One topic that always comes up is how to keep colleagues accountable for results. How to manage up. And How to manage sideways.
It’s such a big topic we devoted a session to it at Next Generation of Gov’t Summit on 7/6th with speaker Misti Burmeister and Kate Walker.
Misti is a rockstar and blogs at Washington Post amongst others.
Here is a quick excerpt from her blog post “How to keep colleagues accountable for results”…Read the full thing here
Managing your team? Piece of cake. Managing up? Slightly more complicated. Managing sideways? Diplomatic tightrope act. But you can make an impact with your peers – if your intentions are good and your execution includes understanding and compassion.
Consider Tom’s conundrum. As vice president of international relations for a small technology company, he was concerned about an
ongoing conflict between two employees – an engineer and a builder. In
order to ensure clear communication between these two teams, Tom
e-mailed the VPs of each group, Jeff and David, to alert them to the
problem. “Soon after, I received an e-mail from one of the problem
employees saying a whole lot of nothing,” Tom recently told me. “When I
looked down the thread, I saw a note from Jeff to his direct report. He
had forwarded my e-mail to him with a line that said, ‘Tear em up,
bulldog.’”
All Directions(up, down,sideways and there are probably some that might fit 2 of these categories) requires the absolute trust and respect of all. Don’t have to like em, don’t have to agree with them, but if one doesn’t respect and trust the communication is going to fail
From what It appears to me, Tom didn’t get quite the result he’d hoped for. It seems Jeff is perpetuating the problem, instead of addressing what the differences were between the two problem employees, and turning it back on Tom.