The Power ofThe Middle
By Brenda Beukelman, MBA
The role of the marketing director can seem both powerful and powerless; it depends on the day, season, and maybe even the time of day. For all the usual frustrations of managing a team, a tight budget and competing demands, there is great power in the ranks of middle management. These leaders are the fulcrum of strategy and implementation. Successful marketing managers transform strategy into reality through leadership, sweat equity, and creativity.
“Seemingly mundane things that managers do can have great impact on their workers,” says Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile. Her recent research studies the impact of day to day management on the organization’s ability to implement strategy. The findings suggest effective leadership in the middle is the unrecognized edge of an organization.
From my experience of “living in the middle” of a health system leading a marketing function, I have learned a few things through trial and error on how to keep a marketing team engaged. Some lessons were learned the hard way, like pushing too hard for results without enough resources to sustain momentum. Other lessons learned were through pure serendipity; like finding a champion for a new marketing initiative with a hallway conversation. Teresa Amabile’s research puts these day to day interactions in a new light. So what can a marketing director in health care do to create this edge in their organization?
Speak Two Languages and Translate
The marketing director’s most effective function is to translate strategy into action. Once the strategic plan is printed, it needs to move off the paper and become visible in the marketing team’s work. But the strategic plan does not articulate what the marketing team’s objectives need to be to help the organization reach its goals. This is when translation skills come in to help your team understand the role they will be playing to help the organization fulfill the strategies.
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Connect to the Patient
Many marketers have chosen health care because of the altruistic nature of the industry. Yet, it is hard for marketers to feel connected to the patient. Their work can feel more than six degrees of separation from the patient because of office location or lack of involvement with patient care teams. Connect them to the bigger purpose and see increased productivity and positive attitudes in their work. My former team and I viewed surgery (with patient consent), toured the ambulance call center and a lucky few, rode with an ambulance crew. The enthusiasm and energy soared as they shared their experiences with each other and talked about where and when they saw implications to their work in the patient’s experience. Work Smart |
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Power Up
The power of the middle also comes from the ability to partner with executive leadership to influence the strategy. You have the vantage point of knowing the organization’s strengths and weakness at a level they do not. This is because you have most likely experienced some of these challenges while they have only heard about them. Be a voice of measured reality as well as vision. Staying mum when decisions are made will only compound the challenges.
Competing priorities, limited budgets, and stressed teams are the reality. But through strength in the middle, you can bring strategy to life with an engaged and enthused team.
