I recently found a post from Cliff Hazell about “Flight Levels”. it is a thinking model to understand better which opportunities have the most leverage. It helps to answer questions like:
- Where to focus? Out of a variety of visible options
- Whom to involve? You don’t want to involve everyone every time.
- How to connect to the broader organization?
The model describes three flight levels:
- Flight Level 3 – strategic level
- Flight Level 2 – coordination level
- Flight Level 1 – operational level
How does this map to your organization? Levels 1 and 3 are normally easy to identify. The operational level is usually the teams, the people doing the actual work, e.g., a development or a marketing team. Level 3 is often the higher management or separate strategy teams. And what’s Level 2 then? Quite often everything in between, let’s call it middle management. This can be department managers or project managers, product managers, product owners, etc. Their job is among other things to translate the strategy coming from Level 3 into digestible chunks for Level 1.
Here I do not want to go deeper into that model, but I want to mention a challenge that becomes quite visible with that model.
And this is a challenge for many organizations, at least all organizations I have seen, which have a particular hierarchy. What does the reality in many companies look like? Level 3 puts immense pressure on Level 2 to deliver. Level 1 on the other hand doesn’t understand the decisions made on Level 3 and challenges Level 2 on that. That’s a war on two fronts for Level 2 and not every manager on Level 2 is able to deal with both fronts and the result is the high burn-out rate we see in mid-management.
But what to do about it? Here are a few things to consider:
- Enable Level 2 to understand and communicate the strategy. Don’t just give them a 100-slide strategy presentation in an all-managers meeting. Fire and forget won’t work most of the time. Rather pick up the concerns of Level 2, listen to those people, and help them to understand the strategy in every detail.
- Keep your strategy short and easy. It should align with your company’s values, vision, and mission. If you don’t have a vision and mission or values, it would be time to think about that. If you have those, but they are too complex, you will lose important aspects when communicating through the hierarchy. Have you ever played “Chinese Whispers”?
- Train Level 2 in management topics. Don’t promote people to Level 2 and let them figure out alone how to do that job. Enable them, give them training and mentoring.
- Establish an open communication culture. If you are shooting the messenger of bad news, people will stop giving you bad news. But the bad news is still there, you just don’t know it now. But you want to know bad news as early as possible to get a chance to react. Hence don’t establish a culture of fear.
In conclusion, the Flight Level model is a useful tool to understand which opportunities have the most leverage and where to focus. It’s important for organizations to enable their middle management level (Level 2) with knowledge of strategy and training in management topics so they can communicate effectively between Levels 1 and 3. Establishing an open communication culture will help ensure that bad news gets communicated early on, giving companies time to react accordingly. By applying these principles, businesses can better manage their cross-level communication and increase efficiency across all teams.
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