At a recent in-house leadership development programme I was delivering, I came across an unusual number of lateral leaders among the participants.  These were senior managers with accountability for achieving results through people or teams over whom they had no formal authority.

The setting was a medical facility where a high level of collaboration and co-operation was required across a multiplicity of disciplines and functions.  The programme participants, senior managers, were drawn from various departments e.g. clinical, nursing, catering, occupational therapy, pharmacy, physiotherapy, social work, administration, facilities, IT.

Over the course of the programme, I brought up the subject of the challenges of lateral leadership with three separate groups of participants.  What I found really interesting was that few – if any – of our lateral leaders were aware that ‘lateral leadership’ was not only an established term,  but was a bona-fide management style .  These were all senior professionals, highly qualified and accomplished in their primary disciplines, professions or functions.

What they were very well aware of, however, was the day-to-day challenge of achieving the objectives of their own role while relying in part, or sometimes totally, on the discretionary co-operation of their colleagues or peers. In some cases, on peers from outside the organisation.

In this age of cost-cutting, re-sizing and getting more done with fewer resources, change initiatives have grown increasingly complex.  Most high-level change initiatives now involve multiple functions, disciplines or departments within and often between organisations.  These days many such interventions involve an entire sector.  Consequently, new kinds of collaborative partnerships, alliances and associations are on the increase.

In these conditions – with numbers of interim projects, virtual work groups, temporary teams and voluntary committees on the rise – the traditional command and control management style just won’t work.  Oftentimes there is no carrot and no stick.  This raises some interesting questions and challenges for the emerging lateral leader:

What are the imperative characteristics of a great lateral leader?

How can a newly appointed lateral leader become productive and effective quickly?

What added-value can a lateral leader bring to an organisation?

How does the lateral leader motivate a work-group when there’s no financial reward available for collaborative results?

Consensus v. conflict.  How can the lateral leader manage facilitate effective problem-solving and decision-making?

What motivates peers or colleagues to yield their discretionary ‘followership’ to a lateral leader?

These are some of the questions that #kaizenblog host Elli St.George Godfrey (@3keyscoach) and I (@MiriamAhern) will be discussing on Twitter #kaizenblog on Friday 3^rd February 2012 ( 5pm GMT/12pm ET/9am PT).  Why not join us?

Miriam Ahern is Managing Partner of Align Management Solutions.  She is a Certified Management Consultant.  Miriam is President of the Irish Institute of Management Consultants and Advisers.

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Health sector managers  relied too much on union officials to communicate with key employees in the health service during the era of ‘social partnership’.  Now they need  skills in effective communications which can no longer be ‘outsourced’ to  the ‘social partners’.

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