Why effective leaders must manage up, down, and sideways
Strong
team leadership isn’t enough. New research shows the importance—for business
impact and career success—of also mobilizing your boss and colleagues.
Most of the leadership advice aimed at senior
functional managers is how to build, align, energize, and guide a world-class
team. This is a challenging task in its own right, but we all know it isn’t the
whole story. Leaders, even those in the C-suite, must also extend their influence upward and horizontally.
Organization theory
suggests that managing upward and sideways is good for both the company and the
individual leader’s career: CEOs need the insights and pushback of trusted
executives to help sharpen strategy. And complex modern organizations benefit when people engage with their peers across
functional and business-unit boundaries to bring a range of perspectives and
drive change and innovation.
Our research confirms
this theory, and then some. In a wide-ranging study of the leadership actions
of chief marketing officers (CMOs)—a good proxy, we believe, for the skills and
behaviors of functional leaders in general—we’ve shown how “managing” the CEO
and mobilizing colleagues increases business impact and career success. (For
leadership research on another C-suite proxy, the CFO, see “How functional leaders become CEOs.”) To test our hypothesis, we asked more than 1,200
senior marketing executives from 71 countries about their perceived business
impact (contribution to revenue and profit growth), their career success, and
their characteristics against 96 variables. Using statistical techniques
(explained below1), we were able to
relate to these outcomes the 96 variables (which included leadership behaviors,
functional skills, personality traits, sociodemographic variables, and external
factors, such as peoples’ fit with the company). We supplemented this research
by analyzing existing 360-degree data on 7,429 marketing and nonmarketing
leaders—a total of 67,278 individual evaluations by these leaders’ bosses,
peers, subordinates, and themselves.
Our findings lend
support to the notion that senior executives should pay more attention to
mobilizing their bosses (managing upward) and functional colleagues (managing
horizontally) Taken together, these
upward and horizontal actions were about 50 percent more important than
managing subordinates for business success (45 percent versus 30 percent)—and
well over twice as important for career success (47 percent versus 19 percent).
Clearly, there’s more
to success than managing up and sideways: leading a high-performance functional
team accounted for 30 percent of the explained variation in our CMOs’ business
impact, and 19 percent for career success, and managing yourself accounted
for the remaining variation. Mobilizing subordinates, in particular, is the
base executives need to build from if they want to establish credibility with
the CEO and with colleagues. The best executives build strong teams,
relentlessly enhance team members’ skills, keep subordinates focused with
objective performance measures, and establish an environment conducive to trust
and loyalty.
But they also do much
more. Our model helped us identify the most important specific actions
associated with managing upward and horizontally, and our 360-degree survey
data confirmed that some of those actions receive less emphasis than they
should.2
Mobilizing your boss: Focus on strategic issues and
demonstrate financial results
When we asked CMOs
about their primary role, some responded that they “ran the marketing
organization” or “led their companies’ advertising and brand campaigns.” We
believe many other functional leaders would provide similar departmentally
focused responses. By contrast, the most effective and successful leaders in
our study were more likely to describe their primary role as increasing company
growth or better outreach to customers to improve performance. We found that a
key determinant of success was taking on the big issues, those in sync with the
CEO’s agenda and contributing to the company’s overall performance. Aligning
with the CEO’s strategy explained 10 percent of CMO business impact and 10
percent of career success.
But are functional
leaders well aligned with the CEO’s agenda? Seventy-six percent of our CMOs
said yes—but just 46 percent of the bosses in our 360-degree database believed
their marketers knew where the organization was going. Many functional leaders,
it seems, could and should better align with the top.
Building a reputation
as an effective user of resources also increases standing with the CEO. In our
study, the ability to demonstrate returns explained 12 percent of CMO business
impact and 3 percent of career success. Here, we again found a gap: while 67
percent of our CMOs said they had a strong returns orientation, only 39 percent
of C-suite executives in another study reported that marketing executives were
delivering measurable return on investment for their expenditure.3
Mobilizing your colleagues: Forge strong ties with peers
to build momentum
If you want to build a
“movement” within the company, lead from the front with an inspiring story to
win the hearts and minds of colleagues, including those who don’t report to
you, and with a clear action plan to deliver tangible results. That can
initiate a virtuous circle of internal recognition by energizing a cadre of
early followers among colleagues. Our research suggests that leading from the
front and having a strong narrative together explained nearly 10 percent of
business impact and about 20 percent of career success. The ability to reach
beyond the marketing silo to executives in areas such as IT and finance
explained an additional 13 percent of the variation in both business impact and
career success.
Only 56 percent of
CEOs, however, described their marketing leaders as role models who lead from
the front, and only 61 percent of CMOs said they use their storytelling skills.
Tellingly, while marketers are adept at telling stories that mobilize customers
to buy their products, we find they are less likely to ply that strength
internally, despite the importance of effective engagement with colleagues.
Mobilizing horizontally
means walking the halls, getting out of the office to share ideas with peers,
listening to their concerns, and working jointly to attack strategic issues. In theory, leaders could do many
of their interactions on video these days. But that’s rarely inspiring.
Instead, the best leaders connect directly with as many people as possible
through town halls when they travel to local markets, and hunker down to help
teams solve their biggest problems.4
Fortunately, the
actions needed to mobilize the CEO and colleagues are often mutually
reinforcing. For instance, moves by functional leaders to build support
horizontally are often related to their simultaneous efforts to show tangible
results and advance the organization’s strategy.
While CEOs rely on
functional leaders’ ability to build high-performance teams, much more needs to
be done to help these leaders extend their influence upward into the C-suite
and horizontally across the organization. Happily, our work suggests that not
only business impact but also career success redounds to those CMOs (and, we
believe, functional leaders of all stripes) who can increase their span of
leadership influence upward and across functions.
By Thomas Barta and Patrick Barwise
http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/leadership/why-effective-leaders-must-manage-up-down-and-sideways?cid=other-eml-alt-mkq-mck-oth-1704&hlkid=123a71c0cffe4db8bebd774179610523&hctky=1627601&hdpid=6f6bda89-bd23-442d-8f62-f5fdbe063c4c
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