Lateral Leadership: A Practical Guide for Agile Product Managers

by Tim Herbig

Agile doesn’t just change how teams work. It also changes how teams are led. Agile requires a radically different approach to leadership, one that puts business, design, and engineering at equal levels—where they must work as peers. This is called lateral leadership , but it creates a challenge for roles like product management. Agile leadership requires teams to align around a committed vision and support it in the best possible way without formal authority. And even though product managers lack the expert knowledge of their new peers, they have to succeed in their mission without the traditional safety net of hierarchical power.Written by Tim Herbig, a product and business leader with experience at large-scale companies such as XING and Gruner+Jahr as well as multiple startups in the SaaS and social network space, this book will help define what it takes to master the challenges of being a lateral leader. It will guide you through chapters on strategic alignment with your team and individual alignment with other team members. By recognizing empathy and escalation as helpful tools, you’ll be able to maintain and strengthen your leadership role within agile teams." Lateral Leadership shows Product Managers how to lead without the explicit authority to do so. This book gives us a detailed roadmap for how to use empathy and alignment to better lead the people that make up our teams toward common goals, and build better products because of it."—Martin Eriksson, co-founder Mind the Product & co-author of Product Leadership .

Genres: Leadership, Business, Management

68 pages, Paperback

Published November 7, 2018

Reviews

[Adriyana Grotseva · Rating 3 out of 5]

This brief book talks about lateral leadership and ways to achieve it without having an explicit power, some tools for empathy work with teams and tips on how to resolve escalations. The main takes from it for me are:

Explicit leadership gives power to the person via title and hierarchy. Implicit leadership is influencing others without formal authority. Lateral leadership is about striking the balance between business and the emotional aspects of a collaboration. There are some tools that can help with it, eg role model canvas by Christian Botta (made for discussing gaps or overlaps between individuals in a team) - helps you frame the roles and responsibilities of team members. Empathy map helps provide perspective on the needs of individuals, collecting and visualising the treats of your peers, though it can also feel a bit vague because it doesn’t consider the aspects of collaborating. The agile peer canvas consists of 7 areas for each team member: mission (what is the essence of this role, captured in one sentence), dos (what explicit tasks are clearly assigned to and owned by this person), don’ts (what important tasks should this person explicitly not tackle that is counterexamples), hopes (what this person wants to get out of their role), fears (what is holding this person back), drivers and motivators (which aspects of this person’s work make them excel and push trough), informal role (which team internal role could leverage the drivers of this person beyond their job description).
Rely on mediation and not authority in disputes because your colleagues are more likely to own the decision and follow through with it if they are involved in making it. You can use this escalation checklist to prepare a structured email or message, in which you lay out the following issues: the goal or action you are asked to achieve or complete (ideally referencing an aligned mission briefing), the best solution from your perspective to achieve that goal, including proof that you are on the right track, the counter-argument or a conflicting goal your peer is advocating, possible solutions you’ve discussed already and why they didn’t work out, the one question you want your boss to answer.

[Joao O · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brief but interesting read on the idea of lateral leadership. A good introduction to the topic of leading and influencing with limited authority.