The Space Between the Boxes: Why Mid-Level Leaders Hold the Keys to Real Change
And why now is the time to invest in their healing, wellness, and capacity-building.
Systems Design Lab helps social sector organizations use systems thinking and human-centered design to collaborate, innovate, and amplify their community impact. We work with technical tools, but we focus most on people. We are really good at bringing together diverse perspectives to make radical changes that lead to radical social change.
TL;DR // Mid-level leaders operate in the undefined spaces between formal organizational structures, serving as connective tissue that enables complex systems to function. My research reveals four core practices that make this work learnable rather than dependent on rare individual gifts. Yet these essential bridge-builders face isolation and burnout precisely when organizations need them most. Now is the time for intentional investment in their capacity and well-being.
A couple of years ago, we worked with Mike Hanson, a former superintendent who had transitioned into advising other school district leaders. Mike had a way of cutting through organizational complexity with deceptively simple observations. He would often remind us that "the real work happens in the space between the boxes on an organization chart,” those undefined territories where formal structures give way to human relationships, where collaboration either flourishes or withers based on factors that rarely appear in job descriptions or strategic plans.
Mike's insight captures something essential about how change actually unfolds in complex systems. While we spend considerable energy designing hierarchies and reporting structures, the most consequential work often occurs in spaces we haven't explicitly designed for: informal conversations, cross-departmental problem-solving, and relationships that bridge institutional silos. This is where mid-level leaders quietly orchestrate transformation, often without recognition or systematic support.
In our previous explorations at Systems Design Lab, we've identified four core practices essential to navigating complex systems. Today, I want to delve deeply into one that has become increasingly critical: building alliances and shared understandings across silos. As a natural connector myself, this is a role I often fall into…and the one that burns me out fastest when I feel like I'm pushing the boulder up the hill alone. It's led me to leave work I was passionate about, and it's what drove me to research mid-level leaders' experiences in my graduate studies.
At SDL, we've discovered a unique power residing in leaders positioned in the middle: they operate under less public scrutiny than senior leaders and possess greater flexibility to negotiate among parties, where hierarchical power dynamics have less constraining influence. Yet organizational turbulence threatens to erode the very relationships that enable meaningful change. Understanding and nurturing these leaders isn't just strategic, but essential for an organization's survival. We need to design our routines and structures to support the work that happens between the boxes, recognizing that these liminal spaces hold the greatest potential for systemic healing and growth.
The Shape-Shifting Nature of Middle Leadership
My research into networked improvement leadership reveals something remarkable: these leaders don't operate from a single, clearly defined role. Instead, they fluidly move between multiple "hats" throughout their days…sometimes within the same conversation. One moment they're thinking strategically about where their team needs to go, the next they're coaching a colleague through a challenge, then shifting to coordinate between departments that rarely talk to each other.
What strikes me most is how naturally they weave together seemingly disparate functions. They're simultaneously managing immediate responsibilities while keeping an eye on how their work ripples through the broader system. They mentor and guide while also learning and adapting. Perhaps most importantly, they serve as living bridges, spreading insights, approaches, and ways of thinking across organizational boundaries in ways that feel organic rather than forced.
These leaders understand something fundamental: lasting change happens through relationships and shared understanding, not mandates. They become the connective tissue that helps disconnected parts of an organization discover their interdependence.
Making the Invisible Work Visible
Too often, we attribute the success of these boundary-spanning leaders to unique personal qualities: exceptional interpersonal skills, natural ability to see connections, and innate capacity for relationship-building. While individual attributes matter, this framing reinforces a problematic narrative: that effective cross-boundary work depends on finding rare, gifted individuals rather than designing roles and systems that cultivate these capabilities.
My research sought to make the "how" of this work more visible, moving beyond personality-based explanations to identify specific practices that can be learned, shared, and systematically supported. This shift toward shared language matters deeply. It becomes a precursor to designing better organizational structures that can sustain these leaders through inherently demanding, exhausting, and sometimes demoralizing work.
The shared language around the role is also a hallmark of a true profession, one that’s more than a job because it’s governed by agreed-upon shared practices and standards of quality. (This insight comes from my work with committees of teachers at the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.)
Through careful observation, four core practices emerged as essential for leaders navigating complex alliance-building roles:
Connecting: These leaders serve as buffers and translators, proactively intervening to streamline processes, reduce conflicting demands, and facilitate clear communication across organizational boundaries. They become the human infrastructure that makes collaboration possible, not through charisma alone, but through deliberate practices of coordination and care.
Thought Partnering: They embed improvement approaches into daily interactions through informal coaching. One leader described this as conducting "covert improvement." This practice prioritizes relationship and shared understanding over methodological purity.
Trust-Building: Leaders cultivate relational trust and psychological safety across the networks they're weaving together. This extends far beyond their immediate teams, creating environments where colleagues feel empowered to take risks and engage deeply in collaborative work, especially across traditional boundaries.
Extinguishing: They consistently manage unexpected challenges and emergent problems, protecting collaborative efforts from disruptive pressures that might otherwise fragment carefully built alliances. This "crisis management" function often goes unrecognized but proves essential for maintaining momentum across complex initiatives.
Understanding these practices as learnable skills rather than innate gifts opens possibilities for more intentional development and systemic support of boundary-spanning leadership.
The Paradox of Leading from the Middle
Leading from the middle carries an inherent paradox: these roles are simultaneously rich with opportunity and profoundly isolating. The leaders in my research described constant fluctuations between feeling empowered to create meaningful change and being overwhelmed by competing demands from multiple directions. Their effectiveness depends on a delicate ecosystem of trusted colleagues, personal qualities like curiosity and resilience, and senior leaders who truly understand the unique value these positions provide.
This volatility becomes particularly acute in our current organizational climate, where mid-level leaders often serve as the primary absorbers of systemic stress, including resource constraints, conflicting priorities, and the turbulence of constant change. Yet paradoxically, they're also uniquely positioned to identify emerging patterns, surface innovative solutions, and maintain the human connections that enable systems to adapt and thrive in the face of uncertainty.
The stakes couldn't be higher. Organizations that fail to recognize and support this alliance-building work become vulnerable to fragmentation precisely when integration and collaboration are most essential. Senior leaders have a critical opportunity and responsibility to design structures that maximize these leaders' potential: clarifying expectations while preserving autonomy, offering robust support while trusting judgment, and actively mitigating organizational turbulence that threatens the delicate work of building across boundaries.
The alternative is a loss we can't afford: the erosion of the very relationships and connections that enable complex systems to function with humanity and purpose.
The Imperative of Intentional Investment
Sustainable improvement in complex systems relies deeply on leaders positioned "in-between," who skillfully navigate ambiguity and complexity to knit networks together for lasting change. They embody the principle that collective action emerges when people perceive themselves as part of a shared system.
Yet recognizing this work isn't enough. The current moment demands more than acknowledgment; it requires intentional investment in the healing, wellness, and capacity-building of these essential connectors. As we've explored in our previous work on organizational healing, many systems carry embedded traumas that manifest as fractured relationships, defensive postures, and the very silos these leaders work tirelessly to bridge. Before we can truly improve, we must create space for collective healing, and mid-level leaders are often both the architects and casualties of this essential work.
The paradox is stark: we ask these leaders to heal organizational divisions while they themselves operate in roles that can be isolating and depleting. They absorb systemic stress, navigate competing demands, and maintain hope across multiple constituencies, often without adequate support or recognition. This is precisely why capacity-building investments matter so deeply right now. As organizations face unprecedented complexity and change, the leaders who hold our systems together need more than good intentions. They need robust, systematic support that acknowledges the full scope of their contribution.
The work of making peace with messy, complex organizational realities (as we've discussed in our exploration of how healing justice principles can inform systems work) requires leaders who can hold both the vision of transformation and the patience for non-linear progress. These mid-level leaders embody this capacity daily, serving as bridges between aspiration and reality, between what is and what could be.
Now is indeed the time to invest in them, not as isolated individuals carrying superhuman loads, but as part of an ecosystem that recognizes their work as infrastructural, essential, and deserving of the same intentional design we bring to other critical organizational functions. When we invest in their healing, wellness, and capacity, we invest in the connective tissue that allows our complex systems to function with both effectiveness and humanity.
Speaking of capacity building, we are thrilled to announce our partnership with the Barr Foundation, the Reimagining Capacity Building Table. We have been supporting Barr by facilitating a group of nonprofit leaders, capacity builders, and funders to come together and test new ideas, developing field-wide recommendations for making capacity building more equitable, accessible, and effective in the Greater Boston region. Read more here.
» Back in May, we hosted a community call about Relationship Intelligence using the Strengths Deployment Inventory assessment. Since then, we’ve had a lot of conversations about navigating conflict in the current sociopolitical climate, and we thought it would be useful to resurface some information about this tool. If you’re interested in the SDI assessment, please reach out to us to explore!
» An organization we deeply respect, YW Boston, recently held a webinar on Leading With Inclusion: A Conversation on Black Women's Mental Health in the Workplace. The recording is publicly available; we highly recommend listening into these vulnerable, honest stories of healing.
» A simple grounding practice you can do without anyone knowing what’s up, Toe/Heel Breathing: flex your toes as you inhale, lower your toes as you exhale. It’s that easy.
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I love the clarity you provide around a topic that can seem nebulous, but is really so critical to organizational success. It reminded me of a university building I used to work in - the building was intentionally designed to create random connections among the researchers that worked there, rather than allowing them to remain silo'ed in their labs. The building design was part and parcel of the institute's vision for innovation. Generally, we invest so much in c-suite and young career professionals, but neglect to give the middle layer any intentional support. How do we buoy and empower them to grow, while taking advantage of what informal systems have to offer?