Middle Way Management Assessment Instrument

What this is, where it came from, and what it can and cannot tell you.

What it measures

The MWM-AI measures the degree to which you already practise Middle Way Management — compassion held together with accountability — in your daily work as a manager. It is not a personality test, and there is no type at the end of it. It measures behaviour you can change.

Scoring follows the eight Cognitive Domains™ Dr. Molnar published in 2010 — Mindful Awareness, Compassionate Practice, Motivational Disposition, Expanded Worldview, Knowledge Creation, Systemic Outlook, Focused Framing, and Coaching Skills. He describes them as “meta-categories of behaviors”, each composed of characteristics that can be observed and worked on. The essay that introduced them is on this site.

Where it came from

The instrument was produced by a mixed-methods study run between 2009 and 2010. A Delphi panel of working leaders and managers, drawn from several industries and levels of education, took an initial pool of 100 candidate items and reduced it over two passes to 25. Those 25 went to a limited field test for validity, reliability, and internal consistency, and then to a full-scale administration and statistical analysis.

Dr. Debra Elliott, James Rivera, and Dr. Theodore Kariotis contributed resources, comments, and encouragement throughout. The study is written up in full, in Dr. Molnar’s own words.

Why it asks your level first

During the Delphi study, James Rivera pointed out that an executive’s vantage on managing people is not a front-line supervisor’s. An executive’s decisions reshape an organization; a front-line supervisor is the organization to the people they supervise. Asking both groups the same questions would have measured two different things and called them one.

So the instrument captures your organizational level and branches to the items that fit it. Twenty items are common to every level; five are written for yours.

How it was meant to be used

Dr. Molnar administered the MWM-AI at the outset of a consulting relationship and again once people had had time to work the methodology. That is the honest use of it: a baseline, then a second reading later, with deliberate practice in between.

A single score in isolation is the least interesting thing this instrument produces. The distance between two readings is the interesting thing.

What it cannot tell you

This is self-report. It measures your account of your own behaviour, which is not the same as your team’s experience of it — and the gap between those two is often the whole problem. Treat a high score as a hypothesis, not a verdict.

There are no population norms published here, so your score is not a rank against other managers. It is a reading of you against the practice.

Nobody is scored on whether they are a good person. Middle Way Management is a set of behaviours, and behaviours are learnable.

Six minutes, twenty-five items.

1. Choose the level that matches your actual daily work, not your job title. If you spend your day supervising the people doing the work, you are front-line, whatever the title says.
2. Answer for how you behave, not how you intend to. The instrument is only useful to the degree you are willing to be unflattering about yourself. Nobody else sees this unless you choose to contribute it.
3. Think across the last three months, including the weeks when things went badly. Practice that only holds in easy conditions is the thing this is trying to find.
4. Take the first reading. If you find yourself constructing a justification for an answer, that hesitation is usually the more honest signal — go with the lower one.
5. Read each item carefully. A few are worded so that agreeing with them indicates less of the practice, not more. They are there to catch straight-lining.
6. Answer every item. There is no neutral option by design; the middle point is “Sometimes”, which is a real answer rather than a way out.

Reading your result

Your dimensions are listed weakest first, which is where the practice is. The overall figure matters less than the shape — a manager scoring 4.2 everywhere and a manager scoring 4.8 on compassion and 2.9 on accountability have very different work in front of them, and the second is the more common pattern.

Take the lowest dimension and ask what is happening in the moments when it slips. It is almost always a specific condition rather than a general failing: a particular person, a particular kind of pressure, a particular time of day.