How to lead people who do not report to you

Lateral leadership means: influencing people who do not report to you. You cannot promote, cannot issue warnings, cannot set targets. What remains are three levers: understanding, trust and power in the sense of influence through knowledge, relationships and backing.

That sounds like less, but it is often more. An order produces obedience as long as someone is checking. A conviction produces behaviour that remains even without checking. Whoever leads laterally has to build every step so that those involved want it themselves. That is more demanding, but the results last.

The flip side: lateral leadership only works if formal leadership wants it. A lean manager whose plant manager always sides with production when in doubt has no lever. She has a title.

In the plants I know, lean managers, project leaders and process owners almost always fail at the same points:

• The mandate is unclear. "Teach us lean" is not a mandate. What is missing is which problem is to be solved, by when, and how you recognise that it has been solved.
• The backing is only claimed. The executive team says the topic is important. When production and the lean manager argue, production wins, because it delivers.
• The role sits too low. A staff position under the production manager cannot change production. It is part of it.
• The person becomes a firefighter. Because they have no area of their own, they are deployed for whatever is burning right now. After a year they have put out many fires and changed nothing.
• They work alone. Without allies in the line, they remain the person who comes from outside and wants something.

A plant with several manufacturing areas had hired an experienced lean manager with a good reputation from another company. After a year and a half he was frustrated and plant management disappointed. The conversations revealed: he had never received a concrete mandate, sat organisationally under the production manager and was bypassed in every escalation. The person was not wrong. The set-up was.

Whoever creates a lateral role takes on obligations. Without them the position is decoration. In my experience, these are the five:

A clear mandate. Which problem, which area, which result, which time frame. In writing, in one sentence that the shift leader understands too. "Lead time in assembly is to come down without quality suffering, and in six months we want to see whether that is working."

A stage. The lateral role needs a fixed place in regular communication: in the leadership circle, in the weekly plant meeting, in the shopfloor meeting. Not as a guest, but as a member with their own agenda item.

An escalation rule. What happens when the line and the lateral role do not agree? Who decides, within what deadline, and how is the decision communicated? Without this rule, inertia always decides.

Visible backing. The plant manager who stands next to the lean manager on the gemba walk and asks her questions says more than any speech. Backing is an action, not a sentence.

Protection from firefighting. Plant management has to say no when the lateral role is to be pulled off for daily business. Otherwise the mandate is buried under urgencies within a few weeks.

The other half lies with the person in the role. Over the years I have learned that influence without authority comes from a few, always the same, sources.

From usefulness. Whoever solves a problem for the shift leader today that has annoyed him for months may ask something of him tomorrow. Start with what the line needs, not with what the programme prescribes.

From presence. You cannot lead laterally from the office. Whoever is on the line or in order processing every day knows the problems before they escalate, and is a face, not a sender.

From data. Opinion against opinion, the person without line authority loses. A measured value stream, a counted waiting time, a photo of the buffer stock shifts the conversation from "I think" to "we see".

From allies. In every area, look for the one person who wants to improve anyway. With them you build the pilot. Their success is your argument towards the others.

From reliability. Whoever promises to come back tomorrow comes back tomorrow. In a plant that is the currency you are measured in.

At some point in almost every plant comes the suggestion to give the lean role disciplinary authority after all. The CIP coordinators in the areas could report to it, or a department of its own could be created straight away.

I usually advise against it. As soon as the lateral role has its own line, it becomes another department with its own interests. Production then sees improvement as something "the lean people" do, not as its own task. Exactly the opposite of what an improvement system needs.

The better solution is to leave the responsibility for improvement where the work is, in the line, and to strengthen the lateral role as enabler, provider of methods and critical mirror. That requires plant management to make improvement a leadership task of every line manager and to demand it too. In target-setting conversations, in regular communication, on the gemba walk.

If you have a lateral role or want to create one, examine these questions honestly:

• Can the person say in one sentence which problem they are to solve by when?
• Do they sit in a body in which they regularly report and are heard?
• Is there a rule on who decides in conflicts with the line?
• Has plant management been visibly on the line with them in recent weeks?
• Do they have at least one ally in every area they are supposed to change?
• Were they recently pulled off for daily business, and who allowed that?

If you answer more than two of these questions with no, the problem does not lie with the person. It lies in the set-up. And only plant management can change that.