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Dedicated to learning better management techniques, I am an avid reader of everything management related. My personal favorites are the “21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership”, by John Maxwell and from “Good to Great” by Jim Collins. Together I believe those two books will guide people with the aptitude for leadership to excel in management.
They are an excellent tutorial on management leadership they are also very “politically correct”. I am not “politically correct” and believe I have found a few pearls of wisdom that the inner leader in all of us might find enlightening.
- Managing horizontally is NOT bypassing channels
Managing horizontally, is management without authority and if doneincorrectly will cause you more problems than you solve. If done properly then you will have assisted your fellow management team without challenging their authority.
To manage horizontally you must understand the proper motivation. My motivation is basic math, profitability. I am very process oriented because process creates repeatability;repeatability reduces deviation and increases productivity. Documentation of the process allows a senior skill set to manage multiple junior skill sets without as great a need for independent thought, thereby lowering labor costs.
This works wonderfully, until the teams managed by your peers are NOT process oriented. When you run into this wall, you need to knock it down, go over it or go around it. The first two options are general bad because knocking it down requires that you confront your fellow manager’s lack of process and going over it means that you report your peer to your management. I always recommend “attempting” to work it out with your peer if you can but if you can’t then going around the wall is the path of least resistance.
This politically incorrect move must be executed very cautiously. I have used it on multiple occasions in various ways. One example would be when I needed to re-enforce policies within my own team by using the resources of a separate and independentteam.
My team provided professional services engineering and my engineers needed to learn and implement the new process. However, with over 20 engineers I could not participate in each project, but each project had a project manager. I went to PMO group manager first and explained what I needed but I found that he was not as effective as I needed.
The project management group only totaled around 6 people and they all sat in the same area. The individual project managers were eager to control the projects better and more profitably. I was the source for all engineering resources. So I made apoint to visit their cubicle area at least once a week and ask what I could do to help them manage the projects.
I provided the documentation that my engineers were supposed to be completing for customer sign-off. I explained to the engineers what I wanted and then I had the project managers request the exact documentation I provided to them. I provided their team with the initial documentation and processes. The Project Managers siezed the success and maintained the documentation. This technique lead to the adoption of my process by both groups.
Horizontal management when exercised with the right intentions will help you to build inter-departmental relationships that are required for businesses to thrive in today’s marketplace.
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