Most mid-level managers focus almost exclusively on one direction of their leadership… downward, toward their team.
That focus makes sense on the surface. Their team is visible. Team performance reflects directly on them. And they spend most of their working hours navigating the people and problems directly in their line of sight.
But leadership does not stop at the boundary of a manager’s department. And the managers who never develop the discipline to lead upward and across (to proactively align with their boss and their peers) create friction across the organization that accumulates quietly and costs significantly.
The Three-Legged Stool
Here is a useful way to think about a manager’s leadership environment.
A mid-level manager sits at the center of three critical relationships: their team below them, their boss above them, and their peers across from them. Those three relationships form a three-legged stool. When all three are strong, the structure is stable and the manager’s leadership impact multiplies. When one leg is weak, the whole thing wobbles and the instability shows up in places that are hard to trace back to their source.
Most managers build the downward leg, their relationship with their team, with real intentionality. Some build the upward leg, their relationship with their boss, at least enough to manage their own position. The lateral leg, the relationships with peers across departments, is almost universally the most underdeveloped.
And that underdevelopment is costly.
What Happens When Managers Do Not Manage Across
When mid-managers are not proactively aligned with their peers, something predictable happens.
Departments drift into subtle competition. Assumptions replace dialogue. Friction builds at the seams of the organization at exactly the points where collaboration is most critical for execution. Projects that require cross-functional coordination slow down or stall. Problems that could have been prevented with a fifteen-minute conversation become organizational issues that consume leadership attention for weeks.
None of this looks, on the surface, like a manager development problem. It looks like a communication problem, a culture problem, or a prioritization problem. And because the source is invisible, the solution tends to be a meeting structure or a process change that treats the symptom without addressing the root cause.
The root cause, in most cases, is that no one taught the manager that building alignment across the organization is part of their leadership responsibility. They thought their job was to lead their team. No one helped them see that it is also to strengthen the system around their team.
What Happens When Managers Do Not Manage Up
The upward relationship is equally important, and equally underdeveloped in most managers.
Many capable managers default to waiting, waiting for direction from above, waiting for feedback, waiting for clarity to surface naturally through the hierarchy. Sometimes that works. Often it leaves expectations unspoken, assumptions unchallenged, and the manager operating at the edges of what their boss actually needs from them without ever quite knowing it.
Managing up is not about managing your boss. It is about being a proactive partner in the leadership relationship. It is about staying clear on what success looks like from their perspective, understanding the pressures and priorities that are shaping their decisions, and positioning yourself as someone who reduces friction rather than adding to it.
That kind of upward alignment does not happen automatically. It requires initiative, communication discipline, and the confidence to step into conversations that can feel uncomfortable, particularly for managers who are still developing their leadership identity.
Why This Matters to You Directly
Here is the practical reality for a senior executive.
When your managers are not managing up effectively, you end up doing more translating and clarifying than you should. You find yourself repeatedly communicating priorities that should be landing clearly without your constant reinforcement.
When your managers are not managing across effectively, you find yourself mediating between departments that should be coordinating directly. You are solving alignment problems that should be prevented at the manager level.
Both of these are taxes on your leadership time — and they are entirely preventable when your managers are developed to lead in all three directions.
The manager who leads only downward is doing a fraction of the leadership job. The manager who leads in all three directions, building their team, aligning with their boss, and coordinating with their peers, is the one who truly multiplies your organizational capacity.
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