James LaughlinHigh-performance leadership and executive coach. Covering all aspects of life and career.

Steve Vamos: A message to all leaders in the workforce. 🗣️

29 Apr 2025 · 1 min

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Steve Vamos delivers a direct message to organizational leaders: senior executives must take responsibility for enabling change by clearly cascading intentions, debating trade-offs at every management level, and engaging in disciplined conversations. If leaders fail to do this, middle management becomes overwhelmed and is often unfairly blamed for resistance or lack of change (the "frozen middle"); Vamos argues the fault lies with senior leaders, not middle managers.

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Leaders of organizations need to get really serious. The act of taking an intention could be better customer service. Operate with excellence. For anything to do with a different outcome, a change. Unless you go through that discipline of cascading and debating at every level of management, what does doing this mean? What's the trade off with other things we're doing? Unless you have those conversations, what happens is middle management looks up, sees all these expectations showering down, looks down, sees all the work that they've got to get done and they do the best they can, which generally means they don't do the change stuff. And what happens then is middle management gets blamed. Often this whole notion of the frozen middle. Yeah, I've heard it many times. Yeah. And I always say whenever a CEO or a senior executive uses those words to me, I say you're to blame. Don't blame them, you are to blame.