Q6. Tell us more about The
Conflicted Middle.
It’s a book about why
middle management seems so resistance to change, and what can be done to
overcome that resistance. At GM, middle
management was called the Frozen Middle. Senior leadership is frustrated that their ideas are not being
implemented, and outside consultants feel like their banging their heads
against a brick wall trying to implement change. Having been in middle
management for most of my career at GM, I lived within the frozen middle. Originally, I had the same viewpoint – it’s a
cultural thing, and you’ll never be able to change it. That perspective changed when I took the
Jonah program. I realized that middle
management was behaving logically! As in
a cloud or a CRT, it was the assumptions and policies that they were operating
under that was causing this resistance to change.
What was shocking to me
about the Jonah course was that my scope of influence was much larger than I
originally thought. When it came to
proposing a change to middle managers, I originally thought, “They’ll never
change, so why bother.” Now I want to
understand what their conflicts – why are they choosing not to adopt a new
program when there are indications it will help. You soon come up with a fairly common list of
logical objections. Overcoming these
objections in your sales pitch is a critical aspect of securing their support
and reducing the number of obstacles that will have to be overcome.
So the book describes
the conflicts the middle management faces, and why I now look at them as the
Conflicted Middle vs. the Frozen Middle. For those with a TOC background, there
will be little that is new. But I am
writing more for the few middle managers out there who would like to become change
agents in their organizations.
