Middle Way Management and Active Decision Making

In my last post, I discussed how equanimity is one of the most valuable characteristics of a Middle Way Manager™. Maintaining your composure under every circumstance and modeling the best characteristics of a leader under pressure are great ways to promote Middle Way Management™. In this post, I consider the importance of active decision making to your daily Middle Way Management walk.

An Organizational Expectation
As a manager in an American-style organization, it's an organizational expectation that you engage in active decision-making unilaterally, with your team, or as part of a larger management structure. As you morph your management approach into a Middle Way Management practice, this expectation does not decline in importance. In fact, its import increases because you will have beefed up your decision-making toolkit with new sensibilities--compassion, empathy, sympathy, understanding, and kindness. The decisions you make in your daily practice will determine your success as a Middle Way Manager.

What does Middle Way Management decision-making look like? It looks like any other decision-making process, the differences being the practice influences under which you make decisions and the terminal effects of the expected outcomes at the individual and organizational levels. By this, I mean the Middle Way Manager characteristics of compassion, empathy, sympathy, understanding, and kindness will act to inform both the ways in which you make decisions, as well as the outcomes of those decisions. As long as your decision-making process is aligned with organizational goals and objectives, your methodology will be considered organizationally sound, especially when you produce spectacular results.

Forty Per Cent Turnover? Are You Kidding Me?!?
I once worked for a non-profit organization with a phenomenal track record as one of the premier K-12 testing and assessment organizations in the United States, maybe even the world. I learned shortly after starting there as an IT manager that the turnover rate in the department was at least 40 per cent. Of course, this is one of those little gems you never hear about from the recruiter or the 25 people who interview you before you start the job. I was stumped at the figure because my boss (VP, Information Technology) was such a caring, concerned, generous, kind man. I knew this because he had told me so--repeatedly. If you're not seeing red flags and hearing alarm bells by now, you should be.

My boss' initial interest in me was predicated upon my study of and publications about servant leadership, a leadership and management approach philosophically close to Middle Way Management. It turned out my interest was as close as the organization intended to get to servant leadership. Two weeks after I started, I began noticing that people were quitting in groups of three or more. They were, for lack of a better term, dropping like flies.

As I investigated the reasons for this by interviewing several vocal, disgruntled team members, it became clear the attitude prevalent among IT managers was the typical American-style, humans-as-a-resource approach that forced people to work long hours and weekends to accomplish development goals set by those at the very top of the hierarchy. The trickle-down effect was the highest turnover rate I've ever seen in an organization.

How would a Middle Way Management approach have made this any different? First of all, software and system development goals would have been set with team member input. This sends the message that all team members are valued for their insights and expertise. Next, development planning would have taken family and outside obligations into account. Working people to death because children need testing and assessment tools is no way to create team member buy-in. Finally, extraordinary effort would have been rewarded in a variety of ways, all of which could be decided upon by team members.

Through my interviews, I learned that people simply wanted three things: (1) Not to be worked to death, (2) More time off to spend with their families, and (3) Thanks for a job well done. That was it. They didn't want more money or even recognition before their peers. All they wanted was to be treated decently, which is a primary responsibility of the Middle Way Manager.

Anything But Mediocre
The "Middle" of Middle Way Management is about finding the middle ground between management behavioral extremes. Compassion, empathy, composure, resilience, creativity, kindness; these are the "Middle Way" of the approach. When it comes to decision-making, the actions taken by Middle Way Managers are extraordinary because they are made with the precision and intent that only come from walking the true Middle Way Management path of compassion, accountability, and excellence, of honesty, candor, and empathy. Middle Way Managers are active decision-makers because it's their duty as organizational managers and it's their moral obligation to make the decisions that provide vision for the team. Middle Way Managers, and their decisions, are anything but mediocre.

I hope this has clarified questions you might have had about the nature of Middle Way Management and how Middle Way Managers engage in active decision making. In my next post, I will address the tightly coupled roles of creativity and innovation in Middle Way Management.

Onward! Darin

Copyright © 2009, Darin R. Molnar, PhD. All rights reserved.