The Middle

Justin King CBE was the chief executive of Sainsbury's plc, the UK's second largest grocery chain. He joined the organisation and engineered the corporate turnaround from 14 years of losing market share  to 9 successive years of profit growth.

He joins Stephen Willson to explore the issues underlying the decline and how they were addressed. This included changing from being centrally led to empowering the front line on the basis that the only place that customers are served is in the stores. This required fundamental changes in the top management lineup but illuminatingly no more than normal turnover in the 1,000 or so in the middle management ranks.

Tony Taylor is the managing director of Gibbs and Dandy, a unit of Saint-Gobain, the French multi-national building materials organisation. 

He joins Stephen Willson to explore the issues of working on two fronts in a distribution business. The first being making multiple small internal operational improvements to prove their worth to their parent organisation. Secondly to access resources and manage boundaries with parallel distribution businesses and internal material manufacturing units.

Stephen Willson brings together contributions from 20 executive interviews that support a three stage process that underpins the evolving role of middle managers.

He then investigates the challenges for individuals making the transition between stages and how bosses can support the process.

Stephen is an associate professor at Birmingham City University Business School.

Asha Devi is associate director at Ove Arup the company most famous for being the architect of the Sydney Opera House. She joins Stephen Willson to explore the issues of designing customers' office space for collaboration and the satisfaction of multiple stakeholders in a changing world.  This has particular significance in enabling middle managers to work effectively across their organisations. The same spotlight is then shone on the design of Arup's own professional services offices.

Gavin Card is the Director of Global Operational Excellence at SHV Energy, the parent company of Calor in the UK. He joins Stephen Willson to explore the middle management challenges of aligning supply with demand that is regional and weather dependant. The topics include improving UK-wide performance by abandoning regional P & L accountability and refining KPI's for operational improvement. Gavin draws powerful parallels with his previous experience within GE and the Royal Air Force.

Jason Smith is the Managing Director of Artex, a leading distributor of construction products. He joins Stephen Willson to explore the development challenges faced by middle managers in different phases of their career progression. 

Nigel Riglar is the Director of Environment & Community Services at South Gloucestershire Council. He joins Stephen Willson to explore the challenges for middle management precipitated by the Covid crisis. These include the shift to facilitating local communities rather than cities and the dynamics of work when many staff are only infrequently in the office .

Anthony Tattum is the Chief Executive of Big Cat creative agency. He joins Stephen Willson and discusses how Big Cat works with organisations to align their customer-facing and delivery-focused middle management tiers in an environment where customer needs are changing rapidly.

More details of Big Cat are available at their recently rebranded website: https://bigcatagency.com/ 

Nick Walkley is the Chief Executive Officer of Homes England, the government's housing accelerator. He joins Stephen Willson to explore the challenges of configuring middle management to achieve public sector and political objectives through private sector developers.

Ruth Cooke is the chief executive of housing association GreenSquare Group. She joins Stephen Willson to explore the middle management challenges of working with a wide range of customers and stakeholders with diverse priorities.