For 37 years, I ran a business. We had good days and we had bad days, but in general, it was a very rewarding experience.
I can’t ever remember hearing anyone say “that’s not my job,” and nothing ever seemed to go undone. Someone always got what needed doing, done. Not every time, but darn near.
I never gave much thought to why all this happened until I read a Wall Street Journal article titled Leading From Below. The point of the article was that CEOs increasingly are pressured to produce quickly, and if things are going to happen in their organizations, more and more the driving force must come from middle management, not what the article called the C Suite of CEO, COO and CFO.
If day-to-day operating management doesn’t pounce on small problems as they develop, they probably will become big problems once they eventually get to the C Suite. In my case, fortunately, that rarely happened.
Often before I even knew we had a problem, we no longer had one, because someone in my organization had already solved it.
Now, I recognize we were a small business, as you probably are, and the Journal article addressed larger companies. However, the basic advice it provides for Microsoft seems to me to be just as valid for businesses of any size.
The gist of the article was to develop and preserve a climate in which middle managers think like leaders, and in essence, become leaders.
