Managing Up, Down, and Sideways: The Competency Nobody Trains You For

Ask a new manager what leadership training they got, and they'll usually describe something about managing direct reports: one-on-ones, feedback, delegation. Almost nobody gets explicit training on the other two-thirds of the job — managing up to their own boss, and managing sideways across peers and other functions who owe them nothing and report to someone else entirely.

Managing down works because there's formal authority backing it up, however lightly used. Managing up works because there's usually a shared incentive (your manager wants you to succeed). Managing sideways has neither — you're trying to align someone who has their own priorities, their own manager, and no obligation to defer to you, purely through communication and stakeholder management skill. It's the least-supported direction and often the one that determines whether a cross-functional initiative actually ships.

The fix starts with naming it: stakeholder management and communication aren't soft add-ons to "real" leadership skills, they're the specific competency that makes managing sideways possible at all. Once it's named, it can be assessed and developed the same way any other competency dimension can — with a specific target level, specific evidence, and a specific plan, rather than left as an unspoken expectation nobody ever explicitly develops.