We talk a lot in this newsletter about managing teams. Today we’re going to tackle something slightly different: how to manage up and across.

The advice comes from two clinical professors of innovation and entrepreneurship. Carter Cast is a venture capitalist for Pritzker Group and former CEO of Walmart.com and Craig Wortmann is the founder and director of the Kellogg Sales Institute. They chatted in a recent episode of The Insightful Leader’s Ask Insight podcast. Below are some slightly edited excerpts from their conversation.

How Do You Effectively Manage Up and Manage Across?

INSIGHT: We had a reader asking about the always challenging process of managing up and managing across. (Managing up is about influencing the people that are senior to you in an organization. Managing across would be folks at your peer level across the organization.) What do you guys think?

CAST: I was notoriously bad at managing up. I really thought that if my boss would just leave me alone and give me room to run, then everything would work out just optimally. I ended up getting demoted for that wonderful attitude. And I learned something in this painful demotion: it would behoove me to see my boss as a customer. My job is to make my boss as effective as he possibly can be. So instead of my attitude at the time, which was, “just leave me alone. I know what I’m doing,” I should have said, “what are your goals and objectives, and how can I fit into them? What can I do to take work off your plate? Are there any things that you don’t want to do that I’m qualified to do, that I can help you with?”

I’m not talking about brownnosing and being ingratiating. I’m talking about trying to make them as effective as possible. And once I started realizing that, low and behold, my career went better.

WORTMANN: The other key point that I talk with people about is being open to feedback and being very proactive about asking for feedback—not obnoxiously—but “how am I doing? Give me some coaching. Give me something to do differently,” such that you get better and better, faster and faster, in the process of delivering those goals.

CAST: With managing across, the first thing that I would try to do is meet with the people that are your constituents or that are your peers and try to find out what are their goals and objectives. What are they trying to accomplish in their jobs? And see where you can help them.

Then I would ask them, “where are you having a difficult time in terms of our function or our group that I can help alleviate? Are you finding it difficult to work with us?” And if they see you trying to make things more efficient and better, they are going to be more open-minded and they’re going to be easier to work with.

INSIGHT: These are great examples for when you’re on the same page as the person that you’re working with. What do you do if you’re really butting heads with somebody? You just have a really different vision for how the organization should be responding to a challenge.

WORTMANN: I think the move here is to acknowledge that there is a difference and to have a difficult conversation. Step one is acknowledging and going to your peer and saying, “you know, it seems like you and I are running down two different paths in two different directions. And I feel the tension and I feel the heat, and I want to acknowledge my role in this. Can we have a conversation about this?” And I just think if you lead in that way, it puts you and hopefully your counterpart in the mindset of listening to each other, asking the questions and then eventually solving the problem.

CAST: As you open up and you find, “we have common objectives here and here, and it seems like we’re diverging over here,” that gives you the chance then to unpack that area and try to understand, are there any assumptions each one of you are working under that may be erroneous? Or, fundamentally, are the goals and objectives just differing because purchasing wants this and merchandising wants that, for example?

WORTMANN: Embrace healthy conflict, not unhealthy peace, always and forever. That’s the key.

(You can listen to the full episode here. It’s part one of their two-part conversation. We’ll cover part two, which focuses on entrepreneurship, in a future newsletter.)

LEADERSHIP TIP

“Just because businesses are owned by a family doesn’t mean that all family businesses are alike.”

—Clinical professor Jennifer Pendergast in Insight, on what potential employees should consider before joining a family-run firm.