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Hey there,
Ever notice how the real tone of a company is set by the people you actually report to, not the ones on the stage? This piece zooms in on senior middle managers, the folks squeezed between big strategies and everyday fires, and shows how their coaching, feedback, and small daily choices quietly decide whether culture change sticks or dies.
Take a moment to see why investing in their skills, support, and peer spaces might be the most practical culture move you make next year.
In this issue:
Playbook of the Day
How to Run a 25-Minute Weekly Bottleneck Review
Goal: Identify and clear the 3–5 biggest bottlenecks slowing revenue, delivery, or customer experience.
Who: COO/Head of Ops, Chief of Staff (optional), and 1 leader per core function that touches customers or delivery.
Before the meeting (5 mins):
Each lead adds 1–3 bottlenecks to a shared doc, with a short name and a one-line impact description.
Host de-duplicates the list and roughly orders it by impact.
During the 25 minutes:
Top Bottlenecks (10 mins): Quickly walk the list and choose the 3–5 that matter most this week. No solutioning yet.
Root Cause Quick Pass (10 mins): For each chosen bottleneck, ask, “What is the simplest reason this keeps happening?” Capture one sentence per item.
Owners & Next Steps (5 mins): Assign one owner per bottleneck plus one concrete action they will take before next week.
Rules: No deep dives, no shared ownership, no more than 5 active bottlenecks at a time.
Latest News
Middle Managers Are Your Real Culture Engine 🔧
Read the full article here »
Published: 12/08/25
Culture change sticks when leaders invest in the layer between the C-suite and the front line. Senior middle managers carry culture because they feel pressure from above and below. When they model new behaviors consistently, transformation finally moves from slide to daily work.
Upside: Use this lens to reframe how you support the managers between directors and teams. Start with role-specific coaching on tough feedback and competing priorities, not generic workshops. Add small peer leadership labs so they can trade stories and test new habits in a safe room.
Impact: When the middle feels trusted, culture change scales faster and with less resistance. Senior leaders gain a clearer view of real risks and bottlenecks instead of filtered updates. Invest here and you turn an anxious layer into the engine of your next transformation.
5 Skills You Need Before 2026 Hits 🤖
Read the full article here »
Published: 12/09/25
By 2026, the people who thrive will work confidently with AI, not compete with it. The article maps out five make-or-break skills, from agentic AI workflows to change leadership. Together they form a career survival kit for a job market that is shifting fast.
Upside: You can start stacking these skills now, without quitting your current path. Pick one lane, like data literacy, and begin reading, charting, and interpreting the numbers you already see at work. Layer in basic cybersecurity habits and small AI-powered experiments, and you turn daily tasks into hands-on training.
Impact: The real risk is not that AI replaces whole professions, but that it sidelines people who never adapt. Employers will reward those who pair technical fluency with creativity, sound judgment, and the ability to lead teams through constant change. Build even two or three of these strengths now, and 2026 becomes an opportunity, not a threat.
Operational Resilience Is Your Hidden Competitive Advantage 🛡️
Firms face overlapping crises, so trust now depends on how well they stay operational. Operational resilience means keeping critical services running and bouncing back fast when disruption hits. When applied well, regulatory pressure becomes a clear strategic edge over less-prepared competitors.
Upside: Leaders can use this lens to redesign services around customers, not internal org charts and silos. They can test severe, realistic scenarios, then fix weak points before they become public failures. Data-driven tools make testing more targeted, so resources go where they truly matter.
Impact: Boards that treat resilience as a cost center almost always underinvest until it is too late. Those that frame it as growth insurance protect revenue, win share, and deepen client loyalty. In constant shocks, resilience by design is how you stay credible and stay in business.
Prompt of the Day
COO Focus, Delegation, and Systems Prompt
Trigger Event | Action | Use Case Example |
|---|---|---|
Reviewing today’s calendar. | Paste the schedule and key goals. | Clear view of what truly deserves your time. |
Checking dashboards or metrics. | Share top-line numbers and anomalies. | Fast identification of what’s off and why. |
New issue escalated by a manager. | Describe the issue and current plan. | Guidance on where to step in vs. delegate. |
Planning what to delegate. | List tasks on your plate. | Concrete recommendations on what and to whom to hand off. |
End-of-day reflection. | Summarize what got done and what slipped. | One specific process to tighten before tomorrow. |
Prompt
“Act as my operations coach. Based on this quick snapshot of today’s meetings, metrics, and issues, (1) rank what truly needs my attention, (2) show what I should delegate, and (3) suggest one system or process I can improve today.”
Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.
One last Thing
If the middle feels anxious, overrun, or left out, every transformation becomes a game of telephone between the C-suite and the front line. When you give these managers targeted coaching, real context, and room to compare notes with peers, they start modeling the new behaviors in every meeting, one-on-one, and on projects.
Over time, that turns culture from a slide in a deck into how work actually feels on a Tuesday afternoon.
Until next edition,
Chloe Rivers
Editor-in-Chief
COO Intelligence
P.S. Interested in sponsoring a future issue? Just reply to this email and I’ll send packages!