Customer Reviews

H.I.M.M. - High Impact Middle Management: Solutions for Today's Busy Managers

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First things first: I love this book and it's going into my regular reference shelf. But it took me a little while to really get into it.

First, there's the title. I mean, there's a certain stigma attached to the phrase "middle management." Reminds me of the boss from the movie Office Space. And once you've got an unhealthy notion of middle management as bumblers or control freaks, you become very reluctant to self-identify with that group.

Next, the first couple of chapters are slow going. Once you press on, though, you realize that the author was just setting the stage for what's to come.

If you make it over those two roadblocks, you ought to find great value in H.I.M.M. (I know, that's awkward, too). The book is divided into 14 chapters in five parts, which I'll paraphrase here:
1) The role of middle management
2) Performance planning and results management
3) Structure and time
4) Performance optimization and leadership
5) Fine tuning yourself
6) Appendix-not really a formal part of the book, but this section contains a wonderful selection of reference information.

In addition to solid advice from the field, the book contains liberal doses of lists, diagrams and personal anecdotes that all help structure the ideas the author is trying to convey. Also, our old management friend the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) makes frequent appearances throughout the book

I marked up the book pretty liberally, especially in later chapters. The author presents some great ideas for better management performance that really hit home for me. Among these were the H.I.M.M Playbook. Haneberg parallels management with sports and offers up a customized version of a management playbook (templates available at haneberg-management.com), which ought to be reviewed daily. I've been successful in getting my team to use a wiki on a regular basis, and it occurred to me that the playbook would be right at home there-this is a takeaway that I'll be using immediately.

She also invents a new management phrase that's sure to take the business world by storm: "mucky muck." Mucky muck is exactly what it sounds like. All the junk that prevents managers from being effective or moving ahead. She outlines sixteen (!) variations of mucky muck to keep an eye on. The ones that hit closest to home for me were "undiscussables" "learned helplessness" and "contradictory information." All of which you can probably understand just by their titles. She also offers up eleven techniques for navigating mucky muck. My favorites among these are #4: Over communicating, inclusion and follow-up; #9: Get organized; and #10: Lighten up!

Chapter eight offered a good beginners overview of the Theory of Constraints. Haneberg didn't delve too deeply into TOC, but she did give it an appropriate amount of space in the book, considering its importance in modern management practice. And she gave a nice tip of the hat to Eli Goldratt along the way.

Chapter nine was most intimidating and challenging to me personally. This chapter went over time management and offered a very comprehensive format for a formal time audit. I'm afraid to even try filling this out, but I know I'll reap rewards from doing so.

Chapter twelve and thirteen addressed the issues surrounding coaching others and being coached ourselves. This was probably the section of the book that I was personally least familiar with, so I greatly appreciated the insights, especially with respect to coaching others.

I was a little disappointed with the final chapter, which was titled Putting It All Together For Maximum Managerial Flow. While it adequately referenced the rest of the book and H.I.M.M. system, it just seemed too short and abrupt an ending (that's probably a testament to the quality of information throughout the book). I would liked to have seen a more comprehensive outline of a "typical" manager's week. Where the various bits of information would come into play as the manager moved throughout her day.

Overall, High Impact Middle Management is a great book. I'd recommend it to both new and experienced managers alike, since the contents are both broad and deep enough for both groups.

If you're in middle management or aspire to be, Lisa Haneberg's book is a must read. It is practicality incarnate. Haneberg helpfully explains specific ways to be more productive and offers techniques to help your employees become focused, fulfilled and fruitful. Her energetic book codifies the steps you should take to grow into middle management, shine and advance to upper management. Along the way, you'll learn how to improve your organization, identify trouble spots and implement changes in your corporate culture. We can envision this book as a part of a college management curriculum or of any firm's ongoing middle management development program. It's practical, lively and thorough. If you want to be sure you've got a good grip on management from the middle, read on.

There are many good books on management, but this author gets management. You'll learn how to get the best from yourself and those who work for you. It's an easy read and you can put it to work immediately.

Some of you may know of Lisa Haneberg from her blog called Management Craft. If you are a regular reader of that blog, you will find that her book called High Impact Middle Management (H.I.M.M.) elaborates on many of her ideas.

She focuses her book on middle management, sort of the middle child of an organization. When it comes to books on management, they tend to focus either on the line supervisor or executive management. This is really the first book that covers all of those areas yet applies it directly to this group.

In her book, she covers strategy (H.I.M.M. Playbook), organizational improvement, bottleneck identification/resolution, performance management and coaching. Each of these areas doesn't get into absolutely everything you need to know in these areas, but is a overall good starting place to cover these topics. I found myself wanting Lisa to dive more into the details, but to do so would have made the book too large. She does a great job at the end of her book in recommending other books to gain more knowledge. Lisa ends up giving just the right amount of detail to help the middle manager, and leaves the book at a good size (240 pages in a larger print) that you can get through and digest the material quickly.

I particular enjoyed the chapter called "Mucky Muck Obstructions - Navigating the Corporate Obstacle Course". She covers such things as miscommunicating, hidden agendas, alliances, and other aspects of a dysfunctional organization and shows you how to identify and work through each of these.

I enjoyed the book so much that I have decided to use it for my managers as part of their ongoing training. I found that everything in the book is in agreement to my views on management, and it provides me a way to ensure that the other managers have a similiar foundation. Lisa's book establishes that foundation.

Lisa Haneberg brings two things to the party that make her books really helpful for working bosses. First, she understands what life is like for you. Second, she explains things in a way that you can learn how to do things better.

I opened this book as a fan. I've read other books Lisa has written and reviewed three of them. I read her Management Craft blog regularly.

I was excited about the topic. Most of the managers in most companies are middle managers. Even so, there's hardly anything written specifically for them.

I amped up even more when I read this in the Introduction.

"A great middle manager - referred to in this book as a high impact middle manager - is an individual who makes substantial qualitative and quantitative contributions to his or her organization and moves forward with velocity and direction."

That sounded good, but just a paragraph further on I hit something that made me pause. Here it is.

"This book offers a vision of high impact middle management and a system for achieving this superior level of performance."

The word "system" was a red flag for me. When a book offers a system, it's also offering to be your boon companion for quite a while. Systems require you to dig in and work at lots of things and apply what you've learned. I find that most of my readers, working bosses, aren't willing to invest that time and energy in any single book.

Now that I've spent some time with the book myself, I can tell you one thing. If you're a working boss, you will get value from this book many times over, whether you adopt the whole system or not.

You will get the most value if you decide to use Lisa's system to change the way you do your job. The system is well designed. The writing is clear. The ideas are practical. But to get the most value, you will need to commit to spending time with the book and the ideas.

The good news is that you will get great value from this book even if you read it for random ideas and leave working the system to others. I do have one suggestion though. If you're going to dip into the book, instead of reading it through, read whole chapters or sections.

This is a very readable and practical guide to making the most of management responsibilities. There's great stuff in here on everything from managing performance to busting through bottlenecks. I found the chapters on using the principles to optimize individual performace extremely helpful.

Pick it up. It'll pay for itself in no time.