The role of middle managers is so tricky. Part of this trickiness is due to the back and forth we do learning information and then digesting, framing and relaying it to our teams.  But there’s a layer of this back and forth that feels particularly confusing and draining—I’m naming it emotional whiplash. 

It’s that experience you have when you go back and forth between being the bottom of the food chain in meetings with other managers, directors and leadership, and then being the most senior person in meetings that you lead, with staff who report to you. In one situation you have no power. In the next you have the most power. Emotional whiplash. 

Emotional whiplash can impact the way we lead our teams—for worse or, well, worse. Our own sense of power when we’re with our employees is impacted by how we respond to this emotional whiplash. I see this play out in a few extreme ways: either our sense of power is elevated because we’re gripping to the minimal power we have (and this can be kind of scary for our employees), or its diminished because we’ve internalized the feeling that we don’t have any real power (also scary for our employees but in a different way). There is a middle ground—a balance that is not an over or under reaction to our ever-changing power—but it’s hard to strike. It comes down to having self awareness about how the shift in your power makes you feel vulnerable and what you do with that vulnerability.