Leading From The Middle

By Christine Cutucache, Sarah Andrus, Nikolaus Stevenson and Andrew Cutucache

Leading from the Middle is co-written by professionals with a variety of leadership positions. This resource shares empowering messages to help you take control of your environment by seeing yourself as an actionable leader today. This book is all about leading without authority. If you do not have the title of "leader" within a team or organization, then this book is for you! This is a leadership book 'for the rest of us.'

 

Part of the reason that we wrote this book is due to the dearth of resources for those in non-positional leadership positions. CEOs can drive action through multiple modalities--from offering bonuses to firing ineffective employees. But what about the team member who just wants to help her group succeed? Or, the team member who doesn't have a budget at his disposal, how can he help the group along? How does the team member that has zero authority, but needs maximum influence, accomplish the core mission? The authors share experiences ranging from sports to the military. Through their shared experiences, they hope that you will also find camaraderie. This resource offers actionable items to foster change on your team today. Finally, take the 30-day leadership challenge to close the book with specific, action oriented next steps.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christine Cutucache
• Release date: Feb 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9780578835334

Book preview

Leading 

from the Middle

When you have zero authority, but need maximum influence to accomplish the core mission.

Leading from the Middle

––––––––

When you have zero authority,  

but need maximum influence to  

accomplish the core mission.

––––––––

Christine Cutucache

Sarah Andrus

Nikolaus Stevenson

Andrew Cutucache

The names and identifying characteristics of individuals and groups within this book have been changed to protect their privacy. Any resemblance to actual individuals, groups, teams, companies, or organizations, active or inactive, is only coincidental. 

The information throughout this book is a result of the collective experiences of the authors, be that lived or observed experiences. Moreover, additional experiences come from interviews with a variety of leaders and non-leaders spanning various decades and contexts in an effort to add reliability of principles across structures and organizations, and ultimately inform translatability. While the information throughout the book is meant to serve in an advisory manner to aid the reader in their own personal journeys, this book, nor the advice herein, are for the reader and the authors do not assume liability for following or not following any advice within. 

Leading From The Middle: When you have zero authority, but need maximum influence to accomplish the core mission. ©2021 by Christine Cutucache. All rights reserved. Printed in Bellevue, Nebraska in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. For information, contact: [e-mail]. 

FIRST EDITION

Designed by coauthors

___________________________________________________________

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

LCCN: 2021926086

Cutucache, Christine.

Andrus, Sarah.

Stevenson, Nikolaus.

Cutucache, Andrew.

When you have zero authority, but need maximum influence to accomplish the core mission. / by Christine Cutucache, Sarah Andrus, Nik Stevenson, Andrew Cutucache.—1st ed. 

Includes index.

ISBN: 978-0-578-83533-4

Self-help Techniques.      2. Leadership.    3. Teams

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For all those that are born leaders

who just don’t know it yet.

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About This Book

Most leadership books are written directly to the CEO, President, or Vice President of a corporation. Those books are written directly for those with positional authority and distinct leadership positions. However, the great majority of us don't have, and may not ever have, such titles. This is a leadership book that caters to the non-leader. This is a book to empower anyone that currently feels powerless from lack of positional authority to rise up and carry out the mission. This is for those who don't have any way to motivate the group, and aren't given any budget with which to work, but who is charged with moving the group, team, company, or organization forward. For anyone who has been frustrated at the overt action or overt inaction by those with positional leadership positions, this is a how-to for implementation of leadership strategies to manage up, manage down, and manage side to side amongst peers to improve outcomes for all. This book will give you the tools necessary to emerge as an action-oriented leader, no matter your title. Need to motivate those around you to action? This book is for you. Do you have a specific objective to carry out, but lack sticks or carrots? This book is for you. If you have been aiming to learn more about becoming a leader and yearn to build your toolbox? Then the 30-day leadership challenge component of this book is for you.

Told through a series of lived examples, the authors take you through stories from various professions and levels to give candid, and sometimes fanatically funny case studies of effective and ineffective leadership. Ultimately, the lessons provided herein aim to empower you, the reader, to be a leader, no matter your title. Join us and LEAD from the middle.

The authors describe activities that they’ve been charged with coordinating, accomplishing, or leading. However, most importantly, all of our stories are told from this charge without any positional authority. Another way to state this would be that we were to accomplish the impossible without any carrot and without any stick. 

These stories are only minorly edited to protect the privacy of those described. They may be lived, or directly observed, experiences. Either way, this book is chock full of examples, anecdotes, advice, and discussion for anyone charged with accomplishing major tasks that involve collaboration, but without any actionable authority to warrant a level of accountability. What does that mean? We mean that it’s for those that can’t fire someone from the team for not upholding their responsibilities. It means that our only way of holding others accountable is through sharing expectations, weighing in to buy in, and through trust building to foster genuine collaboration. We’re not CEOs. We don’t have the final say, and most of the time we don't have the first say! But, we are palpably passionate about helping middle level team members to tap into their otherwise untapped potential as leaders to foster change within their organization, team, church, or otherwise.

Finally, after you complete the 30-day leadership challenge at the end of this book, we hope that every person that shakes your hand can remember every detail of your handshake. From our hands to yours, welcome to Leading From The Middle.

Contents

Preface Materials        

Chapter 1

Culture change: The Core 4      

Chapter 2

Using Personality Profiles to Aid Leadership Style:

Servant Leadership Revisited 

Chapter 3

360 Degree Leadership in Action

Chapter 4

Be a Leader that Supports Others

Chapter 5

Stop, Look, and Listen:

Utilizing the CAAR Method in the Trenches

Chapter 6

The GAS Factor

Chapter 7

Leadership in Tough Moments: Leading with Compassion

Chapter 8

The Leadership Matrix

Chapter 9

Trust and Accountability: Choices, Change, and Environment

The Takeaways So then where does authority come from?

About the Authors   

Appendices

-The 30-day Leadership Challenge

-Discussion Materials: Team Cohesion

-The Speech that sparked this book: "Lenses"

Preface 

Proactive Leaders hedge their bets. We saw this with many of the most recent natural disasters and strains on the world. From the 2008/2009 financial crisis, to the coronavirus outbreak a decade later, whenever people are shocked at a uncommon, unexpected hit to the system, this is when leadership becomes most acute. The choices of the leader become more heavily scrutinized. The lack of decision becomes perhaps even more-so scrutinized. The leader is suddenly thrown into a storm of communications, useful and useless information, accurate and inaccurate reporting, and the pulls of many stakeholders, and, of course, the need to decipher all the information gleaned to then make the best decision possible at that time (i.e. to act). Leaders have plans A through F already at their disposal.

It is during these moments that we see who the quality leaders are. The problems of those that look to you become your problems. You navigate the trying times from both the system and individual levels. Leaders are the ones that already planned for and expected this worst-case scenario. Leaders also lead those that don’t want to be led. And leaders lead those that don’t yet know that they need to be led. Leaders communicate within their group, and with their external stakeholders. This happens continuously. When the crisis hits, the effective leader simply reminds everyone of the plan.

Effective leaders build their networks early on and establish their style of leadership. Certainly leadership style is a fluid medium and must adapt to each person and/or situation, but the networking and trust building early on ensures that there is trust established before the trust is ultimately tested. A sort of ‘baseline.’

Finally, leaders know that everyone is always watching. Rumors, while frustrating and non-productive, are part of the reality of the workplace. People often form their opinions of others based upon feedback from those already in their circles of trust. Or, they formulate their opinions based on what they see from afar. Is the leader always surrounded with people who look, speak, or act like them? If so, then the leader will be perceived as being adverse to diversity and inclusion, and unwilling to hear differing opinions. Does the leader always ask the same individual to initiate core objectives? Then others will feel as though their voices won’t be heard, nor welcomed. 

It is the leader’s job to think an hour, a week, a year, 5-, 10-, 30-years into the future. You must be constantly looking, evaluating, and reflecting (more on this in Appendix A). Leaders must see the world through a variety of lenses, and demonstrate their processes for making decisions, with an eye toward inclusion, to ultimately build confidence in their style and process. 

Decades ago, Peter Drucker brought us The Effective Executive. In a world where there is less and less administrative structure, less unionization, and a more diverse workforce, the model of leadership remains fluid. Some, such as Ken Blanchard, have gone so far as to say that the old way of leadership is ‘dead’. The ‘old way’ meaning when the positional authority figure tells the subordinates what to do, when to do it, and isn’t open to feedback. This progression is further emphasized by organizational psychologists like Adam Grant encourage us all to use our unique, Original (pardon the pun) attributes to follow our morals to lead a productive life. Taken together, to serve as a dynamic leader in the 21st century, the leader must be adaptable, apt, and genuinely empathic. We as a society will face challenges that we’ve never dreamed of before with the coalescing of multiple fields of study. As interdisciplinary researchers, clinicians, psychologists, executives, and writers, we’ve been preparing for this very need. The traditional training for scientific researchers was to stay in their lane, thus identifying a core area, and subsequently study that for their lifetime. This has changed. Now, researchers are expected to, and really need to, fuse the concepts, practices, and tools from a variety of fields together to most aggressively and accurately address a question. The world is not without variables. As researchers, we try to limit the variables within an experiment. However, excluding all norms of the world makes the experiment artificial, as we (and our experiments) are influenced by a variety of factors of which we’ll never be able to control. This principle demonstrates the core need of effective leaders today. The effective leader is understanding of different subject matters and their integration. The effective leader prioritizes diversity. The effective leader puts people’s well-being first. The effective leader has continuous communication so that constituents are never left guessing, nervous, or scared. The effective leader prepares to fail, and prepares to have his/her staff fail. The effective leader maintains humility, creativity, diversity, accessibility, and effective planning, while simultaneously maintaining accountability amongst the group. We bring you strategies to be an Effective Leader. Looking for resources to help you manage up, down, and side to side? Let’s start Leading from the Middle.

A leadership book ‘for the rest of us’

If you’re like us, you’ve ready many a great Adam Grant, Gretchen Rubin, Farber, Lencioni, or Maxwell book, all to focus on the nitty gritty applications of creative thinking, effectively following a schedule, the styles of leadership, the need for leadership to be adaptable, and on and on. These are great resources—for those with positional leadership titles. These are great resources—for the budding leader. These are great resources—for those interested in moving up the ladder. For the rest of us, these have useful insights, but it can be hard to identify actionable steps because we aren’t the CEOs who can make people or financial decisions.

We love the lessons captured in Steve Farber’s stories of leaders thanks to his infusion of humor and storytelling, and we aim to do the same. We would like to bring you, the reader, along with us as we retell some of our most interesting, dramatic, and challenging stories about leadership to-date. We hope that this pragmatic advice serves as a we’re in the trenches with you style of book to complement the existing traditional leadership books mentioned above. We’ll show you how to take stock of your talents, and the talents of those around you, to elevate your fellow co-workers or team members with support, morale, and respect, and expand your influence from there. We will encourage you to pay attention to dead weight, address