You're listening to women at work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Bernstein. Middle managers should drive your business transformation.

That's the title of an HBR article published in April.

The authors, Michael Mankins and Patrick Lietra, both partners at Bain, implore

executives to harness the ingenuity and creativity of leaders

come from.

Directors and department heads have uniquely valuable perspective.

They're deep enough in the day-to-day operations to appreciate the factors and assumptions that contribute to any given problem.

They're also close enough to the work to spot certain emerging opportunities.

All this means that they're inclined to propose solutions and ideas

that are thorough, yet doable.

Common sense, right?

But the reason Mankins and LITRA implore executives to welcome bottom-up

change is that senior leaders tend not to. I mean, think back to the last time you had an idea for changing how your company does business or for bringing in new business

Different tech a new market and improvement to a process how How'd that go over? Did you feel you even had their full attention?

Michigan Ross Professor Sue Ashford says the overarching reason executives pass on an idea from a mid-level manager is that they

don't immediately perceive its relevance to organizational performance.

She teaches MBA and exec ed students how to sell their ideas up the chain of command, and

she's here to share wisdom from her couple of decades of research into that skill.

Ellen Bailey is also here with us because at Harvard Business Publishing

she's the VP of Business and Culture Transformation and boy does she live up to

that title. She'll give examples of how she's applied Sue's thinking in her job,

tailoring her pitch, framing the issue, involving others, and more.

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