Increasingly, business takes place within a “matrix”.  Managers manage the work of people who are not their direct reports.  People manage projects whose success depends on the inputs of people across the organisation.  Priorities shift and change.  Priorities compete.  Work styles clash.  And that’s before you factor in the boss – have you noticed yet that the boss also needs to be managed?  Not surprisingly, this new reality is rarely reflected in the literature.  A wide range of good research was conducted in a bygone era – before the matrixed organisation gained ground.


So, I was intrigued to notice recently that the Harvard Business Review is due to publish the HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across.  This is what they say about it:



Does your boss make you want to scream? Do you have more than one boss? Do you spend your day corralling people who don’t report to you? Do you work across departmental silos? Collaborate with outside contractors?


Then you know that managing up and across your company is critical to doing your job well. It’s all about understanding your boss’s and colleagues’ priorities, pressures, and work styles. You need to manage up and across not just because you may have a problem boss, an incompetent colleague, or fabulously hairy projects that touch all parts of your organization. You need to manage up and across, for example, to get your marketing and sales folks to see that your project will help them meet their goals, too; to establish authority with higher ups so they’ll bless your new product ideas; to secure people’s time for a new team when they’re already feeling overextended.


The Guide to Managing Up and Across will help you get the information and resources you need to solve your challenges, increase your effectiveness, and make your day-to-day worklife more enjoyable.

I haven’t read it (yet) and still, I do know that it’s addressing challenges that we increasingly face in the workplace.