Acronym

There’s a very interesting post on the Signal vs. Noise blog on the secrets to Amazon’s success. Some of these “secrets” include

- “People’s side projects, the ones they follow because they are interested, are often ones where you get the most value and innovation.”
- “Innovation can only come from the bottom. Those closest to the problem are in the best position to solve it.”
- “Everyone must be able to experiment, learn, and iterate. Position, obedience, and tradition should hold no power.”

These ideas collided in my head with an article in MIT Sloan Management Review’s Business Insight on “How to Fill the Talent Gap." Authors Douglas Read and Jay Conger identify five factors that they believe will make it increasingly difficult for companies to fill top positions. One factor they identify is the downsizing of many organizations since the early 1990s—by stripping out so many middle management positions, they argue, companies removed developmental opportunities for up-and-coming leaders.

Read and Conger are seeing time in middle management as an important learning experience on the track to upper management, but I think you can help your staff develop similar skills even when they don’t have the word “manager” in their titles—and even when there aren’t any middle-management positions likely to become available.

If you work to create an environment like the one described in that Signal vs. Noise post, where everyone can experiment and pursue side projects and ideas, then employees will develop and learn even in the absence of open middle management positions. Creating that environment takes work—but if senior management can be open to and supportive of staff-driven initiatives, then the staff involved in them reap all kinds of benefits as they learn to take a product or service or program from concept to reality. (There was some discussion of how this would work in a past Acronym post by Peter O’Neil.)

Of course, this kind of environment is a two-way street. Folks in senior management need to do all they can to create a culture of openness and inclusion; and those outside of senior management need to keep their minds open for new ideas and make the effort to pursue them. If you’re in a junior position and you believe that you can't develop without that “manager” word in your title, then you’re a part of the problem, too.