level leaders are not acting in a way that's consistent with your culture, consistent with your core values, those team members just start to believe it's all BS now.
the mid-level leaders are also in a unique position because unlike senior leaders un, unlike A CEO, unlike rank and file team members, those mid-level leaders need to manage both up and down. Of course, they need to lead and manage their direct reports. But they also need to manage up, communicate up, sometimes even lead up, and that puts them in a very [00:05:00] difficult position of feeling like they've gotta take one side or the other.
Are they taking the side of their team members and looking like they're protecting them in the eyes of senior leaders? Which can make them look weak or are they consistently taking the side of senior leaders and their team members believe they don't really have their backs. it's a really, the mid-level leader position is a really difficult position.
And on top of it just being a difficult position, there are a number of challenges they face when that mid-level leader position is not focused on in the right way. And I see time and time again, mid-level leaders became mid-level leaders because they were really good at what they did. They were really good.
Salespeople. So [00:06:00] they became a sales manager, or they were really good, you know, on the factory floor. So they became a operations manager. And not only does being good at the day to day, not always mean, you could be great at leading and managing people. That's true. But let's even put that aside. What I see time and time again in small and mid-size companies, the larger companies might do a little better job of this because they have the manpower and the dollars to put behind it, and they have so many mid-level leaders that they put formal programs in place.
But at the small and mid-size company level, these folks get promoted to those positions without any real training, coaching, or mentoring.they're left to, to navigate their new leadership responsibilities without a guide or a compass on how to do that. They also, more so than any other [00:07:00] part of the organization, they need to balance the strategic nature of the business along with the operational demands of the business.
And that's really hard to do. It's really hard to focus on strategy and vision when you're dealing with the, you know, production line that broke down today, or you're dealing with the,the client that, that's complaining, you, you tend to dive in and roll up your sleeves as a mid-level leader into the details at the same time, you've gotta keep strategy and vision in mind.
Soit's a very difficult position, and if your company is not growing significantly, it's also a position where people really talented, mid-level leaders could feel stuck without opportunities for any upward [00:08:00] mobility. And unless you have some kind of program in place or you're doing a good job coaching them, and we'll talk about all that,they're stuck with that opportunities for upward mobility, but they're also stuck without any opportunities for skill building 'cause they're so busy rolling up their sleeves and diving in to the day to day.
So I wanna talk about some ways, eight ways to develop mid-level leaders. And the first is not specific to mid-level leaders, but it's super important. Number one is to set crystal clear expectations for those leaders. Crystal clear expectations on what productivity you expect from their team, what it means to be a culture fit, how.
They and their team need to live [00:09:00] core values, but on top of that, those are expectations you need to set with everyone, team members, mid-level leaders, senior leaders. And the CEO, those expectations need to be there for everyone. But with mid-level leaders, especially those that are new to leadership, you need to set specific expectations for what it means to be a leader, what they should be doing to hold their people accountable, to give their people feedback, to coach them, develop them, retain them.
So setting those expectations is key. that's number one. And it's gotta start there. Number two is you've gotta model the way you can't expect your mid-level leaders to be better leaders than you if you are a senior leader. And I've seen in the past, CEOs and VPs of HR say, [00:10:00] we need our mid-level leaders to be stronger.
We need stronger middle management. and they bring people in to do these leadership development programs, these trainers to come in and do leadership development programs. They do them for the middle managers, and yet the senior leaders aren't doing that stuff. So the middle managers learn things that aren't reinforced.
And all that money and all that time goes to waste. So you've got to model the way. As a leader, if you want your folks to coach and hold people accountable and give people feedback and have the difficult discussions, and hire in the right way and coach people out of the organization and if that's what's important to, to have one-on-ones in the right way.
You need to model the way and do that as a senior leader, it's gotta start there because they will follow you. That's number. Two is modeling. The way [00:11:00] number three is start with your high performing team members, and even more specifically those high potential folks who might be sitting around the leadership table one day.
If there's work you wanna do, if you wanna dive in and be a better coach, be a better mentor, put in place some leadership development. Don't necessarily look at all your mid-level leaders, put them all in a bucket and say, what do we need to do for all of them? Your mid-level leaders may be at different way different levels of maturity and performance, and you're gonna get your greatest ROI by starting, by focusing on your best people, partially because they could be great role models.
For everyone else, partially because like strength finder and positive psychology. The whole idea of spending more time leveraging your strengths than fixing your weaknesses, a real is a really important [00:12:00] idea, and it doesn't just work for you as an individual. Works for your team. Most leaders overinvest in their underperformers and underinvest in their high performers.
Don't do that. Start with your high performers. Start with your high potentials. What could you do to help them? Step four. Once you understand who those folks are, challenge them. Raise the bar. Set higher productivity goals. Set higher expectations around living the culture. Increase their responsibility, especially if you are stretched too thin.
Give them projects to do. Don't think you need to take all of that on as a CEO or as a senior leader. Give your mid-level leaders projects to do either as individuals or get a bunch of high potential mid-level leaders together and have them [00:13:00] tackle a broken process or a new,or a new way to, to handle getting into a new market or developing a new project or figuring out a new strategy.
So challenge them. and by the way, I've seen more superstars leave out of boredom than anything else. So challenge them to do more, be more, become more. So that's step four.
so far set crystal clear expectations. Model the way. Start with your high performers, high potentials. Challenge them as number four.
Number five is implement some training. A, call it a leadership development program, but when I say that, I cringe a little bit because I've seen too many organizations spend months and [00:14:00] months developing these all encompassing leadership development programs, and they're crap and they don't work.they're either not done well or they're done well, but.
but the time is not invested in making sure people are going through those programs and getting value out of it. Sometimes the senior leaders say, yeah, I know you've gotta do this leadership development, but I need you to fix this problem first. They're putting every priority over leadership developmentand the biggest problem I see is leadership development is about teaching a whole bunch of concepts, but.
What about actually holding people accountable for executing on it? So there's nothing wrong and everything right, with saying what do we need to do from a leadership development standpoint, and do we need to create a program and how do we design that program? That's all good, but my suggestion is do it in small chunks.
Don't create an all-encompassing leadership development [00:15:00] program. Start narrow not only what I said. Before it, which is start with your high performing folks and your high potentials, but start narrow. Don't try to teach everything. Maybe start with teaching people how to have the right kind of one-on-one weekly, one-on-one conversation with their direct reports.
Maybe start by teaching people how, what coaching is all about. Versus managing versus feedback versus holding each other accountable. What does it mean to be a coach? What does it mean to ask the right questions to help people surface the right answer for them versus always giving advice?
So when you do this leadership development program, think narrow and think, not, did I check the box and teach people something? Think what value came out [00:16:00] of that. Piece of leadership development and as I said before, model the way part of modeling the way is as a senior leader, you better make sure you're an expert in that first, that was step five.
Step six is if you wanna take care of your mid-level leaders. If you want your mid-level leaders to perform at a high level, you need to have the right hiring processes. Crappy hiring processes that cause the mid-level leaders to have a bunch of lower performing folks working for them. I don't care what leadership development program you put in place, I don't care what kind of coaching and development mentorship you give them, they're gonna find themselves diving down and having to do the job of their team members.
So you need to put in place a hiring process. That focuses on hiring the best. I love the top grading methodology. Now, it's not the only one have a methodology. And by the way, [00:17:00] don't, I hope Brad Smart isn't listening to this. Don't read the book Top Grading. I much prefer the book his son, Jeff Smart wrote called Who the A method for hiring, but you need to put in place a hiring process and commit to hiring the best people.
That's step six, step seven. Create transparent career pathways, build career progressions to alleviate the uncertainty in people's minds about what's next. Mid-level leaders are gonna be much more excited about doing what it takes to be great mid-level leaders if they see a career path in front of them.
Now for those of you who have companies that aren't growing very much, this is a tough thing to do. 'cause you can create a career path on paper, but if your company's not growing [00:18:00] unless you retire or die, the folks working for you have no way up. So part of. The most difficult part of having a career pathway is, man, you gotta make sure you're firing all on all cylinders and growing as a company, or that stuff looks good on paper, but it doesn't go anywhere.
but create transparent career pathways and have discussions with your mid-level leaders as to where they want to go. When's the last time you sat down with them and said, where do you want to go in your career, and how could I help you get there? That's step seven career pathways and step eight is be willing to coach low performing folks, whether they are low producing, which in my methodology means their productivity is low or they're low culture fit.
I don't care how productive they are. If you are not willing to coach those people out of the [00:19:00] organization, you are tying the hands. Of your mid-level leaders, not only are you setting a bad example for them, but again, you are forcing them to go down and do lower level work because you're not willing to coach the low performing folks out, including the low performing peers, not only allowing them to coach their low performers out, but.
If you've got someone who is a sales manager, but your operations manager and your service managers, those other mid-level leaders aren't doing their job. It's hard for the sales manager to do their job, so be willing to model for them. Having the difficult conversation, making the difficult decision, and sometimes the best way to take care of your best people is to [00:20:00] fire your worst.
So eight steps I shared with you. They're not the only things, but I think they're pretty powerful if you start there. Step one, setting crystal clear expectations. Step two, starting. step two is modeling the way. step three is starting with your high performing, high potential folks. Step four is to challenge your mid-level leaders.
Raise the bar, increase responsibility. Step five is, implement a leadership development program, but do it in manageable chunks with some real outcomes and value coming out of it. Step six is have hiring processes to hire the best. Step seven create, clear, transparent career pathways.
Step eight, be willing to coach out your low performers.
How equipped are you? I'm sorry. How equipped are your mid-level managers, your mid-level leaders to step into leadership roles? Tomorrow? [00:21:00] You'll benefit, your company will benefit by making sure they are equipped, start thinking what it would take, what would it take for them to do the next job?
What would it take for them to sit around the leadership table and. A great way to start is start with creating those crystal clear expectations for them, and make sure you're having weekly one-on-ones, productive weekly, one-on-ones with them to help them understand how they're doing against those expectations, to hold them accountable for that and to coach them.
If you want a great leadership team. You need a great set of mid-level leaders, and if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team so it all falls into line. I hope that helped. I'll see you next time.
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