The strategy is clear, the people are capable, the meetings happen.
So why don’t you get the results you know you should?
The breakdown happens in the layers in between, what I call the Flabby Middle. Before we “fix” anything, we look beyond the symptoms. Because part is how the work is structured, and part is a capability the middle managers need to develop.
The strategy is clear, the people are capable, the meetings happen.
So why don’t you get the results you know you should?
The breakdown happens in the layers in between, what I call the Flabby Middle. Before we “fix” anything, we look beyond the symptoms. Because part is how the work is structured, and part is a capability the middle managers need to develop.
The pattern that shows up in most growing organizations
The gaps start to form when organisations scale up. As a company adds layers of middle management, runs more teams and departments, and pushes more work across functions, the gaps get more room to open. They are a side effect of scale, and they show up in capable, well-run companies.
You usually see it first in two places.
The strategy is clear in the leadership room, and it gets fuzzier on every layer down. MIT Sloan studied this across 124 organizations and found that only 28% of the managers responsible for carrying out the strategy could name three of their company’s top five priorities (one in three could not name a single one). That is the Clarity Gap.
Then the work starts to pull against itself. Capable people push hard, and a lot of that effort quietly cancels out. Bain put a number on it: the average company loses more than 20% of its capacity, close to a day a week for every person, to what they call organizational drag, teams rowing hard against each other without anyone meaning to. That is the Alignment Gap.
These are the first two of six gaps that open up in the middle as a company grows. They tend to be the ones leaders recognize fastest, but they are rarely the whole story.
The Six Gaps
These are the six, and they work as a chain. Each one makes the next one worse. Clarity slips first, alignment goes with it, and from there accountability, trust, feedback, and influence all start to go. Most companies carry a version of all six without ever naming them, and naming them is where the fixing starts.
The Clarity Gap
When “figure it out” becomes the operating system. Leaders held accountable for outcomes they were never clearly set up to achieve.
The Alignment Gap
Why effort does not turn into outcomes. Teams are capable and committed, but priorities collide and trade-offs stay implicit.
The Accountability Gap
When responsibility outpaces authority. Middle managers own results without owning the inputs, decisions, or consequences.
The Trust Gap
When people protect themselves instead of collaborating. Vulnerability is punished, so honesty goes underground.
The Feedback Gap
Why problems persist even when they are discussed. Conversations happen, but behavior does not change.
The Influence Gap
When leadership no longer follows the org chart. Results depend on cooperation that cannot be mandated.
Three ways to strengthen your organizational core
The Flabby Middle Keynote
For your leadership event or strategy day. We explore the six gaps together and give your people the language to name which ones are most acute and most costly in your organization. It runs 60 to 90 minutes, or a half day with live diagnostic exercises.
The Organizational Core Diagnostic
You know the saying, “measure twice, cut once.” Before you invest in any development, the first step is to see what is actually breaking. We run a mix of surveys and interviews to find which gaps are there and how big they are, so you know how much is structure and how much is capability, and you invest where it matters most.
Or start with the free three-minute assessment.
The Organizational Core Program
This is the next step, built on what the diagnostic found. It is fully customized to your organization and those findings, usually a mix of proven processes and systems where the structure is weak, plus coaching and training to build capability where your people need it.
Trusted by leaders at
“Working with Florin, I quickly realized how effective his approach was. I learned how to recognize and adjust my communication to fit the styles and needs of others, which has helped me connect in a more meaningful way.”
About Florin
I spent 12 years inside the organizations I now help fix.
At Renault and Volvo, I coordinated international engineering teams across cultures, time zones, and matrix structures. I watched talented people get promoted into management and discover that nobody had taught them the hardest part of the job: leading without authority, giving feedback in conflict-avoidant cultures, and translating strategy into action when the strategy keeps changing
I saw the same pattern everywhere. Mostly it was the structure overloading good people, and the rest was a skill nobody had taught them. Both are fixable, once you know the mix.
That pattern became The Flabby Middle. A framework for diagnosing and fixing the six gaps that form in the middle layer of every growing organization.
Maxwell Leadership Certified Coach, Trainer, and Speaker (11+ years). Cialdini Institute Certified Professional (founding member). Currently writing the book: The Flabby Middle.
Does this sound like your organization?
If your strategy is clear but execution keeps stalling, if your best technical people struggle when you promote them, if you spend your own time on problems your team leads should handle, then we should talk. It would be a diagnostic conversation where I tell you what I see, and you decide whether it is worth pursuing further.