Why the Middle Matters

Being in the Middle of the management ladder is not a place that most people fight for, and for that very reason its a place that has room for great growth and opportunities for success. Think about it - if everyone is fighting their way to the executive level, competition, and therefore excellence, is lacking in the middle.

Seth Godin has a lot of great insights worth the read in his books as well as his blog. His latest post got me to thinking about the type of person we need to be in the middle. Check out an exerpt below (and check out the full posting at Seth Godin's Blog):

"Back in 1999, every internet marketer was a genius. And well paid, too. A lot of those marketing geniuses brought hubris to their work. They acted big, spent big and never looked at or learned from their mistakes.

Others, just a few, approached their work with a sense of gratitude. They realized that the good times wouldn't last forever and they tried to develop skills and insights and connections for the future.

It's interesting--years later, very few of the arrogant guys have done much of anything. They never developed perspectives or attitudes that extended beyond, "hey, shut up, I'm here, we're winning," and so they failed once they left the mother ship.

This is why you should hesitate to hire a marketer or salesperson who comes from a successful big company marketer (like Apple or Microsoft). Sure, they 'contributed' to the growth of a great brand, but how much? What did they learn? What will they do when they don't have a one in a million brand and the wind at their back? Or in the case of P&G alum, what will they do when they don't have billions of dollars to spend on advertising?

Confidence is often a self-fulfilling prophecy, particularly in marketing or investing. Arrogance, on the other hand, is hard to reward. My favorite combination is the quiet confidence of knowledge, combined with the humility that comes from realizing that you're pretty lucky and that you have no idea at all what's guaranteed to work tomorrow. "

Thanks Seth. Let's keep pushing what happens in the middle.

A Return to the Three

Going back to the Rule of 3...

As consumers, we're almost always focused on one of three characteristics in our buying decisions: Quality, Time, or Price. Its rare when we can find an instance that all three of these are equally catered to.

A colleague of mine saw this sign the other day that re-iterated the point.

I would go one step further and argue that its unlikely for two of the three to exist in equal measure. Your company will probably focus on one more than the other two. And by focus, I don't mean words, I mean results. McDonalds may say they produce quality food, but at the end of the day people go there first for price, then for time, and last for quality. On the other hand, most people go to Whole Foods first for their quality - with their pricing and speed a distant 2nd and 3rd.

Don't try and sell yourself and/or your company as producer of all three. Focus on one and speak to your strengths.

Accept you are one of the three, weave it into everything you do, and be unapologetic about it.

Myths of Impossible People

I'm tired of the fault game. I am guilty of playing this and certainly see it all the time in the world of client | manager relationships. As MMs, we've got to put a stop to it.

The bottom line is this, if someone is paying you to do a service and you are within the terms of your contracted agreement, the details of delays, mis-information, etc don't really matter. If your customer is upset, and feels the job hasn't been done right, well, on time, etc - then they are right. Even if you can prove you have fulfilled your duties, if they are not satisfied, we've failed to meet obligation #1 - meet their needs.

I know, I know, some people are impossible. But guess what - that doesn't excuse this obligation. It just means we've got our work cut out for us that much more.

Accept the fact that you will fail with some people, but consider it a failure, and not the client's fault. The minute we start assigning fault to our clients, is the minute we start making them out to be the bad guy. And they are not the bad guy - they are the ones paying our salaries. I can tell you from experience, even the most difficult of clients knows somewhere inside that they are difficult. And when you stay the course and don't let them get the best of your patience, they will notice. Think about it - if they are truly that difficult, then they are probably that difficult with everyone they work with and are no doubt used to a certain type of response. By bucking the status quo, you might just be the one person that stands ahead of the rest.

Know in advance that you'll probably never hear a so-called "difficult client" directly acknowledge that you've done a good job, but I bet you'll hear it via Word of Mouth. It happens all the time.

Resist: Don't let your frustrations get the best of you.

Turn Into the Spin

Reaction is natural. Similar to driving on ice - when you slide out of control your immediate response is to correct the spin. But as we all learned in Driver's Ed, that only makes the spin worse. The right response is to do what feels insane at the time - turn into the spin.

With the economy taking its steady dip, we're seeing reactions more and more as managers...

You fear losing clients you have, so you try and protect those relationships by amping up the face-time; you worry about money, so you cut back on spending in areas you consider "non-essential" to making your business run; you get desperate in your approaches to drumming up new work and start the cold calling - you get the idea...we react.

Slowly, this reactionary mindset works its way down into our actions to a point where we start to look and sound kind of pathetic. Whether psychological or not, this does effect people's desire to do work with us. Not to mention, cutting on spending can often mean cutting back on things that are actually generating profit in the long-term.

Its not easy, but we've got to fight against our desire to react, even if its just in our mindset. It'll not only help us make better decisions, it'll also separate us from the pack.

A Good Long-Term Offense

In spite of my leanings to not draw from a sports analogy, I can't resist this one. I'm a life-long Alabama fan, and watching them play Auburn this past weekend for a 36-0 win gave me plenty of fodder.

But there were three main strategies going on during the game that really grabbed by attention - their focus on the game at-hand, their look-ahead toward the SEC Championship game next weekend against Florida, and the plays they ran with their second string players (players that will not play a role until the 2009-10 season).

All of these were potentially competing strategies and could have risked too much distraction. But the greater risk would have been to not juggle all 3, which may not have cost them in the Auburn game (the short-term) but most certainly could have cost them next week against Florida.

So while considering a head coach's approach toward a successful football program I was led to this - as MMs, we've got to do more than just focus on the one thing in front of us. If we're not focused on what may be competing priorities for next month's, next quarter's, as well as next year's goals, we're not going to be consistently successful. And the greatest attribute of a successful manager is not just one who gets the big one-time results, but the manager who performs consistently.