What are the challenges faced by female employees when they are in their middle management roles?

The outcomes of the above question have led to the following conclusions at a broad level. These are not restricted to just female employees, but to most of the employees in the middle management level. The outcomes are based on the responses received from some of you and a mirror of our experiences thus far.

Re-skill Self

By the virtue of the good performance in the past, the employees are promoted or moved to high level in the chain. However, most of the times, handling self in the middle management levels becomes a challenge if they are asked to handle a different domain, technology etc., It calls for re-skilling or upgrading the skills as required. Every time the management framework or the concepts cannot be applied to the new domains or technologies that the new manager has not worked for in the past. Organizations have indeed a career plan for the middle management teams, but this training or re-skilling or upgrade, happens at a predefined frequency or is not at disposal of the employee. To resolve this, the best means is to keep track of the new trends in industry and the organization road map and setup a career plan for self and work towards it, as it will avoid some of the surprises in the middle management level and related challenges.

Work Environment

Women leadership have to compete with male counterparts equally to sustain in any Organization. Tight competition and the cycle of survival of the fittest prevails. Professional rivalry dominates and leads to unhealthy competition. Senior management expectations augments leading to high work accountability. The constant anxiety surrounding job security prevails. Employees should understand that moving to middle management roles comes with some cost. Due to prevailing issues around voluntary and in-voluntary retirement and retrenchment, it is advisable for every employee to start working on alternate career options, business opportunities or the like.

Handling diverse projects and teams

An individual contributor, gets promoted to next level and by Organization mandate is asked to handle a team with diverse projects or teams, here comes the challenge. This challenge is just not restricted to the individual contributor, but to anyone who has not handled diverse aspects in the past. Diverse projects and teams are becoming the need of the hour and the capability of the manager is at stake, if they fail to handle this situation. Projects can be diverse on technology front, teams can be diverse on gender, location and skill. The best means to address this is identify the high performers in the team, define a proper team structure, delegate and monitor the work progress on a daily basis. Identify the technology, people and any other risks or issues that is / are the impediments and report the status to senior management on a frequent basis. This is an art by itself and will take form in due course.

Work Life Balance

We are not born in a circus to balance everything around us. The most talked about topic in today's era is the imbalances in Work-life. The middle management and above levels in the Organizations, call for augmented attention for the association of the employee with work and company's direction. This draws undue attention towards the current association with the company. Many other things go into imbalance mode like personal life, health, planning for next career, re-skilling., The good means to create an associated balance with everything cannot be attained at one time. Hence derive the priorities on everything and work out a plan as to which one would be of higher order and implement it. Keep checking this plan, re-prioritize at least every 3 months and move forward. Assign, short- and long-term goals and align self towards them.

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