Stop Managing Up, Start Leading Across

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Communications Management   Leadership   Talent Management  

In project management, you often hear the advice, “You need to manage upward effectively.”

This is generally good advice. Communicating clearly with executives, aligning on goals and outcomes, anticipating concerns, and surfacing risks are all essential parts of being an effective project leader. If you want your work to be visible, and you want high-level support for your efforts, managing up is an essential part of the job.

It’s also not the entire job.

Too often, project managers are so focused on keeping leadership informed that they overlook where most of the real friction lives—across the organization, or even in other teams in the same organization. Deadlines are never missed due to a weekly update going out late, or from a VP not getting their status readout.

Deadlines are missed because a team was forgotten about, or Legal was never consulted. Or the brand team hasn’t approved it, and the engineering team is overcommitted anyway. These kinds of project obstacles rarely come from the top; they come from all directions across, down, and all over the organizational map.

This is why being able to lead laterally isn’t simply a "nice to have," it’s a core competency of project managers. The ability to influence peers, collaborate across verticals, and align teams outside of your span of control is what …

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