Welcome to Managing Across

“I have to figure out how to exert influence without control.”

A client of mine (“Lawrence”) said that to me recently as he stepped into a senior role at a multinational company.

For the first time in his career, Lawrence was responsible for delivering projects where most of the critical resources didn’t report to him.

Until now, management had been  straightforward:

If someone wasn’t performing, he had options. He could coach, reassign, replace, even fire.

Now?

People weren’t doing things the way he needed.

Deadlines slipped. Quality dropped.

And he had no real leverage.

Welcome to managing across.

Most of us learn early on how to manage up.

Then we learn how to manage down.

Managing across?

You’re expected to just figure it out.

And it’s harder than it looks.

In Lawrence’s case, success depended on people in other groups deprioritizing their own work to support his project, often on short notice, with limited context. Unsurprisingly, they resisted.

So we walked through his options.

He could escalate.

He could push harder.

Or he could step back and ask a different question:

“What would I do if these people actually worked for me?”

His answer was immediate:

“My team understands my goals and why they matter.”

That was the gap.

With his own team, alignment came first.

With these colleagues, there was no relationship, no context, no shared understanding.  There were just requests.

So we changed the approach.

Instead of waiting for the next project, Lawrence began building relationships in advance. He scheduled informal conversations with key stakeholders - not to ask for anything, but to understand what mattered to them, and to share how his work connected to broader company goals.

No authority. No leverage. Just clarity and alignment.

The shift was simple, but the impact was real.

Because it turns out that managing across isn’t fundamentally different from managing down.

It’s the same job just without the ability to discipline and fire.

Which means everything depends on your success in building alignment before you need it.

That’s the work.

And if you wait until the project starts, you’re already behind.

This is one of the most common challenges I see with leaders stepping into bigger roles, and  one of the least talked about.

If this sounds familiar, it’s worth taking a step back and rethinking how you’re building alignment across your organization.