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This paper aims to consider middle managers’ influence on organizational learning by exploring how they cope with demands and tensions in their role and whether their practice affects available team energy.

In total, 43 managers from three large organizations involved in major change assessed their group’s energy using a tested and validated instrument, the OEQ12©. This generated six distinct categories of team energy, from highly productive to corrosive. Thirty-four of these managers, spread across the six categories, completed a Twenty Statements Test and a follow-up interview to explore their cognitive, affective and behavioural responses to coping with resource constraints and tensions in their role.

The research provides preliminary insights into what distinguishes a middle manager persona co-ordinating teams with highly productive energy from those managing groups with less available energy to engage with knowledge and learning. It considers why these distinctions may affect collective sensitivities in the organizational learning process.

Informants were not equally distributed across the six team energy categories; therefore, some middle manager personas are more indicative than others.

This research suggests areas where middle manager development could potentially improve organizational learning.

This study offers early empirical evidence that middle managers’ orientation to their role is entangled with the process of energizing their teams in organizational learning during change.

This paper aims to explore how strategic HR professionals might create the conditions for leadership learning to play a key role in supporting organizational transformation.

Drawing on research into learning in complex organizations, the paper applies six different lenses to consider what made a real leadership development program successful as an enabler of change.

It highlights some of the apparently small things that made a huge difference to the impact of the leadership learning investment and includes practical advice for HR professionals on how to apply this thinking to their own leadership development programs.

It introduces a simple model that can be used to consider some of the complex contextual dynamics of leadership learning and other forms of organizational learning.

Strategic HR practitioners are encouraged to consider their own leadership learning initiatives in terms of a broader range of influences that have an impact in complex organizations.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds his/her own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

The term “middle manager” never feels a particularly satisfactory one. It is the sort of term that people who are in middle management would probably not use to describe their role. They may use head, lead or executive, but they would not rush to place themselves in the middle management bracket. It is, of course, a useful descriptive term, but again you would probably not use it to someone’s face. “Oh, you’re a middle manager, aren’t you?” sounds like you are damning someone with faint praise rather than lauding their achievements in their career so far.

This paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world’s leading organizations

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Clift and Morrison (2011) report that weekly singing over eight months for people with enduring mental health issues led to clinically important reductions in mental distress. The purpose of this paper is to test the robustness of the earlier findings.

Four community singing groups for people with mental health issues ran weekly from November 2014 to the end of 2015. Evaluation place over a six-month period using two validated questionnaires: the short Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation (CORE-10) questionnaire, and the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS).

In all, 26 participants completed baseline and follow-up questionnaires. CORE-10 scores were significantly reduced, and WEMWBS scores significantly increased. Comparisons with the earlier study found a similar pattern of improvements on CORE items that are part of the “problems” sub-scale in the full CORE questionnaire. There was also evidence from both studies of participants showing clinically important improvements in CORE-10 scores.

The main limitations of the study are a small sample size and the lack of a randomised control group.

No attempts have been made previously to directly test the transferability of a singing for health model to a new geographical area and to evaluate outcomes using the same validated measure.