The fact is that despite the collaboration revolution, with its flatter organizations and self-managed project teams, there is always somebody in charge who is making decisions. Choices are considered up and down the chain of command. At your own level, there will always be conflicts that can’t be worked out.
What can you do? There are three logical possibilities:
“Proceed until apprehended. That was our strategy,” says Chris, a former executive in a federal agency. She was describing how her team dealt with the many unclear lines of authority in its working relationships with people in other offices, agencies, and departments. “We’d get an interagency request, or we’d have some initiative we were keen to pursue that required participation by another office,” she says. “Nobody had the authority. It was like the Wild West.”
How did that work out? “Sometimes it was fine, if all the people involved were on the same page,” says Chris. “But too often we were just moving ahead blindly until it would come back to bite us. We’d all buy in to somebody’s great idea and in- vest time and energy and budget dollars. Then it would turn out there was no support at higher levels. So, the whole thing would get scratched. Or we’d decline a request, and then be overruled by the bosses and end up getting a late start. Or we’d disagree about something and fight it out until one or the other prevailed, or not.”
Too many people find themselves, in effect, proceeding until apprehended, leading to the kinds of real business problems and costs that Chris describes. That’s often the net effect of “work things out at your own level.”
Meantime, most people in the workplace need a lot more guidance than they get when it comes to managing their sideways and diagonal working relationships. But they feel they are discouraged from going to their managers for that guidance until things are already going wrong. Or they sidestep authority and go in the wrong direction until it comes back to bite them.
The ad hoc, unstructured, as-needed communication typical of the collaboration revolution often breeds unnecessary problems that get out of control—leading to delays, errors, squandered resources, and plenty of relationship damage.
How you align yourself in terms of decision making and support—and with whom—is the first core mechanism of becoming indispensable at work.
“I don’t have the power myself, so I go get the power from my boss,” says Fernando, an IT service tech manager in a large accounting firm. “We have a system for ranking service tickets and project work, but of course every ticket is somebody’s special urgent priority. Everybody wants their IT issues put higher in the queue. Before I took over the team, people here were in the habit of going over the tech manager’s head or even going to the boss or the boss’s boss. Nobody does that now.”
What changed?
Fernando says, “Since I took over, we beat them to the punch every time. We go over our own heads before anyone else can. I’ve already gone to my boss, every time, before anybody else can go over my head. My techs have already come to me, every time, before anybody else. We are all totally aligned. So, there is no point to going over our heads.”
Does that mean Fernando has to check with his boss every time he makes a move? And do his techs have to check with Fernando every time before they make a move? “Only if we don’t already know the answer,” says Fernando. “If we don’t know, then we’d better check. But we almost always already know the answer. I don’t speak for my boss, but I might as well, because nine times out of ten, I already know what he would say. The same is true with my techs. They already know what I would say, in almost every case, so they might as well speak for me.”
Can you say the same about you and your boss and your chain of command? Are you so aligned with your boss and your boss’s boss that you might as well speak for them because you already know what they would say?
Remember, you are not in charge, but somebody is. Decisions are being made at a higher level. If you are going to have the power to operate without authority and work things out at your own level—what I call working sideways and diagonal—you first must align yourself with the vertical decision makers.
Improving the quality of your leadership, no matter your role, is one of the best career investments you can make: