Trapped in the Middle
You are in back-to-back meetings until four in the afternoon. Then the firefighting starts. By dinner, you are running on fumes. And somewhere around ten at night, the laptop opens. “Now I can finally do my work.”
Your manager gives you a direction and assumes you understood. Your team looks to you for clarity you were never given. When priorities shift, nobody tells you what to stop doing. They just add more.
And when things break (and they do), the question is always: “Why did this happen?” The answer lands on you. Not because you failed. Because you were the most visible person attached to the outcome.
You are not broken. The system around you is.
I have spent twelve years inside that system, first as a project manager at Volvo and Renault, then as a leadership practitioner working with growing organizations across the Nordics. And I have found six structural gaps that form in the middle layer of every growing company. They are not your fault. But they are your problem. And there are things you can do about them from where you are, without waiting for anyone above you to change first.
You will not sit and listen for two hours. There is no slide deck with 47 tips. No breakout room icebreakers about your favorite animal.
This is a working session. Before you show up, you complete a 10-minute self-assessment that maps where your pressure is across six structural gaps. You arrive knowing your profile.
During the session, you see the aggregate data from the room. You discover that the pattern is not personal. You work in small groups with other people who lead from the middle. You leave with a clear picture of what is actually stuck and one thing you can do about it this week.
Two hours. Forty people. Real situations, not hypotheticals.
- Your personal Six Gaps profile from the pre-work assessment.
- The aggregate data from the room, so you see the pattern is bigger than you.
- One specific tactic for your widest gap that requires no organizational authority to use.
- A room full of people who get it. Because they are living it too.
Middle managers. Project managers. Team leads. Department heads. Anyone who translates strategy into execution and wonders why it keeps getting lost on the way down.
If you have ever left a meeting knowing that two teams are about to deliver conflicting outputs and nobody asked you, this is your room.
You do not need your manager to approve this. 995 SEK sits under most self-expense limits. This is your decision.
Florin Lungu spent 12 years as a project manager inside Renault and Volvo. He knows what it feels like to sit in the middle of a matrix organization where your results depend on people who do not report to you, where priorities shift without warning, and where the person making the decision has never done your job.
He left the corporate world and spent the next decade working with leaders and organizations across the Nordics, diagnosing the same six structural gaps in every growing company he walked into.
The gaps are always the same. The people sitting inside them always think it is just them.
This workshop exists because he has been on both sides. The middle manager nobody prepared. And the consultant who walks in after the damage is done.
