PDF Summary:Leading from the Middle, by Scott Mautz

If you're a middle manager, you know the unique pressures of the role: You must constantly shift between managing up, down, and across the organization while navigating conflicting demands with limited resources and authority. In Leading from the Middle, Scott Mautz addresses the distinct challenges of mid-level leadership and offers practical strategies for succeeding in this position.

Mautz explains how to balance serving others with demonstrating business expertise, build strong relationships with your boss and colleagues, develop high-performing teams through purpose and interdependence, and manage burnout and change effectively. You'll learn how to maximize your impact from the middle of the organization, where you're positioned to influence every level and drive meaningful results.

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Leading Vertically and Across: Influencing Beyond Direct Reports

Mautz advises building a solid alliance with your supervisor to enhance your influence and career success. Having your boss hold you in high esteem is one of the strongest ways to gain influence and visibility. McKinsey research indicates that this relationship is twice as important to your career success as any other.

(Shortform note: While building a strong relationship with your boss can be beneficial, it can also have drawbacks. If you rely too heavily on one powerful person, you may become dependent on them for your success. This can be especially problematic if your boss is abusive.)

To form a solid relationship with your boss, first understand the dynamics between supervisor and employee. You rely on your manager, and your manager relies on you. You're both flawed humans. Your boss essentially has conflicting responsibilities, being both a supporter and evaluator. Handling this tension involves building trust, so that the supporting and evaluating roles don't conflict. Next, gain clarity on your boss's expectations. Ask questions to clarify what your boss prioritizes and what will enhance their image. Then, adapt to your boss’s approach. Understand their preferences for receiving and processing data, deciding, and handling conflict. Accommodate these preferences to influence your boss more successfully. Finally, support your boss by expanding their capacity, helping them make decisions, solving problems, and advocating for them.

What to Do When Your Boss Is Toxic

The author’s advice for building a relationship with your boss assumes that your boss is a reasonable person. If your boss is persistently toxic or unethical, these strategies may not work. For example, building trust with a toxic boss can be difficult, as they may not be trustworthy. Adapting to their approach can be challenging if their approach is abusive or unethical. Advocating for a toxic boss can damage your reputation and make you complicit in their behavior. In these situations, it may be more effective to focus on protecting yourself and your team, documenting any inappropriate behavior, and seeking support from HR or other resources.

Mautz also recommends cultivating authentic relationships with colleagues to influence them effectively. Colleagues are often treated as transactions rather than relationships. You can distinguish yourself by putting in the work to forge a genuine connection. This lets you take on a distinct position in the workplace. You can become a confidant for venting feelings and sharing worries. This may create a fulfilling relationship and establish the foundation for your peers to understand that your intentions are genuine when you work together on projects. Make an effort to learn about your peers and allow them to learn about you. Find shared beliefs, values, and experiences to use as a foundation.

The Power of Being a Confidant

Cultivating authentic relationships with colleagues can help you become a confidant, as Mautz suggests, and this can help you become more influential. In a study of a large organization, researchers found that the people who were most influential were those who were at the center of the advice network. These people were sought out for advice and information, and they were also more likely to be promoted. The researchers found that the most influential people were those who were able to build relationships with a wide range of people, including those who were different from them. This suggests that cultivating authentic relationships with colleagues can help you become more influential by giving you access to a wider range of information and perspectives.

Building Internal Capacity & Resilience

Mautz asserts that managers at the mid-level are well-positioned to identify and address burnout. Burnout is a medical condition caused by ongoing job stress. It develops gradually, so it's often hard to spot. Employees may not realize they’re experiencing burnout, or they may be unwilling to admit it. Middle managers are close enough to employees to notice the signs, which include fatigue, disengagement, low productivity, irritability, and absenteeism.

When you notice signs of burnout, talk to the employee to determine what's causing it. Common causes include being overloaded with work, work that's a poor fit, lack of appreciation, and unrealistic expectations.

Burnout: Definition and Causes

Burnout is a complex phenomenon that has been the subject of extensive research and debate. While it is not classified as a medical condition in itself, burnout is recognized as a work-related psychological syndrome that can contribute to the development of various health problems. Maslach and Leiter, two leading researchers in the field, define burnout as a combination of emotional exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalization, and a reduced sense of professional efficacy. They emphasize that burnout develops in the context of a chronic mismatch between the person and key aspects of the job, such as workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values.

Additionally, Mautz explains that building resilience involves adapting to shifts and embracing uncertainty. To build resilience, he suggests following the 50/50 principle: If you need to adapt, focus half your energy on practical problem-solving and half on seeing the situation as an opportunity. This prevents you from becoming trapped in negativity or self-doubt.

Mautz also recommends employing the OAR technique to handle uncertainty: Observe the uncertainty without overreacting, Acknowledge it without trying to control it, and Recognize that change is inevitable.

The Role of Psychological Flexibility in Resilience

The 50/50 principle and the OAR technique work by exercising your psychological flexibility, which is the ability to adapt your thinking and behavior to changing circumstances. According to psychologists Todd B. Kashdan and Jonathan Rottenberg, psychological flexibility is crucial for resilience because it allows you to update your mental models and choose your response to uncertainty, rather than letting uncertainty dictate your behavior. By practicing these techniques, you strengthen your ability to remain open to new information, shift your perspective, and take effective action even when faced with unexpected challenges.

Next, we'll look at ways to develop a high-performing core and to navigate change and challenges.

Developing a High-Performing Core

Mautz explains that you can build a high-performing team by instilling a powerful feeling of purpose. Purpose means the motive behind your work. It’s the higher-order reason for dedicating so much effort and spending significant time apart from your loved ones. Employees often look to work for purpose. They find the most meaning in being part of a team. A well-defined purpose provides a foundation they can rely on when they feel lost. It offers guidance, makes intentions clear, and helps them comprehend their thoughts, actions, and feelings. It assists the group in forming a strong shared identity. To establish a feeling of purpose, first discover your team’s purpose.

(Shortform note: Adam M. Grant, an organizational psychologist, conducted a series of field experiments to test the impact of purpose on performance. In one study, he worked with a university call center where employees raised funds for student scholarships. Grant arranged for some employees to meet a scholarship recipient who shared how the funds had changed his life. The employees who met the recipient subsequently spent 142% more time on the phone and raised 171% more money than those who didn’t. This demonstrates that making the purpose of work vivid can lead to substantial, measurable gains in collective performance.)

Ask why the group was formed, who it serves, and in which areas it can excel. Ask about the team's core values. Include the whole team in this questioning so they create the purpose. Then, role model the purpose. Use the purpose statement to help guide your decisions. Keep the statement of purpose visible to your team. Next, assist team members in internalizing the purpose. Challenge them to describe how the purpose is realized in their roles. If necessary, meet with each person in the group and assist them in linking their responsibilities to the group's mission. Then, show that you value following the purpose. Reward behaviors that align with supporting the purpose. Finally, get team members who are particularly enthusiastic about the purpose to help others adopt it. Give all team members resources to help them advocate for the purpose.

(Shortform note: In The Culture Map, Erin Meyer explains that in some cultures, employees expect their leaders to provide clear direction. In these cultures, asking employees to help define the group’s purpose can backfire. They may see this as a sign of incompetence. Similarly, asking employees to advocate for the purpose may be seen as an abdication of responsibility.)

Navigating Change & Challenges

Mautz emphasizes that transformation is a means toward a brighter future, not just something to suffer through. If you guide change effectively, employees will view the transition as a means to improve their trajectory, both in their careers and personal lives.

(Shortform note: Mautz’s assertion that transformation is a means toward a brighter future may not apply to all organizational change. For example, if a transformation results in a loss of job security or professional identity, employees may not view the transition as a means to improve their trajectory. In these cases, the transition may be experienced as a means to an unavoidable personal loss, rather than a brighter future.)

He also states that handling change requires a structured, methodical strategy. Although change is inherently unpredictable, managing it demands a structured process. This process has three phases, plus a “pre-phase,” which structure change management.

The Intellectual Tradition Behind Phased Change Management

Mautz’s emphasis on a structured, phased way of handling change reflects a broader organizational‐change tradition, exemplified by John Kotter’s work, that views transformation as a leader‐orchestrated sequence of stages rather than a single chaotic event. In Leading Change, Kotter argues that successful change follows an eight‐step pattern: creating urgency, building a guiding coalition, developing a vision, communicating the vision, empowering action, generating short‐term wins, consolidating gains, and anchoring new approaches in culture. This model, like Mautz’s, assumes that leaders can shape attention, behavior, and norms over time, rather than simply reacting to unpredictability. Kotter’s approach builds on a long tradition of stage‐based change models. Kurt Lewin’s “unfreeze‐change‐refreeze” framework, developed in the mid‐20th century, popularized the idea that large‐scale change unfolds through recognizable phases. Later theorists expanded on this, arguing that change is a journey with distinct stages, each requiring different leadership actions. The key insight of this tradition is that change is manageable when leaders can choreograph human motivation, political alignment, and cultural reinforcement over time. By framing change as a sequence of steps with specific aims, Kotter and others provide leaders with a cognitive scaffold for turning messy, uncertain shifts into a series of deliberate interventions. This intellectual backdrop helps explain why Mautz emphasizes a pre‐phase and three main phases as the organizing logic for managing change.