Down Is the Easy One

Somewhere in my master's at Royal Roads they put us into small groups to work on a project.

The program was leadership, with a specialization in executive leadership. So the room was full of people who spent their working lives directing the activities of others. Eight or so of us to a group. Everybody with a good idea.

And no direction on how we were to work out who got to decide.

Was it democratic - should we vote? Was it the strongest voice? Was it the best idea, and who was going to rule on which one that was? We were deep in the values part of the program at the time, which only made it worse, because now every move was also a statement about what kind of leader you were. Push too hard and I look autocratic. Sit back and I look like a passive follower with nothing to offer. How do you lead a room full of your peers?

Most of what gets written about leadership points downstream at your team.

You set a vision. You ask for results. You check in, you support, you keep the team healthy, you stay calm while you do it. Those are real skills, they are hard to do well, and they are what almost everyone means when they say leadership.

Leading downstream is the easiest direction to see. If you read leadership literature, the books on leading a team, and the books on working on yourself inwardly, will take up most of your shelf.

Those skills sit on the assumption of a vertical leadership structure. You may never use your authority. You may lead entirely by consent and be a better leader for it. But the buck stops with someone, and that fact is doing more work than you think.

Take it away and you find out what you actually have.

For the nonprofit sector, much of the important work in this space runs sideways. Funders reward collaboration. The task is too large to finish on our own. So we end up leading without authority - peers who don't report to us. We sit at partner and coalition tables where everyone arrived with their own mandate, and we work in shared leadership teams where several people hold a piece and collectively hold the whole thing.

I'm working with a leader inside a team structure like that right now. It's a great organization and it is hard to lead in.

The priorities compete. That's normal. The question is what you do when there's no over-force to sort them out. No arbiter. No final boss to say yes or no.

And your peers aren't especially inclined to take your read on the situation. They may be in the same situation as you, but their role gives them different priorities. They think their issues are more important (or at least more pressing) than yours.

They might be.

In that battle for priorities, most people reach for one of three things. Some overwhelm you with the detailed spreadsheet - proof and evidence that you need to follow their lead. Some demand attendance and acquiescence - they call it strong leadership and it happens in every industry. And some use charisma and influence to move people along - charming all the way.

All three are fickle.

Some decisions do need the data, but the rest of the team may not have worked out yet that it's a data decision. Force of personality settles a question fast. It is also burnout territory, for you and for everyone around you. And charisma fades - trust in your charisma lives in other people, not in you. So if you fail to deliver, they may not only drift away. They may actually turn, and feel betrayed.

Back to our teams at Royal Roads. Once we stopped waiting for the question to answer itself, we tried a few things.

We tested the water. Offered a suggestion and watched what came back. To the ideas we thought missed the mark, we tried a negative but still gracious response - and watched that too. We offered again. And we moved forward when we could feel there was some trust in the room.

You don't get authority sideways. What you get is a trust account, and it only ever holds what you've put into it.

Inquiry, offers, and a gracious tone - that build-up of trust is the deposit. It's how we start with strangers, and it's slower than anyone wants it to be. It also works. It's harder to remember once you have a working history with people, but if you're feeling stuck it might be time to go back to the basics.

So make the deposits early and continue to do so, well before you need anything. Because at some point you will have to make a withdrawal - and that's the day you find out whether you're in credit or in overdraft.

You cannot spend trust you never deposited.

These are the deposits.

Curiosity beats the spreadsheet. Competence gets you so far; curiosity gets you the rest. The impulse is to lead with your credentials. Do the opposite - name what you don't know as clearly as you name what you do, and ask genuine questions. There is very little more valuable to a peer than being asked for their read on something, and people will give you far more than you expected. Let your competence be discovered rather than highlighted.

An offer beats a demand. You may have a great idea. Offer it, don't demand it. Then read the room, see how it lands, and let people take it up or not. That last part is the hard one if you are used to having authority behind you. When leading sideways, you don't get to insist.

Relationship outlasts charm. Peer relationships usually start with an assignment, or a person you already knew. The people who spent time on team over task always sped up the deposits. Find the balance, though. You don't want to be running a get-to-know-each-other exercise while the deadlines loom.

None of those settles who decides. What they do is make it safe enough for someone to agree.

We did figure it out at those Royal Roads tables eventually. In most of the small groups.

Not all.

Leadership runs in four directions. Downstream or Inward have plenty of pages in the books on your shelf. Sideways leadership is the collaboration that takes time to prepare for.

Leadership Upward is the fourth - the person above you standing two or three steps into the future, holding competing priorities you can only partly see. That one needs its own conversation, and I'll come back to it.

In the meantime - when you're losing a priority argument with a peer, which of the three do you reach for? I know which one is mine.

En route, but aren't we all.