Middle Way Management Assessment Instrument

What it measures

The MWM-AI gauges the level of Middle Way Management being practiced in an organization. It does this by asking the people on the receiving end of management to rate what they actually observe.

Note what that means: you are not rating yourself. If you report to a manager, you rate that manager. If you sit at executive level, you rate the managers in your organization as a group. The instrument measures management as it is experienced, which is the only place a management practice is real.

A note on the name

The acronym predates the current sense of the letters. The MWM-AI was named in 2009, when “AI” here denoted Assessment Instrument. It was designed, validated, and field tested before the artificial intelligence industry existed, and has no relationship to it.

Where it came from

A Delphi panel of twelve seasoned leaders and managers — drawn from manufacturing, consulting, and higher education — worked through an initial pool of 100 candidate statements using a web-based slider that rated each one from unnecessary to essential. Two passes settled the list at 25.

Those 25 went to a limited field test of 27 respondents, then to a full field test of 303, drawn from an environmental services consulting firm with offices across the United States and from social networks. Internal consistency came out at Cronbach’s α = .964 on the limited test and .972 on the full one, against an accepted threshold of .80.

An exploratory factor analysis — no categories assumed in advance — extracted two components, which on qualitative inspection turned out to be Leadership / Management Skills and Trust. As Dr. Molnar puts it, skills denote practice habits while trust denotes the affective position between managers and those assessing them, and “only a competent manager can build the trust necessary to create a compassionate, empathetic workplace.”

Why it asks your level first

A Delphi participant proposed that executives and non-executives should not be asked the same question in the same words. Someone below executive level has a direct manager to rate; an executive does not, in the relevant sense, and is better placed to judge the managers of the organization collectively.

So the instrument branches. The 25 statements are identical either way — only the stem changes, from “My direct manager…” to “The managers in my organization…”.

How the score works

Each item is scored 1 to 5, so a completed instrument produces an index out of 125. An organization perfectly aligned with Middle Way Management would score 125, which, as Dr. Molnar notes, needless to say rarely occurs.

The instrument was designed to be run twice: once at the outset of a consulting engagement to locate what needs work, and again later to measure whether the work took. A single reading in isolation is the least interesting thing it produces.

What it cannot tell you

No population norms are published, so your index is not a rank against other organizations. It is a reading of one manager, or one management group, against the practice.

The full field test drew 303 respondents. That is comfortably enough to validate the instrument, but short of the roughly 800 needed to extrapolate to an unlimited population — a limit Dr. Molnar states plainly in the write-up.

This measures perception, and perception is the point. It is not an audit of what a manager intended, and it will not tell you why they behaved as they did.

1. Pick the branch that matches your position. If you have a direct manager, choose below-executive and rate that one person. Choose executive only if you are at that level, where you will rate the organization’s managers as a group.
2. Rate one specific manager, not managers in general and not the one you wish you had. Hold the same person in mind for all twenty-five statements.
3. Answer from what you have observed, not from what you assume or have heard second-hand. If you have never seen evidence either way, “Neither” is the honest answer — it is a real option, not a way out.
4. Rate each statement on its own. A manager can be genuinely strong on one and genuinely weak on the next, and those mixed patterns are the useful result.
5. Take the first reading. If you are constructing a defense of your manager before answering, that hesitation is usually the more honest signal.
6. You are anonymous. Nothing here identifies you, your manager, or your employer, and nothing is stored at all unless you choose to contribute at the end.
7. Skip anything you would rather not answer. Every question here is optional, including the ones about you. A skipped statement is recorded as skipped, not as a neutral answer, and you can see your result having answered as few as one.

Reading your result

You get an index out of 125 and two component scores. The gap between the components is usually more informative than either number: a manager strong on Leadership / Management Skills but weak on Trust is competent and not believed, which is a different problem from the reverse.

There are no published cut scores, so treat the number as a baseline to measure against later rather than a grade. What it is genuinely good for is the second reading — the same manager, the same twenty-five statements, some months of deliberate practice in between.