Let’s just state it the way that it is. We’re living in a wigged-out world. Anxiety—we’ve never seen more of it. Depression—we’ve never seen more of it. According to Gallup’s most recent poll, people have never been unhappier than they are right now.

So even if everything’s beautiful and ducky at your organization, people are coming in with their own problems. And so you’ve got to decide if you’re going to be an employer that helps to heal, or if you’re going to compound the problem.

Now here’s the rub. As an employer, you got a lot of stuff that needs to get done.

Have to deliver for your customers. Are outcomes that need to happen, and they need to happen quickly. And so that can be stressful on your team members and on you. And let’s just call it what it is.

And yet if somebody says, “This is just too stressful for me. I need to go someplace else.”

God bless them, because out of the frying pan and into the fire. Yes, we live in a world where I don’t know any place where people aren’t saying, “Here, they’re asking us to do more with less, faster with fewer, and do it better than ever.” That’s the world we live in right now. We’re all called to do five to ten times more than we thought we were capable of just five, ten years ago.

There’s a need to constantly elevate skills. There’s the need to teach people to think about how to get the fastest way from A to B because I see so many people, they think they’re performing. It showed up in our national research study where seventy-five percent of people believe that they perform in the top ten percent. Hello?

Okay, that is mathematically impossible, and yet people believe it to be true. And they’re not bad people. They just think they’re working harder. But it’s not about working harder.

It’s about working smarter. And the companies that help their people learn to work smarter will win the race to be able to stay intact. But it’s not just about the company, and it’s not just about the profit. Every good business owner, every great entrepreneur, every great executive gets that there is something that fills our soul about watching our people grow and thrive and get better at what they’re doing and go home at the end of each week and feel like a superstar.

I was just in a huddle the other day, and I was watching one of my team members who a year ago was kind of struggling, wasn’t really getting it, wasn’t producing a lot of work. I heard all the things she was doing, and I was like, “Who are you? Look at you now!” And I mentioned something to her, and I think her lips touched her ears with the smile that someone had noticed who she is now because now she’s a powerhouse.

Now she’s someone who knows that if you give her the impossible task, give her the two o’clock is what she’s thinking. Whereas before, the impossible task would have just been met with defeat and giving up. And here’s the thing: it’s why people run marathons. They don’t run marathons because they’re in cars to transport them.

They run marathons because who they are at the end of a marathon is someone who says, “I can do hard better.”

We’re in this game to teach team members how to do hard better and to accomplish the impossible and feel what it feels like to know that you might have an S on your chest when you open up that shirt tonight to put your pajamas on.

Probably.

We all want to be someone who is a contributor. Eight billion people on the planet, we don’t want to be someone who just consumes food and oxygen. We want to be someone who contributes in a big way with our lives. That’s what our soul is calling for. Let’s give it to them.

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I believe that when middle managers master management, the resulting breakthroughs are profound and sustainable. What if you could overcome the middle management breakdown—the block that keeps executives’ dreams from being the reality executed by frontline team members?

If you’re the kind of leader who worries that perhaps your managers act more like individual contributors and don’t do nearly enough to maximize the results of their team members, I’m going to give you some solid, executable ideas to get traction with your managers.

If instead you feel as though your managers are proficient, I’ll show you how to build on that so they become high achievers—superstars who can drive even more performance.

Or, if you feel that you’re already doing great at getting your managers to manage—and you have a fire in your belly to always take it up several notches to be the best of the best—you’re gonna love this.

Sounds strange, but it isn’t easy to get managers to manage effectively. There are some predictable challenges.

First, they often don’t have street-smart tools to manage people, situations, or processes—causing them to feel inept. As a result, they often gravitate back to doing the technical parts of their individual contributor roles, where they can enjoy feelings of success.

Second, they quickly learn that not everyone wants to take their coaching. When a manager runs into those who don’t benefit from strong self-esteem—who deflect or become defensive when coached on performance—that manager quickly learns not to put their hand on the hot stove ever again. They’re trained to not manage by the very people who most need to be managed.

Third, because they are managers—not leaders—many lack the why distinctions of what you’re asking for as an executive. They put people under them into the mode of doing without the why. And as a result, things get scary really fast. These things happen in almost all management teams in some way, shape, or form.

Now I’m going to share three steps to help you have a breakthrough in whatever level of middle management breakdown you’re experiencing—so you can rapidly get everyone and everything aligned to exceed your strategic plan.

Step one: Unlike so many management theories and training processes based on conventional wisdom, your managers need some basic knowledge of psychology and how it applies to changing behavior. They need to take the complex and make it simple—breaking everything down to the simplest steps so people can execute quickly and effectively, getting results and feeling the joy of daily progress.

Step two: One of the most meaningless tools ever developed in the workplace for improving performance is the job description. Instead, managers need to communicate the real purpose of the job. If someone is performing as a top 5% performer, they must know what the performance metrics are and what the key roles, tasks, and responsibilities are—so it’s clear what great performance looks like.

Step three: Teach managers how to align each person to what we discussed in step two—as well as to the new quarterly key initiatives of the strategic plan. Let’s face it: if you can get people doing the behaviors of a top 5% performer, you will certainly increase performance for everyone in that job. The skills to coach, celebrate, do one-on-ones, and conduct quarterly performance reviews that tie to the strategic plan will transform your performance.

So follow these three steps:

1. Help create simplicity from complexity so people know how to win.
2. Make it clear exactly what extraordinary performance looks like.
3. Get everyone aligned with the metrics, key roles, and responsibilities—and how they fit with the strategic plan.

By solving the middle management breakdown for good, you can reap the benefits of consistently having each team member hit every goal and metric.

You know you can hit all your goals and receive the praise and personal satisfaction that comes with a job well done.

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Think your organization shares one unified culture?

Think again.

Our groundbreaking research revealed something fascinating—and potentially dangerous. You don’t have just one culture. You have multiple, fragmented cultures, split along generational and hierarchical lines.

For instance, nearly 70% of executives believe their culture is thriving. But fewer than half of frontline employees agree.

Boomers proudly say their company lives its values. Gen Z? They remain skeptical—craving authenticity over corporate mission statements. And managers? They’re caught in the middle—often feeling cynical or silenced.

This fragmented view isn’t just inconvenient—it’s costly.

It kills innovation. It lowers employee engagement. And it builds invisible barriers that stall performance.

So make the decision: You are 100% responsible for the culture in your organization.

Step all in. Own it. Be a leader.

So here’s the thing: your organization does this thing every couple of weeks called payroll.

They can afford to do payroll because people pay for themselves within the organization.

Here’s the problem: we have to figure out how we pay for ourselves so that every one of us feels like we’re a contributor to that—because we want to be good people, right? And yet, for most organizations, it’s not really clear how we tie to profit. So I have an idea for you.

What if you went to your boss and said, “Boss, I want to rock this job. I want to be so good at what I do that it is absolutely impossible to believe that I am here in this organization making this difference. But to do that, I need to understand how I tie to profit. Now, I took my first best guess, and I think these are the critical drivers or the numbers that we should be looking at, where you know that I would hit this little low number in terms of mistakes, or this number in terms of volume, or this number of sales, or this many steps along the sales process, or whatever it would be.”

But depending upon what stage you’re at in your organization and what you do in the organization, everybody ties to profit in a different way. So recently, we did a study, and we asked one thousand people in the workplace, “Do you perform in the top ten percent?” And seventy-five percent said they did. Now, you know and I know the math doesn’t work out on that one, and so the reality is most people are guessing about how they tie to profit. Coming in early and staying late is not the ticket, but moving the right needles is. Best to have that conversation with your supervisor to find out how you tie to profit, but don’t go in as a victim. Go in as someone that says, “Boss, I want to rock my job. Here’s where I think I tie into profit.”

“Do you see something more important than this? Okay. Is it okay if I report to you every week and let you know how I’m doing?” Wouldn’t that be great for the manager—to know that you’re performing? And wouldn’t that make you noticeable as the next person probably eligible for promotion when that opportunity hits? So step up, figure out how you tie to profit, keep it visible in front of your manager, and decide to be a rock star.

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Recently, I went out for lunch with my son. Is there anything better than having the person that you gave birth to become one of your best friends who intrigues and stimulates you with great thoughts and inspiration? If so, I can’t imagine what it is.

He chose the restaurant: Perkins. Why? Because they have a huge breakfast in the afternoon. What could be better for my son, the culinary black hole?

From him, I learned one of the biggest lessons in life about explanatory styles. He seems to be walking on a permanent cloud of incredible success in so many areas of life. Great job, great wife, great friends.

As the waitress left with the order, he turned to me with his eyebrows up, as if he had just seen the Red Sea part, and he said, “Mom, I just knew they would have exactly what I wanted for breakfast.”

“And the thing I ordered had it all—pancakes with blueberries, fried potatoes, meat, and eggs. All I had to do was ask. Mom, that’s how my life works. I just think about what I want, and it comes easily. Things just work out for me.”

I was floored. Didn’t he know that you can pretty much go anywhere and order breakfast and that they would have meat, eggs, pancakes, and whole wheat toast? For goodness’ sake, he got accepted into one of the top PhD programs in physics. He’s not a dummy, but I must have been.

What I learned from my son is that the reason his life was so gracefully filled with success, fun, friends, and happiness is that his filter sees it all that way. He’s on the happy bus, and Pollyanna is sitting next to him.

If he gets a setback, he explains it away as a temporary challenge. Let’s face it, if they didn’t have pancakes, we would have had to figure out how to go get them down the street.

He expects things to work out. In his worldview, they do.

Yep, his mother, who might instead have whined that they never have the food on the menu that I want, just learned a powerful lesson from her son.

Martin Seligman, the author of Learned Optimism, has done profound research that shows that optimists—those who have a positive explanatory style—tend to be far more successful than those who interpret events as negative and permanent.

His research shows that successful people explain good things as positive and permanent. “That’s how it always is for me, Mom.”

They discuss less optimal results as not likely to happen again.

How can you discover optimism by consciously choosing an explanatory style that is positive and permanent? It might just transform your life to figure that out.