It’s hard to get any group of employees to change their behavior when their managers are still reinforcing old processes, measurements, and beliefs. Middle managers show up in organizations under a variety of titles, but regardless of the descriptor, they are the ones who execute plans, lead teams, and direct collective efforts to produce results. Because of the importance of these responsibilities, we made “Activating Middle Managers” a key strategy in our change model, Employee-Engaging Transformation. In this report, we examine five categories of best practices for successfully activating middle managers in organizational change efforts and describe the critical role that senior leaders must play across all of these strategies.