Question: What are the key actions that the folks in middle management need to implement to reach top management, the next level of their career?

In general, folks at middle management demostrate and focus on following key skills and competencies:

Critical Thinking

Business Orientation

Influencing

Customer Partnering

Engaging and developing others

Self-leadership

While the above skills are extremely important for the middle management role, these skills are not enough for the next level. Now let us look the six key areas/ competencies where the shift is required. While you are in middle management you may still be doing few of these things but in order to get into the exec/ top leader band you need to uplevel yourself significantly in these areas.

Strategic Thinking

Business Acumen

Customer Advocacy

Driving change and impact

Leading groups

Innovation

So while at middle management your graph for these competencies may look something like this…





The above graph is just an example, from here what you need to do is to focus on each one of these skills and uplevel yourself to take these scores from 3 to 4 or from 4 to 5.





Tools and Techniques:

Workshops and Seminars

Behavioral and Competency Building Trainings

Live opportunities at workplace/ Experimentation

Partnering with the senior management in shadow executive boards etc.

Actions/ What you exactly need to do in each of the areas:

Strategic Thinking

Drive long-term business advantage after assessing all relevant environmental factors

Update self on global trends and has a global perspective in relation to own work

Develop robust strategies towards achievement of the goals

Demonstrate effective use of scenarios to generate and evaluate alternatives

Business Acumen

Constantly looks for opportunities for revenue generation

Utilize knowledge of various operating and pricing models to improve profitability

Identify ways to reduce the operating costs and optimise operations

Work to build the brand of the organization and promote offerings amongst customers and industry bodies

Customer Advocacy

Constant lookout for avenues for adding value to the customer

Identify possible areas of conflict between customer and own organization and works towards addressing them

Advise customer with their best interest in mind

Ensure that the customer receives the best service possible and feels valued

Prepare business cases in line with customer's views, preferences and work to gain support for the same in own organization

Driving change and impact

Identifiy and adapt to changing priorities and uncertain times

View and utilize change as an opportunity to improve ways of working

Keep people motivated and engaged during times of change

Take ownership of the change initiatives and ensures smooth implementation

Serve as a role model of the change that she/he expects of others

Leading groups

Provide clear vision, direction and purpose to team members, ensuring that they understand and are accountable

Create opportunities for team members to surpass their performance benchmarks

Facilitate collaboration and addresses conflict effectively within the group

Take onus of development of team members and promotes learning

Empower team members to make decisions by delegating effectively and support them