In addition to working well with their supervisors and subordinates, effective managers also have to strategize - to "manage" their workmates beyond the scope of their authority, and to deal with those subtle and imperceptible horizontal relationships
Managing work can involve a lot of horizontal relationships. For many managers, job performance in addition to relying on their supervisors and subordinates, but also rely on a number of other people - managers do not have much formal control over these people, but if you do not deal with their horizontal relationship, will make the work half the effort, or even a complete failure.
Lessons from Jerry's Failure
Jerry Cutler had been serving for many years at a Silicon Valley company as a respected and well-paid technologist. By chance, he realized that he could make a clever improvement to one of the company's existing products, which had no medical use, and make it relevant in the medical field; the technology was a fraction of the cost of the prevailing treatments at the time.
Initially, his bosses appreciated his idea and passion, and agreed that he would spend half of the next 2 months working with engineering, marketing, and production to develop a prototype of the new product and financially analyze its economic viability.
Jerry went into the development of this project with a level of enthusiasm not seen in many years. Initial market research also showed that the market was lucrative because there were no competing products. But the good times didn't last long, and soon he ran into trouble. One of the heads of the engineering department called him and told him that the engineers involved in the research project were spending "too much time" on it. He was told that this person had "other important work and was on a tight schedule, so unfortunately he could not continue to be involved in the study". Jerry complains to his supervisor, who accuses him of spending too much time on the project and delaying other work.
Three days later, another catastrophic event occurred. At 4:00 p.m. that day, Jerry's supervisor informed him that someone in the marketing department had redone the market potential analysis based on the latest sales data, and that the latest forecast of the market size was only 1/5th of what was originally projected.
According to this latest update, Jerry's supervisor demanded that he had to stop the study.
Jerry was furious. After investing so much time and energy, he had come to the sensible realization that the project was very important and emotionally impossible to part with. At 4:45 p.m., he resigned and went home.
2 months later, a friend of Jerry's who was a programmer at the original company revealed to him a story that had been circulating inside the company: a director in the sales department had learned of Jerry's project 3 weeks before it was discontinued, and he reportedly didn't like the idea, mainly because selling the equipment required familiarity with hospitals and the medical equipment purchasing process, which was the sales department's weak point. So he had one of his men concoct some very bleak market outlook numbers and reported them to the head of marketing. And this person in charge is a good friend of his.
Upon learning of this sort of thing, naive people are usually angry at the narrow-mindedness, shortsightedness, and nativism of the people around the protagonist of the event, and they see people like Jerry as heroes and victims. Cynical people, on the other hand, will see Jerry as a fool, because in these people's view: people always do things self-centeredly, and Jerry, who initiated this project, is really a fool.
In fact, people like Jerry are neither fools nor heroes. They have the skills to innovate, but they lack the social experience to do so. This lack of experience often gets them into trouble.
Jerry's work is characterized by being largely self-reliant, with little contact with people in other departments, and essentially done by individuals on their own. But the project he introduced required a number of important horizontal dependencies that could not be accomplished by him alone, and he had to rely on the help of engineering, marketing, production, and finance staff, over whom Jerry had no formal leadership authority. In addition, he needs to be assisted by a number of other senior executives who can cause the project to die.
In this situation, it is very important that you have an awareness of the interrelationships at work and be proactive in managing them. Jerry didn't do that; instead, he spent his time and energy developing new product prototypes, which he thought was "his thing.
Jurisdiction over relationships outside of one's authority
In this case, the real thing to do is to lead by:
Noticing subtle horizontal relationships
If there are complex horizontal relationships in a workplace, the first step in effective leadership is to be able to recognize what those relationships are. At first glance this may seem easy, but it is not. For a variety of reasons, horizontal relationships are often difficult to perceive. Unlike hierarchical relationships, the various horizontal relationships are rarely indicated in organizational charts or job descriptions. In addition, lateral relationships are more volatile and changeable than those within the control of authority.
In addition to working well with their supervisors and subordinates, effective managers must also strategize to "manage" their partners outside of their sphere of authority, and deal with those subtle and imperceptible lateral relationships
To solve this problem, it is necessary to constantly observe the future of the organization. The first step in solving this problem is to be constantly on the lookout for possible future partnerships, which in turn requires a keen sense of the pace of work, the tasks to be accomplished, the people who need to work together to accomplish those tasks effectively and responsibly, and who will resist them. It requires a keen sense of what is going to happen, who is going to be resistant to it, and who is going to be responsible for it. Because a person on the future development of the situation can not have a comprehensive and accurate prediction, so the solution to these horizontal relationship issues need to be very careful not to inadvertently offend those who you may have to work with in the future.
Nowadays, there are too few people who have this kind of sensitivity. Jerry lacks that sensitivity. Young people tend not to pay attention to these things, and as a result, they often run into trouble.
Analyzing Horizontal Relationships
Once the relevant horizontal relationships have been pinpointed, the second step for a leader is to figure out who might be resistant to cooperation, why, and how they might resist. What are the reasons for this resistance, and to what extent? This is the heart of horizontal relationship management. This is the heart of horizontal relationship management.
To illustrate this problem and its root causes, I often use the case of Corning-Grace's Electronics Division in my teaching. The division was one of nine divisions under the Corning umbrella that supplied passive electronics to several markets. During the summer of 1968, all of the divisions in the division were involved in an implosion in which people blamed each other. Production, for example, felt that Sales was only concerned with sales volume and would "accommodate the sellers at the expense of the factories". Sales, for its part, thought production was "conservative and unwilling to take risks" and ignored customer service requests. ......
The key to effective leadership in such cases is to figure out how differences among people lead to internal conflict, and what are the important formal and informal differences that lead to conflict. conflict, and what important formal and informal factors contribute to those differences. The first thing to recognize is that the variability among the divisions of the business unit was caused by its organizational structure. When employees are only asked to meet sales (or production, or some other metric), they naturally pay more attention to the requirements and issues associated with that metric and less attention to the issues associated with other metrics. Second, the formal appraisal and incentive system sets different targets for each department. The sales department is assessed on sales volume, the production department on gross profit (factories are profit centers), and the marketing department on market growth and profitability. Once again, the specialized selection and promotion system makes the characteristics of the employees in each department very different from the others.
In the end, it took three years of best efforts by senior executives at Corning to bring some relief to this complex puzzle. And this human-caused tragedy could have been avoided.
Building good relationships
With a keen sense of which relationships are likely to be problematic, the next step for effective leaders is to select and implement strategies to overcome them.
The most common strategy used by managers, professionals, and technologists in this regard is relationship building, that is, establishing personal relationships with the relevant parties and then using those relationships to communicate, educate, or negotiate in order to minimize or overcome much of the resistance.
There are a number of methods that can be used to build and maintain good working relationships, and one of the most common is to put yourself in the other person's shoes and fulfill some of their desires and requirements. When you do this for a period of time, the other person will naturally begin to trust you, listen more attentively to your ideas and suggestions, and usually be willing to fulfill your requests in return. This is exactly what was wrong with Jerry as described earlier. He could have succeeded in his new product development program if he had done a better job of reaching out to the people in engineering, manufacturing, marketing, and finance and building a good working relationship with them.
How do you deal with stubborn resistance?
Good relationships, coupled with effective communication, can help people overcome most, but not all, of the resistance in their horizontal relationships. behavior, but not all. In some jobs, the structure of a horizontal relationship can lead to one party adopting an assertive or even intransigent resistance to the other. attitudes. In such cases, we sometimes need to adopt a more sophisticated or robust approach, albeit one that carries some risk.
Let's take the job of a product manager at General Mills or General Foods as an example. The product manager is primarily responsible for the revenue and effectiveness of a particular product line. This arrangement of duties makes the product manager dependent on employees who work in product manufacturing, advertising, sales, and delivery, often numbering in the thousands, but none of whom he can directly manage; instead, they belong to different departments and even different companies. For example, the product manufacturing staff is part of a large manufacturing company, and the sales staff is part of an independent sales company, and the product manager does not have any formal command over them.
In one case, a product manager encountered strong resistance from the production manager. According to the company's normal procedures, all new product programs have to be "signed off" by many people (including the relevant production manager). This product manager had a new product program that he was very proud of, and it was signed off on by all but the production manager. The fundamental problem is that the production manager has been in another factory and has had a lot of trouble producing similar products, so he almost instinctively objects to such a program when it is presented.
In order to overcome his emotional resistance to the program, the product manager started with the company's largest producer. First, the product manager brought in a representative from the company's largest customer, called the production manager, said, deliberately and casually, that he had heard a rumor about the new product program, and said that he "would like to meet the guys who are going to work on the new product, as he has done in the past". Then, prior to a meeting, the product manager arranged for two industrial engineers to intentionally stand near the production manager and talk about how well the new product trials were going. He then held another meeting about the new product, to which he invited only people whom the production manager liked (or respected) and who also had a favorable opinion of the new product. On the second day after the meeting, he went to ask the production manager to sign the new product plan, and he did!