0:00:00.0 S1: Welcome to Let's fix leadership. Today we're gonna talk about horizontal leadership and what the heck that even means...
0:00:12.7 S2: The landscape of business is changing radically... Yeah, leadership is being taught the same... Hallway has always been tough. When the world is changing, it's time to bring our leadership styles along for the ride, thanks to cutting as neuroscience, we now have access to new tools and new language that inspires action, collaboration and innovation in the modern workplace. I started this podcast to bring you the best of these cutting echols exercises as practices and modern leadership strategies every single week, whether you're a company leader, a corporate visionary or an entrepreneur, this show gives you new insights and center of science and language of leadership as well as practical steps and tempts you can take back to the office, so you can lead your team in a powerful way, keeping your people happy and engaged while achieving your biggest goals, because no one has ever changed the world by doing things the way they've always been done. I'm your host, Jen Ford. I'm a talent strategist, an executive coach, speaker in the founder of Korea or coaching. Now, let's fix leadership.
0:01:16.6 S1: I often work with high-level executives, maybe someone that is a high level VP or an SVP, and even quite a few people that are sitting in the State suite, and I really enjoy working with individuals who have just landed there, maybe they were just promoted recently or are new to that role, because there's something about their leadership that if they've always done it a certain way and they don't change it, they start to struggle really quickly, and that is moving from vertical leadership to horizontal leadership, and that may seem really strange, it may sound strange, but hanging with me, I'm gonna walk you through what that means. But it's incredibly important, and no matter what level you are at today, as you listen to this, you can take something away from this, You may be an early manager and you need to lead vertically, but when you understand the concept of horizontal leadership and you apply it to it, I promise you, you will lead in a better way and you will make better decisions, so what is horizontal versus vertical leadership? So throughout your career, you are responsible for your working group, so the people who do what you have been assigned to do or what they've been assigned to do, so that means that maybe they are IT engineers, maybe that means they are within the marketing department, but this group of people are all in charge of creative, and that group over there is all in charge of social media and managing the media buys, and so when you're leading that way, 'cause it's how we're supposed to lead through most of our career, we're really focused on the decisions that that group makes, and the decisions that you make for your working group, and it's all made based on the objectives that group has been given, and that is very much vertical leadership, and it's where you should be and how we should function because we have to worry about that group getting the work done.
0:03:21.4 S1: Now, that starts to switch when you get to the position of a C-suite or high level VP or SVP, and what happens is these individuals have to start thinking horizontally across the organization, so likely they're still in charge, unless they're like the CEO, they are still in charge of their group, it might be your chief financial officer vertically, he's still in charge of that, or she is still in charge of that, but they have to make decisions and think horizontally across the entire organization, and so how to do that or how to start to think about that, is really starting with understanding the company's objectives, and so if you are a high level executive, obviously, you have to truly understand what the organization is trying to do overall, because you have to understand that to start to set direction for your team. You also have to work horizontally across all of your peers, if you are a C-Suite executive, all of that group or all of your peers have to really make decisions not for their vertical that they're in charge of, but for the company overall, horizontally thinking across the entire organization. And this is a challenge, it's really hard, because that may mean giving up something that your team really needs a resource, a head count, any of those things, tie, money, budgets, you might have to give that up within your vertical to make sure that the company gets that what they need horizontally, for the overall success of the organization.
0:05:02.6 S1: Which means we have to do things like letter ego, go, which is never fun. Is it... No, we never wanna do that, but we have to sometimes... It also means we have to be really honest and start to challenge our peers and really challenge how they are fitting into the company's overall mission and objectives and how they're using the company resources. It also means we need to know a little bit about everything. Just enough to be dangerous. So if you are the CFO, you have to know a sage about what the chief marketing officer is doing and maybe the chief sales officer is doing. You have to know enough about those groups to understand it to make really good decisions for your vertical, but again, thinking horizontally across all parts of the organization, and if we have grown up and not kind of done that work on that internal networking, started to learn how other departments function at base level, that can be really challenging, and it's one of the things that we immediately need to do if we're in a new position, if we get promoted and we're sitting pretty close to the sun, we have to start having conversations with our peers understanding enough about what they do or enough about their objectives and their challenges, so that we make really good decisions across the company, but really make even better decisions within our working group and...
0:06:36.7 S1: You always kinda think, Well, why does that matter? Can I just make really great decisions about my group? Well, why it matters is that the further you go up, the more the intersections have to happen, if you've got five basically working groups, maybe it's merchandising marketing, finance, technology, maybe you have five, however many big working groups, if they are not able to kinda click together like Legos, I mean, click together in a really great way as the work starts to go down, it breaks apart, and you are doing duplicate work, you are wasting resources and time, and I would probably bet that most of us have been in a situation where executives were not connected, and so as it filtered down, it was really, really broken, and we had a hard time fitting the pieces together, every step down that we went, and that's why it matters if you want to truly excel in your business objectives, all of your teams have to fit together as if they are fresh out of the box Legos, and they just click together with that ease and it's not easy at all. And so let's start to think about, if we want to do that, if we want to think horizontally and lead horizontally, we want all of our teams to be intersected and connecting really well, where do we even start? And where we start, even if we are a chief of something is the same place I would say you would start even if you're the manager, because if you...
0:08:17.9 S1: Again, we talked about this the beginning episode, if you start to think horizontally and make decisions vertically, you are going to do so much good for your team, your company, for yourself and for your own career, so no matter where you are, we have to start this process at the same place.
0:08:36.9 S2: Let's take a quick break from the conversation, do you have new leaders on your team and you could see their potential, you can see their runway, but you can not figure out how to get them across the finish line. Reach out to three or four coaching and learn more about our brain-based competency-focused executive coaching.
0:08:57.4 S1: So the first thing you wanna do is really understand the organization objectives and the priorities, and start to understand why those priorities matter, there is never an organization that has all of the resources they need to make every priority come to life. It's just not there. There is not an endless amount of money that goes into organizations, and so you have to really start to understand the priorities of the company, so that as you're working on your own budgets, as you're working on what work matters, your own impact plans, your objectives, whatever they are whatever you wanna call them, or which your organization calls them, if you're not paying attention to how it fits into the organization, then you're gonna really struggle to figure out what resources you need, which ones you don't... Prioritize your resources, and it's just gonna be really hard to get your team to intersect into the company. The next thing you wanna do is learn a little about what everyone else does, and I don't care where you are in your career, if you're not doing this, you are missing out on a lot of fun, you're missing out on learning, you're missing out on some really great conversations.
0:10:13.3 S1: So how do you do that? How do you figure out a little bit about what everyone does? Well, it's about conversations, it's about calling someone and saying, Hey... Do you wanna grab lunch? It's about walking around the office and dropping into someone's office and saying, Hey, do you got five minutes, I just would love to catch up with you, or maybe it's calling someone on teams and just say, Hey, do you have five minutes? I wanna catch up with you. It's the casual conversations that you start to talk about, Hey, what's new, what's going on? I saw you hired a new person, how are they doing... What all are they doing? It's that casual conversation at casual curiosity, that helps you start to learn a little bit about what everyone around you does, and that helps you start to make really good decisions for yourself, and so you're starting to learn horizontally, so that you can lead better vertically. And when people start doing this in their career, it is amazing what they learn and how they can contribute in meetings in a different way, 'cause again, they've got enough information to be dangerous, they've got enough information to ask questions when someone on their team comes to them, and says, Hey, do you...
0:11:31.9 S1: Would you prefer to go through plan A or plan B on this? Well, if you understand who that impacts and what that means for them, because you just have lunch with them and learn something new from them last week, you will make a better decision for them, a better decision for your team, better decision for your peers, so get out there... And have those casual conversations, learn what your peers are doing, their challenges, their success, and again, learn a little bit of everyone's job enough to be dangerous, and those casual conversations matter... They're for networking. They're great for learning. The other thing I want you to think about is how do you start to let go of the ego, 'cause we all got it, the ego that we have around what our vertical needs and versus the organizations, and am I believer and fighting for your team? Absolutely. Am I a believer in doing whatever you can to make sure your team has resources... Yes, absolutely, but this is a little different, this is a ground understanding, Hey, we need these resources to do whatever you need us to do this year, but I understand that this team over here has this priority, which long term will set everyone up for success.
0:12:49.7 S1: I can give up this resource, which means we can do this amount of work, you always wanna say, Here are the resources, here's the work we can do, and you can start to understand how to intersect and work with other people and really understand what the company needs versus what you need and just what your team needs. And the last thing I would say about this, when you're starting to practice leading horizontally, as you have to get really comfortable with challenging and... I use the word conflict, but I don't mean it in that way. I don't mean like Go out there and throw your hand on the table and stomp your feet and say, No, this is what we're going to do, get really comfortable with challenging how people look at things. So if you're in the room with your peer and they're very focused vertically, and you can tell that they're not thinking or leading horizontally or don't have the right information they need to do better within their vertical, get comfortable with asking questions. Get comfortable with saying, are you open to looking this at a different way, get really comfortable saying, I understand those are your priorities, but let's think about the organizational priorities, because if we hit this year's organizational priorities, that means next year we would have x, which then means you can get those resources and more, but if this doesn't happen this year, were no one's getting anything next year, and so if you don't get comfortable having those conversations, then you're not...
0:14:21.2 S1: Again, you're not leading horizontally, you're really, really focused just vertically, so for many of you, this might be a fresh new concept, the way you think, chances are 99% of us out there are thinking and acting vertically, and you can't give that up, you are responsible for the group that you are responsible for, but I wanna challenge you to get out there and start to think more horizontal and really understand your peers, understand what they're doing, understand their challenges, understand their markets, so that you can come back and think much better vertically for your team, and this is another amazing opportunity for you to help your team grow because as you're out collecting all this information and you go back into your vertical, you're sharing this information, you're helping them understand how the company works and you're taking thought what you've learned and you pass it down to the next group underneath you, so if you have a concept that you have questions about or a concept that you would like me to address on the podcast, Reach out, send me an email, you can send me an email any time at... Hello at fix leadership dot com.
0:15:36.6 S1: Alright, go out there today as you are enjoying your day with your team, I want you to really think about what moments are you thinking horizontally, what moments are you thinking vertically, and I can't wait to hear how this impacts your decisions and your team and your career have a fantastic day.
0:15:58.1 S2: Thanks for listening to Les fix leadership. By hanging out with me today, you're already on your path, if you're looking to learn more and to see if your company is a good fit for our coaching and leadership education, and Hey, visit 304 coaching dot com if you got value on this podcast, share it with a friend, and it would mean the world to me if you leave a thoughtful review and a rating on iTunes, thanks again for listening, and I appreciate your work and fixing leadership.
