Standing in the Middle

“Sometimes I feel like I’m responsible for everything... but in charge of nothing.”

The room fell silent.

Nobody reached for their coffee. Nobody smiled or rushed to reassure her. Around the table, heads slowly began to nod. It wasn’t an awkward silence. It was the silence that arrives when someone finally finds the words everyone else has been carrying.

I remember looking around the room and thinking that I had just heard someone describe one of the hardest jobs in education better than any leadership book I had ever read.

For years, I had watched schools invest heavily in developing leaders. There were leadership programmes, coaching models, professional learning, strategic plans and endless conversations about building leadership capacity. Yet the people sitting around this table weren’t questioning whether leadership mattered.

They were quietly wondering whether they were allowed to lead at all.

Their days rarely looked like leadership from the outside. They began before the first bell, answering emails that had arrived overnight. They rewrote meeting agendas because they already knew the first version wouldn’t create the conversation their team actually needed. Between lessons they solved problems, checked in on colleagues, organised relief, answered parent emails, found missing resources and listened to teachers who simply needed someone to hear them before walking back into another classroom.

By the time the paperwork was finally finished, everyone else had usually gone home.

Every so often, someone would ask what middle leaders actually did. I sometimes wondered whether they realised that much of the most consequential work never appeared on a timetable.

It happened in corridors.

Not because that was where leadership had been scheduled to happen, but because that was where people needed it. It happened walking beside a teacher after a difficult lesson, standing outside a classroom for two extra minutes because someone needed to talk, or quietly changing the next conversation because of something you had just heard.

None of those moments appeared in a role description.

Yet they were often the moments that quietly changed everything.

The hardest part wasn’t always the workload. It was helping two legitimate organisational realities continue to understand one another.

Executive teams spoke about strategic direction, implementation, organisational priorities and the future they were trying to create. Teachers spoke about tomorrow’s lesson, the child who hadn’t smiled all week, the parent who needed a phone call, the colleague who was exhausted and the reality of twenty-eight different learners arriving every morning with twenty-eight different stories.

Neither perspective was wrong.

Both mattered.

Someone simply had to help each understand the other.

They take strategic intentions and help teachers understand what those ideas might mean on an ordinary Tuesday morning. Then they make the same journey in the opposite direction, carrying the lived experience of classrooms back into executive conversations. They bring context to the data and people to the plans. They help leadership remember that every strategic decision eventually arrives somewhere occupied by real human beings.

It is remarkably skilled work.

And much of it is relational.

Perhaps that is why it can also feel remarkably lonely.

One middle leader once smiled gently and said something I have never forgotten.

“Nice is lonely.”

At first, I misunderstood what she meant. She wasn’t talking about avoiding difficult conversations or wanting everyone to like her. She was describing the quiet weight of caring deeply about people whose perspectives sometimes appeared to be pulling in different directions.

Teachers deserved to feel heard. Leadership deserved to feel understood. Some days it felt as though everyone wanted her to choose a side.

She couldn’t.

Not because she lacked conviction, but because she believed the work was never about helping one side win. It was about helping people with different experiences remain connected to a purpose they ultimately shared.

That distinction matters.

Relational leadership is not the absence of conviction. It is the ability to hold conviction without requiring someone else to become the opposition.

The more schools I worked alongside, the more I noticed something curious. The strongest middle leaders rarely tried to become the smartest person in the room. They asked better questions. They noticed the colleague who had quietly withdrawn. They celebrated someone else’s idea, even when it had originally been their own. They abandoned the agenda when the conversation happening in front of them mattered more than the conversation they had planned.

Sometimes the smallest things seemed to matter disproportionately: turning the heater on before everyone arrived on a cold winter morning, bringing a homemade cake because the team had endured a difficult week, or leaving a handwritten note that simply said:

“I noticed what you did yesterday. It mattered.”

I remember middle leaders rewriting meeting agendas at 10:30 at night because they already knew the original version would produce compliance instead of conversation.

For a long time, I assumed gestures like these were simply kindness.

Now I think many of them are leadership.

Not because they make people comfortable or avoid the difficult work, but because they communicate something fundamental: I see you. I understand enough of what you are carrying to think carefully about how we do this together.

That does not mean good middle leadership is endlessly accommodating. Quite the opposite.

Sometimes the most relationally responsible choice is to challenge.

Middle leaders quickly discover that leadership is rarely about having all the answers. More often, it involves listening long enough to understand what someone is actually trying to say rather than rushing to solve the problem they first described. It means knowing when reassurance is needed and when reassurance would simply avoid an important truth. It means deciding when to advocate, when to question, when to carry something forward and when the responsibility genuinely belongs with you.

These decisions rarely appear in leadership frameworks.

Yet middle leadership is full of them.

A conversation has gone badly. Do I intervene now or give someone time?

A strategic decision makes sense at executive level but will be experienced differently by the team. What needs translating, and what needs challenging?

A colleague is struggling. Do they need support, clarity, accountability — or some combination of all three?

Someone has said something difficult but important. Do I protect the comfort of the room or protect their ability to speak honestly within it?

There is rarely one rule capable of answering those questions.

There is judgement.

And judgement becomes particularly important when responsibility extends further than positional authority.

Middle leaders often know enough about the organisation to understand why a decision has been made and enough about classrooms to anticipate how that decision will actually land. They know the personalities, histories, pressures and unspoken dynamics that no implementation plan can fully contain.

That is why so many middle leaders quietly describe themselves as feeling like “Switzerland.”

Teachers sometimes wonder whether they have “gone over to the other side.” Leadership can assume they will simply carry decisions back to their teams. Neither description is quite right.

The finest middle leaders are not standing between two opposing sides.

They are helping everyone remember that there has only ever been one side.

The learners’.

That requires advocacy, but not advocacy that turns teachers and leadership into opponents. It means advocating for classroom reality without dismissing organisational direction, and advocating for organisational purpose without pretending implementation is simple. It means protecting voice without promising agreement, preserving dignity without avoiding challenge, and helping different perspectives remain connected long enough to understand what each can see.

That work is demanding.

There are days when middle leaders leave executive meetings already knowing which conversations will be difficult that afternoon. There are afternoons when they walk away from those conversations wondering whether honesty has damaged a relationship they have spent years building. There are evenings when they replay the day in their minds and wonder whether they listened well enough, challenged courageously enough or noticed the person who needed them more than they realised.

Most of those moments will never be recognised.

They won’t appear in a performance review or on a dashboard. Nobody will record how many relationships were quietly strengthened because one person chose curiosity over certainty, or dignity over the satisfaction of being right.

And this is where I want to be careful.

Recognising the significance of middle leadership cannot become another reason to ask middle leaders to carry more.

They are not responsible for absorbing every organisational tension, protecting every relationship or somehow holding an entire school together through sheer relational commitment. When organisations romanticise that capacity, invisible leadership can quietly become invisible burden.

The responsibility belongs to the organisation too.

Middle leaders need clarity about what has genuinely been entrusted to them. They need decision-making boundaries that make sense, senior leaders who provide visible backing when leadership becomes difficult, and places where they can process complexity without always being the person expected to contain it for everyone else.

Because permission to lead matters.

But permission alone is not enough.

A middle leader can be told, “We trust you,” and still be left wondering what they are genuinely authorised to decide. They can be encouraged to show initiative while discovering that difficult decisions are supported only when everyone agrees with them. They can be given responsibility without the clarity that makes responsible judgement possible.

When those conditions are present, something shifts.

Middle leaders become less likely to see themselves as messengers carrying decisions between groups and more likely to recognise the leadership already embedded in their role. They can ask different questions. They can distinguish between a decision they need to make, one they need to influence and one that genuinely belongs elsewhere. They can challenge without wondering whether challenge itself represents disloyalty.

They do not become louder.

They become clearer.

And with that clarity comes something many middle leaders have been waiting for far longer than anyone realised: the confidence to exercise leadership without continually asking whether they have permission to do so.

Perhaps that is why the very best middle leaders rarely describe their influence in terms of authority. They remember people.

They remember the colleague who eventually found the courage to say what they really thought. The teacher who stopped interpreting feedback as judgement and began using it as a way to grow. The difficult meeting that did not end in agreement but did end with dignity intact. The person who became a little more willing to contribute because somebody had made it clear that their voice mattered.

Long before schools become places where learners flourish, they need to be places where the adults responsible for them believe they can contribute meaningfully to making that possible.

Middle leaders work right in the middle of that.

Not as heroic organisational glue.

Not as endlessly resilient shock absorbers.

Not as people responsible for keeping everyone happy.

They work in the places where organisational connection is either strengthened or lost.

And that is where their judgement matters.

For a long time, I thought middle leaders worked in departments.

Now I think they work in corridors.

Not only the physical corridors between classrooms, although so much of their leadership really does happen there. I mean the organisational corridors too: the spaces between strategy and practice, authority and relationship, support and challenge, what leadership intends and what people experience.

They lead in the places where things meet.

It happens in the conversation after the meeting, the quiet walk back to a classroom, the check-in that wasn’t in the diary, the difficult truth spoken with kindness, the moment someone feels heard rather than managed, and the moment two people discover that their different perspectives have been pointing towards the same purpose all along.

That is where trust can grow.

That is where understanding can be protected.

And that is where leadership becomes profoundly human.

If you are a middle leader reading this, I hope you don’t hear it as an invitation to carry more.

I hope you hear recognition.

The meeting you rewrote because you knew the first version wouldn’t work was leadership. The conversation you stayed for when you had twenty other things to do was leadership. The moment you carried an uncomfortable truth upwards rather than allowing it to disappear was leadership. So was the moment you returned to your team and helped people understand the intention behind a decision they didn’t initially agree with.

The care mattered.

The courage mattered.

The judgement mattered.

And if you have ever gone home wondering whether any of it was visible, much of it probably wasn’t.

That does not make it insignificant.

Perhaps that has always been the misunderstanding.

Middle leaders were never meant to be in charge of everything.

Nor were they meant to carry everything.

They were entrusted with something both quieter and more consequential: the opportunity to exercise judgement in the places where organisational intention meets human experience.

In the places where strategy becomes human.

Organisational Truth

Middle leaders exercise judgement in the places where strategy becomes human.

Middle leadership is often described through responsibilities: coordination, communication, implementation, administration and team leadership.

Yet much of its organisational significance sits somewhere less visible.

Middle leaders operate close enough to classrooms to understand how organisational decisions will be experienced and close enough to leadership to understand the pressures, intentions and competing priorities shaping those decisions. Their work is not simply to carry information between the two.

They protect understanding across them.

Doing that requires relational skill, but it also requires judgement: knowing when to listen, challenge, advocate, interpret, decide and act.

Their positional authority may be limited.

Their organisational significance is not.

Where We Chose to Begin

Every organisation enters improvement through a different doorway. The doorway illuminated by this story is Leadership.

The middle leaders at the centre of this work did not lack commitment, care or professional capability. Many were already coaching colleagues, resolving complex issues, translating organisational direction and carrying significant responsibility for improvement.

The uncertainty sat elsewhere.

What did the organisation genuinely expect them to lead? Which decisions belonged to them? When were they authorised to exercise professional judgement without seeking permission? Would senior leadership remain visibly behind them when that judgement resulted in a difficult conversation?

The organisation did not simply need more leadership activity.

It needed greater clarity around the leadership already being exercised.

That changed the question from:

“How do we develop our middle leaders?”

towards:

“What leadership are they already carrying — and what conditions would allow them to exercise it well?”

Creating the Conditions

The work was never about making middle leaders more directive or encouraging them to carry more responsibility.

It was about creating stronger conditions for leadership judgement.

That meant clarifying the purpose of middle leadership beyond administration and coordination, making decision-making boundaries more explicit and ensuring that professional trust was accompanied by visible organisational support.

It also meant taking the relational complexity of the role seriously.

Middle leaders needed opportunities to examine what it means to advocate without becoming partisan, hold multiple perspectives without losing conviction, challenge professionally while preserving dignity, and recognise when a decision requires their judgement rather than another request for permission.

Senior leadership had responsibilities too. Delegation needed to become more intentional. Trust needed clarity around it. Difficult leadership conversations could not simply be handed to middle leaders and then treated as theirs to absorb alone.

These experiences now inform EIA’s Middle Leader Impact Program™ and Relational Efficacy™. They reinforce a principle that has become increasingly important within the work: middle leadership is not strengthened simply by adding leadership tools.

It is strengthened when people develop the clarity, relational confidence and organisational judgement to exercise the leadership already entrusted to them.

What Changed

The first changes were not visible in organisational charts or revised role descriptions.

They appeared in conversations.

Middle leaders became less likely to describe themselves as messengers and more likely to recognise themselves as active interpreters of organisational meaning. They became more thoughtful about which decisions genuinely belonged to them and less likely to seek permission for leadership their role already required.

Senior leaders changed too. Delegation became more intentional, and trust was increasingly accompanied by clarity, guidance and visible support. Middle leaders were less likely to be left alone to absorb organisational tension or navigate difficult professional conversations without knowing whether leadership would stand behind them.

Teachers could experience middle leaders differently as a result — not simply as representatives of “management”, but as leaders who understood classroom reality and could connect it meaningfully to the organisation’s wider direction.

The role did not become easier.

It became clearer.

And clarity created stronger conditions for something middle leaders had often been trying to exercise all along:

professional judgement.

Framework

Relational Efficacy™

Middle leadership operates extensively through relationships.

Yet strong professional relationships are not defined by perpetual harmony or agreement. They become organisationally powerful when people can speak honestly, preserve dignity and remain connected while navigating complexity together.

Relational Efficacy™ provides language for understanding those conditions.

For middle leaders, relational efficacy is visible in whether difficult truths can travel safely through an organisation, whether people feel able to contribute honestly, and whether professional challenge can strengthen rather than weaken collective trust.

It supports leaders to advocate without constructing sides, protect understanding without promising agreement and exercise judgement without treating relational care as the avoidance of difficult decisions.

The framework did not create the observation at the heart of this story.

It gave language to leadership work that had been quietly occurring in corridors, meeting rooms and conversations all along.

School Improvement Pathway™

Entry Point: Leadership

This story enters the School Improvement Pathway™ through Leadership.

An organisation can possess clear Direction and committed professionals yet remain overly dependent upon positional authority if people throughout the organisation are uncertain about where leadership genuinely resides.

Leadership becomes more distributed when people have sufficient clarity about purpose and responsibility, sufficient Belief that their judgement is trusted, and sufficient relational confidence to act without waiting for senior leaders to be present in every moment.

That does not mean everyone decides everything.

It means leadership becomes more intelligent about where decisions belong.

For middle leaders, that can transform responsibility from something they merely carry into leadership they can exercise with greater confidence and legitimacy.

If This Feels Familiar...

You may recognise something of your organisation in this story if:

• middle leaders feel responsible for improvement but remain uncertain about what they are genuinely authorised to decide;
• their role is dominated by administration, coordination and reporting despite significant relational leadership occurring around those tasks;
• teachers sometimes perceive middle leaders as having “gone over to the other side”;
• senior leaders rely on middle leaders to carry difficult messages without always providing visible backing;
• middle leaders absorb frustration from multiple directions and have few places to process it;
• relational work is praised informally but rarely recognised as a serious contribution to organisational improvement;
• capable middle leaders continue seeking permission for decisions their role should enable them to make;
• leadership development focuses heavily on tools and processes without strengthening judgement, identity, voice or professional courage;
• delegation creates additional responsibility without sufficient clarity about decision-making boundaries; or
• some of the most consequential leadership in the organisation is occurring in conversations nobody formally sees.

If you recognise these conditions, the answer is unlikely to be asking middle leaders to do more.

It may be time to see more clearly what they are already doing — and what the organisation needs to provide around them.