Stuck in the Middle: A series of lessons in leadership and execution…

So I’ve had the opportunity to see a great deal of management and leadership styles over my short career so far. This series will provide hopefully and interesting views coping, surviving and ultimate enjoying work with a little humor as a member of middle management.

I’ve all kinds of roles/areas of partial to full ownership in my career (Product Management, Marketing, Strategy, Support, Corporate Drip pan, Customer Advocate, Research guy, Utility Player, Business Development, Business Analyst, Corporate Development and Strategic Initiatives) – not as fun as it sounds, but a great deal more fun that just doing 1 thing for nearly a decade, which unfortunately many folks have. Change is good and brings opportunity – I guess that’s this post’s nugget.

The most unique thing I’ve had the opportunity to witness is leadership styles, so I think I’ll spend some time highlighting experiences I’ve seen on leadership, process and general observations. The majority of my career has been in and around Product, the biggest of the 4 P’s, but in most organizations product management is not understood.

This corporate reality has offered me an interesting opportunity to sit back, analyze and apparently – write and outline of content, which was going to be a book, but is the core content for the blog.

So I will embark on a series of post about being stuck in the middle – mid-sized companies, mid-sized talent and mid-level management.

At some point I will write on Pattern matching, as I think it is a good thing and about the only real skill I have. To that end, I have noticed some patterns in leadership and organizational dynamics which I will explore from a process and persona perspective. I will start with personas.

Some of the leadership personas examined will be geologist, the ameba, category killers, technocrats and Visibility Manager.

middle management