Nate works as a manufacturing manager in a major company that makes truck steering systems. To do his job, he regularly collaborates across the organization, whether it’s with purchasing or quality or engineering. One of his biggest frustrations is when things don’t go well with his counterpart from another department. It’s never clear how to resolve the problem or who has the final word on a disagreement. “Whenever I ask my boss to intervene on my behalf, back me up, and help me get what I need,” Nate says, “his first, second, and third response is almost always, ‘Work things out at your own level.’”
That response has become one of the mantras of the collaboration revolution. “Work things out at your level” effectively pushes as much communication, decision making, and cooperative action as far down the chain of command as possible. When it works well, everything runs more smoothly and swiftly: information exchange, decision making, planning, resource sharing, and execution. It also reduces unnecessary problems and waste.
When people don’t work things out at their own level and get in the habit of going over people’s heads, to the boss or the boss’s boss, trust and confidence within work relationships suffer, along with the work itself. Getting things done indirectly through the boss is not the best way to make your expectations clear and make a solid plan. Poor planning leads to further delays, mistakes, and more resentment.
So, what is Nate’s gripe with “work it out at your own level”? “The problem,” says Nate, “is I don’t have the authority I need to work things out at my level. We don’t always have the same agenda. We have competing priorities and limited resources, not to mention egos.”
Nate is grappling with what I call “the authority conundrum.” The goal is to empower collaboration throughout the organization as far down the chain of command as possible. But when there’s a problem and you’re left to work things out at your own level, by definition nobody has the power of rank to resolve things swiftly and efficiently. And the conundrum emerges even when you are dealing with people in diagonal roles—up or down. One person might have a higher rank, but no one has direct authority, which complicates the relationship even more.
So, to Nate’s point, when you have conflicting agendas, priorities, resource needs, and egos, you get into power struggles. That’s why so many people in Nate’s position “escalate the matter,” which is corporate-speak for going over each other’s heads.
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.
Too many people find themselves, in effect, proceeding until apprehended. 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.
“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.”
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)—then, first, you’ve got to align yourself with the people making decisions: You’ve got to go vertical.
Improving the quality of your leadership, no matter your role, is one of the best career investments you can make: