How to Lead When You’re Not the Boss
"Leadership doesn't just reside with the project manager. For success, it must also reside with the
project team." - Paul
You don’t have to be in charge to act—and be recognized—as a leader in your company ("or project").
Where is that chain of command when you need it? If you’re like most managers, you regularly find
yourself in situations where you have responsibility but not authority to get things done through a
group. Maybe you head up a cross-functional team whose members don’t report to you. Maybe you
manage a set of outside vendors. Or maybe you do have nominal authority, but find that your charges—
software engineers, hotshot Gen X marketers, whoever—respond to directives the way a cat responds
to the command “roll over.”
In all such cases, issuing direct orders is part of the problem, not part of the solution. As Peter Drucker
puts it, “you have to learn to manage in situations where you don’t have command authority, where
you are neither controlled nor controlling.”
So what works? As it happens, a few students of leadership have sketched out approaches designed for
precisely this situation. Harvard negotiation specialist Roger Fisher and colleague Alan Sharp dub their
model lateral leadership or “leading from the side.” Jay A. Conger, director of the Leadership Institute
at the University of Southern California’s business school, advocates management by persuasion,
noting that the most effective managers he observed during research and consulting assignments
“actually shied away from issuing directives.” Whatever the specifics, these are approaches that can be
learned and practiced by anyone, boss or not.
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How to Lead When You're Not the Boss - March 1999
