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Managing Sideways
Everyone Nodded, Then Nothing Happened
Driving change across teams you don’t control.
You have been in this meeting. A group of managers gets together to fix something that is clearly broken, someone proposes a shared way of doing it, and the proposal is good. Everyone agrees. Heads nod around the table. This is obviously the better approach, and the room is unanimous. Then everyone goes back to their desks, and six months later, every team is still working exactly the way it did before.
The idea was sound, and the logic held up. Nothing happened anyway, because agreeing was free and changing was not, and nobody in that room actually had to do the changing.
Most of the work is sideways, not up.
This is one of the most common situations in technology leadership, and one we talk about the least: much of the work is sideways, not up. A lot of advice is about managing up, about getting the people above you to see things your way. Far more of the actual work is getting teams you don’t manage, and can’t tell what to do, to change how they operate. The skill that makes that possible is influence without authority, and it is one of the hardest things a leader learns to do well.
