Shifting from vertical to horizontal leadership.
Creating cross-functional collaboration by leaning into getting to know your lateral peers.
November went by in a flash. After getting settled into London life, I jetted off to Amsterdam to host one of my AfterHours dinners, with a phenomenal group of leaders (who all happen to be women), followed by a reset / recharge self-lead workshop with my best friend in Zeeland and then was off to Copenhagen to work with a leadership team align around a clear direction and strategy for the next 3 years. Happy to be home again but had a VERY fulfilling time.
The strategy offsite client was a bit different for me as as it was a market leadership team of a global household brand name. I’ve dipped a bit into Enterprise before but have spent the past few years working with tech-enabled scale ups and wasn’t quite sure where the similarities and gaps would be. But a model that always lands very well with my scale-up clients, also seemed to land VERY well with this enterprise client, so that was a signal that it’s something worth writing about.
Scale-ups start as start-ups; a small team often motivated to challenge the status quo and do things differently. When successful they hire, raise money and keep hiring. Projects become departments, people become leaders and eventually a leadership team is formed.
Without the right steer and behaviours from day one, that leadership team becomes a collection of projects and their meetings become status updates. When this approach compounds with time, complexity and people, you end up in a very siloed organization, reflecting behavioural patters they sworn against when they set up.
This is often when I get called in.
Disconnected dysfunction.
Now, good leaders know they need to spend time with their direct reports, having regular 1:1s, team days away and often ensure alignment. Great ones even give constant feedback and praise to ensure they are leading a high-performing team, reducing any blockers or blindspots.
When I step into to work with a leadership team, I will ask how often they spend with each other in 1:1s, understanding who is around the table, what their priorities are, giving feedback and praise. The answer is surprisingly very infrequent. This is often the #1 cause of the majority of issues I am called into fix.
Do you want:
Streamlined growth
Faster development
Less conflict
Better meetings
Maximise the talent your pay for?
Your horizontal team is your primary team.
Then you need to shift your mindset from vertical to horizontal.
Here’s how I frame it.
In it’s simplest for, an organization is a combination of Vertical Teams (your direct reports) and Horizontal Team (your peers).
When managers hear “team” they almost always think of their direct reports first, and maybe their peers second (if at all).
I believe this should be the other way around.
One dream, one team.
As a leadership team, you have ONE job, to steer the organization towards your strategy. If the team steering is not lock, solid and aligned, it doesn’t matter how great the rapport you have with your direct reports, or how green your engagement scores are, your progress will be stalled to due to dysfunctions you have with your peers.
As I did with the team in Copenhagen, most teams don’t take the time to align on steer and direction, therefore department (vertical) goal setting and prio’s are done in isolation without any consideration to other teams needs, blockers, or impact. Here’s how I have seen this play out:
Marketing can’t launch a calendar because product hasn’t shared the roadmap
Sales didn’t invite marketing to the exclusive Christmas partner party
CX finds out about a new feature release via a complaint on twitter
Product wants to launch a new feature but didn’t realise the tech stack wouldn’t support it without significant time / updates
So back to your horizontal team - the team you have with your lateral peers. When this team isn’t aligned, clear and leading in the same direction, the organisation that follows it is a mess. Mixed of priorities, repeated work, stop and start projects, changing goal posts, and lack of visibility and accountability create a culture or exhaustion, frustration and blame.
Shift your mindset to your horizontal team.
At the start, it’s probably not giving you as much energy as your vertical team because the people on your horizontal team are different to you. They work different, they communicate differently, or don’t communicate. Great - lean into this as the more you can leverage that diversity the better your work and the collective work will become.
Share to build rapport.
Start reaching out and have 1:1s to talk about both your work and yourselves.
Why?
The Johari window is here to explain.
Get to know your peers and let them get to know you. Might feel awkward but that will pass.
Get really curious what they need to get their work done well. Understand their blockers, energisers, visions and pain points. Share yours back. This helps not only create better understanding, but most importantly empathy, and when you’re back in the room again you’ll be able to advocate for each other.
Most leadership teams only scratch the surface of their full potential and one of the things that holds them back is the not knowing how to unleash the knowledge in the room. People come in as department leads, not organisational lead and therefore don’t have the rich and essential debate to really challenge and improve ideas.
Example.
A while back I used to chair a weekly leadership team. The CTO had been raising the issue of tech debt. Meanwhile marketing and product were sharing their future thinking BIG ideas. Awaiting his turn to speak, each week the CTO shared an update on the need to work on the tech debt it if they want to grow at pace. Each week people sat in silence, no questions or concerns were stated. As the week goes by, he gets more and more frustrated. I decide to step in and pull him aside after a meeting and ask him “do you think they know what tech debt is?”. “Yes” he answers confidently, “how could they not, this is a tech company?!”, I ask again “Do you think they REALLY understand it and the implications you’re highlighting if something isn’t done.” He pauses. Shakes his head, and hangs his shoulders. “Next week, let’s try something else. Turn the tech debt issue into an analogy. Relate it back to what marketing and product are trying to achieve. Also I’d recommend you meet 1:1 with both leads to share a more deeper dive so they really understand the nuance.”. He did. The week after we finally had a debate about investing in clearing the debt and started to look at a platform migration. Win. Win.
Don’t assume common knowledge.
Back to Copenhagen, working with this Enterprise team, when I shared this model, I saw 8 “Ah-ha’s” around the table. Was I surprised to see an enterprise working in silo’s no, but what was surprising was how over the course of the two days, we had great, deep conversations around understanding what we mean by “x” and what are the implciations of "y”. Heated debates ensured and you could fel the energy. Someone mentioned they had never seen their peer so engaged. Most of the folks at worked at this company for over 10 years, the institutional knowledge was very deep but not very broad. They recognised that words thrown around with an assumed understanding was holding them back, and chose to use this offsite to ensure they were all on the same page around: terminology, measurement, points of view. It was fantastic to see and the energy was palpable.
Personally, I get so much energy sharing models that land. I often joke and say that as a consultant I am often just putting words into shapes, but I know it’s more than that. In a complex world, coming out of unprecedented external factors and leading us into even more unknowns, leaders are overworked, stretched and looking for help.
Providing clear, simple and easy to understand tools helps them shift their mindsets super quickly which is usually all we need to unlock the next step.
How might this shift from vertical to horizontal leadership change how you spend your time?
You got this.
G
Interested in learning more about my work? Connect with me to chat about:
Leadership team performance and alignment
Organizational design
Cross-functional Team alignment
Offsite facilitation
Management training