If you knew that a quarter of middle managers in your organisation were not going to cascade important messages from your leadership team to their teams – to your frontline staff – would you be worried?
According to research by the Chartered Management Institute1 in the UK, that is exactly what is happening. In the results of a study published in 2016, more than three quarters of 1,500 middle manager respondents said they were routinely required to cascade critical information about business performance, strategy and priorities from their bosses to their staff. But only one third said they felt confident with the subject matter, and a staggering 24% said they simply did not do it. They did not even try to pass the information on.
That’s a lot of employees coming to work every day, making decisions and completing tasks, without knowing what is expected of them or how well they are doing. Research by CEB (now Gantner) released around the same time evolved a similar theme, showing that conservatively 66% of Australian change initiatives failed because managers did not know how to talk to their teams about change2.
Middle managers are typically skilled employees who have been promoted because of their technical or subject matter expertise. But managing other people is an entirely different proposition; as a manager, success comes not from completing tasks but from knowing how to communicate consistently and well, even in the face of scepticism, even when the topic is difficult. It is a skill, not an instinct, and it needs to be learned. Yet we rarely teach middle managers how to do it.
Instead, leadership teams wilfully assume that their messages are getting through. The messages have been well crafted, the intent and decision-making behind them is sound, the content has been published on the intranet and the managers have been briefed. How could it possibly go wrong?
Inside organisations, again and again, we are presented with evidence that the information ‘cascade’ is not working: The projects that run late and blow budget, the change that gradually slides back to an old status quo, the values that are spoken but not lived, the poor performance left unaddressed, the good people who unexpectedly leave, the staff survey results that dismay the board. But we ignore the evidence because we know that the only way to the workforce is through the middle. We just have to live with the fact that most of the time, the information cascade is more like a trickle. Don’t we?
There are three reasons middle managers fail to share important business information with their staff: They don’t want to, they’re not enabled to, or they just don’t know how. The third stumbling block is the most significant and the most easily overcome. We need to teach middle managers how to communicate like leaders.
The journalist and best-selling author, William H Whyte, a passionate and early advocate for improved communication to unlock business performance and outcomes, once wrote: “The great enemy of communication…is the illusion of it”.3
Almost 80 years later it’s time to let go our illusions about the information cascade, and start equipping our managers to actually make it happen.
1. S. Ghezelayagh and A. Jester, The Middle Manager Lifeline: Trust and communication in the heart of your organisation, Chartered Management Institute, London, September 2016.
2. ‘Making Change Management Work’, CEB Global, 2016
3. The quote is often attributed to poet George Bernard Shaw but there is no evidence of its existence prior to Whyte’s 1950 Forbes magazine article, ‘Is Anybody Listening?’ Shaw died in 1950.