Inculcating Leadership Mindsets in Mid- to-Mid-Senior Managers

A pragmatic white paper for organisations

Many organisations carry several technically strong mid-to-mid-senior managers who continue to behave as individual contributors: excellent at execution, reluctant to own end-to-end processes, unable to lead with authority, and anxious about responsibility or failure. This gap creates brittle processes, uneven decision-making, and limited succession pipelines.

This is more prevalent than you may think, and cuts across industry, company size, and geography. Some organisations, particularly large, mature ones with established processes, may already recognise the problem and may even have processes in place to address it, but success is far from assured. Small to mid-sized companies may just now be in the process of recognising this as a problem that can severely impact their ability to operate or grow to potential.

The problem is cultural as well as structural — it arises from unclear expectations, inadequate training, fear of blame, incentives that reward individual output over collective outcomes, and social norms around hierarchy and face-saving. Correcting it requires a systematic, multi-layered approach that aligns expectations, builds capability, reduces psychological risk, and changes organisational design and rewards.

Symptoms

Symptoms can be diverse depending on industry, sector, geography, and the individual organisation. A deep-dive analysis would be needed to determine what afflicts an individual company, but there are some threads that are common across the vast majority of affected organisations. The extent to which each of these apply will, however, vary.

• Managers avoid decisions that could expose them to scrutiny; they defer rather than address and escalate rather than resolve.

• Focus is on individual performance ratings and rewards, rather than on team and organisational performance.

• Work is fragmented: ownership is ambiguous, outcomes are diluted.

• Managers deflect ownership of outcomes and make excuses about factors ‘outside their control’.

• Behaviour is risk-averse, experiments are rare, innovation slow.

• Senior leaders find themselves micro-managing to ensure desired outcomes.

Consequences

The organisation suffers in myriad ways. Growth slows or stagnates, and the management does not know why. (For the purpose of this piece, market conditions and forces as well as other external factors are ignored.)

• Slower time-to-market, delivery timeframes, and reactive firefighting.

• Poorer development of future leaders and succession pipelines.

• Inward looking teams and hierarchies.

• Disengagement among high performers who want growth via ownership.

• Tendency to focus on external loci of control and to shift blame.

• Cultural stagnation – teams and hierarchies get into a vicious cycle of underperformance.

• Processes reliant on individuals rather than on repeatable systems.

• Lack of sustainable organisational growth.

• Management ends up focusing on sustenance rather than on growth.

Behavioural, structural, and cultural root causes

Expectation ambiguity. Many managers are promoted for technical excellence without a clear reframing of their role from doer to owner. The organisation hasn’t codified what “ownership” means in practice. Often, no formal training is given. There is no open and clear dialogue on the subject.

Not enough focus on leadership potential. Individual contributors, promoted for their technical performance and execution skills, are not assessed for their ability to lead and manage. High execution performance is equated with high leadership potential. Promotions are also often linked to age of service, employee visibility, perception, internal politics, managerial bias, conservatism, or risk aversion. The result is a mismatch in skills and responsibilities, and management is left wondering what happened to the high-performing individual. At leadership levels this is a recipe for disaster.

Inadequate capability building. Training often focuses on technical upskilling or generic leadership modules; practical, contextual coaching on process design, stakeholder management, and outcome accountability is missing. This is usually because not enough mental, intellectual, or financial investment is made in the process of capacity building itself, either due to sheer inertia, lack of process knowledge, or unwillingness of management to invest in it. Gains, where made, are not seen immediately, and that again triggers procrastination or even cancellation of developmental programmes.  

Fear of failure and loss of face. Mistakes can be stigmatized, failures penalized, and career progression linked to subjective management decision-making. This discourages risk-taking. A core cultural, psychological, organizational, and social dynamics issue, it is even more pronounced in hierarchical and performance-driven environments. Results are equated with managers’ competence, and failure threatens not just a project but one’s corporate identity and sense of self. This makes risk-taking emotionally expensive. Unlike in some Western entrepreneurial cultures that place a high value on “failing fast” or “learning through iteration,” many societies stigmatize failure as evidence of inadequacy. This stigma is internalized early—through education systems that reward flawless performance over experimentation—and carried into management behaviour.

Incentives misaligned. Appraisal systems and rewards still credit individual key performance indicators and visible output rather than team outcomes, process improvements, development, or growth. This may be because individual performance is easier to measure and reward than collective contribution or process improvement. Team outcomes involve dependencies that make it harder to isolate who contributed what. In addition, process improvements, cultural shift, and mentoring impact are lagging indicators – they manifest over time and are difficult to quantify.

Hierarchical deference. Decision authority remains centralized; middle managers learn to defer upward rather than commit. Especially true in countries where social and hierarchical submissiveness or regard is taught to individuals very early on, this becomes a way of life and is easily carried into work. Seniors find it easy to criticize or find fault, and juniors then tend to play it safe and ask for or await directions rather than take initiative and risk making a mistake.  

Lack of psychological safety. Open dialogue, constructive critique, and learning from mistakes are not practiced consistently. Again, due to social and cultural constructs, businesses tend to continue in the board room or the meeting room without ever truly appreciating the iterative and collaborative work required to build anything that is innovative, meaningful, or sustainable. People, especially lower in the hierarchy, prefer to bite their tongues rather than risk being ridiculed. Ideas are born and die without ever seeing daylight.

Principles for change

Clarity before capability. Define ownership in job architecture, processes, and outcomes as clearly and succinctly as possible.

Safe shell. Create low-risk environments and safety mechanisms where managers can practice ownership without fearing negative repercussions.

Systemic alignment. Rewards, reporting lines, and governance must support the behaviour you want.

Cultural realism. Solutions must acknowledge local context and norms (e.g., respect for seniority, or importance of face) while progressively shifting them.

Iterative piloting. Test interventions in focused pockets; learn and scale.

Commit and sustain. The going is unlikely to be seamless and results unlikely to be immediate. Tighten your belts for sustained efforts and measurement.

Practical and Systemic Interventions

Define ownership precisely

Replace vague language (e.g., “be accountable” or “take ownership”) with concrete behaviours and deliverables: who decides on vendor selection, who signs off trade-offs, who monitors metrics weekly and what thresholds trigger escalation.

Use the RACI (Responsible – Accountable – Consulted – Informed) framework for every cross-functional process and communicate it clearly across hierarchies. Ownership means decision rights as well as accountability for outcomes.

Invest in well-designed and contextually relevant workshops and training sessions – success may lag but with the right kind of training long-term outcomes can be significant.

Rewire role expectations and performance management

Update job descriptions to include process ownership, cross-team influence, and decision quality.

Appraisal cycles should weigh team outcomes and process improvements (e.g., uptime, lead time reductions, cost per output) alongside individual deliverables.

Make small, measurable ownership objectives part of quarterly goals.

Build capability with action learning

Conduct periodic workshops and sessions, spanning teams, departments, and hierarchies, to discuss lessons learnt – both from what was achieved and what was missed.

Pair action learning with coaching: external or internal coaches observe real work and give immediate feedback focused on decision framing, stakeholder mapping, and escalation discipline. This should go beyond work or performance reviews and into analysis and individual coaching.

Reduce fear: design for safe failures

Create “failure postmortems” with an active effort to separate blame from learning. Make it clear that there is no space in that forum for blame attribution.

Include not just product or delivery failures but attempts and interventions to do with the evolution of internal systems and processes, shifting expectations and norms, improving culture, and driving long-term growth initiatives.  

Publicly recognise well-documented intelligent failures — reward learning, not just success.

Change governance and decision rights

Push operational decision authority closer to the implementing teams by delegating well-defined decision rights with clear escalation mechanisms.

Implement “time-boxed” escalation windows — define norms for escalation including defaults and fall-backs for non-timely escalation.

Use lightweight governance (e.g., weekly outcome reviews) rather than management by committee.

Align incentives and recognition

Tie bonuses and promotions partially to team outcomes, process improvements, and long-term growth initiatives.

Introduce peer-nominated awards for ownership and cross-functional collaboration.

Ensure that intelligent failure is not penalised.

Cultural interventions

Respected senior sponsors must model vulnerability - senior leaders sharing failures and learnings reduces stigma.

Frame ownership as “service leadership” — taking responsibility to enable others.

Implement mediated one-to-one coaching to preserve face while encouraging change.

Conclusion

Converting competent individual contributors into accountable leaders is not a one-time training problem — it is a systems problem requiring co-ordinated changes in role definition, capability building, psychological safety, governance, and incentives. Change is best driven by explicit role clarity, safe pilots, senior sponsorship, and gradual cultural modelling rather than abrupt mandates. With deliberate safe shells, organisations can unlock faster decision-making, durable processes, and a robust leadership pipeline — all of which compound into sustained organisational advantage.