[wearsaredhat]

Highly recommend the book “The Leadership Pipeline” written by Ram Charan. The book focuses on developing a pipeline through which leaders within an organization move and describes accountabilities at each level, along with red flags that indicate that a manager at a given level isn’t operating correctly at said level. Very helpful in understanding what happens (or should be happening) at each level.

Ram Charan is a well respected author and consultant, who has according to Wikipedia consulted with some of the largest businesses in the US.

[maxxxxx]

These books usually describe a very idealized version of the real world. I think the only way to find out what mid level managers do is to ask them or ideally to shadow them for a few days.

I think shadowing other roles would generally be very beneficial in a lot of companies so people understand each other better. I have had a lot of occasions where I basically thought that some role is useless until I worked with them and found out what they have to put up with the whole day.

[wearsaredhat]

Certainly they do. And the book admits as much. In my opinion, it is still a valuable read as it gives a generalized lens through which a large org’s structure, and activities at each layer, can be understood.