It is tough to be a middle manager. On the one hand, you are pulled by the centripetal force of senior management. This is the force that demands seamless and sometimes unquestioning execution of organizational strategy. It requires you to toe the company line, even when you believe the line is flawed. An outlet for those who have unsuccessfully tried to influence organizational direction is to exit the company. A more common but insidious alternative is to remain and become a mindless conveyor of decisions from the top.

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I’ve recently been working with a group of managers who are finding it difficult to encourage their staff to evaluate their working processes in order to generate ideas for improvement (asking the question ‘what improvements can you think of’ was getting them nowhere fast!)

My view is that it’s useful for staff to have a more structured approach for evaluating processes and that SWOT can help with that. Here is the outcome of the work I did with those managers (using the example of the evaluation of a new system) and which they are now using with their staff

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