Horizontal Leadership

CEO Briefing

About 30 years ago, at my daughter’s childcare center, the teachers invited a woman dressed as a witch to join in a Halloween celebration with the little ones. When the “witch” arrived on the scene, she was apparently a bit too authentic for some of the preschoolers, which sparked an episode of crying and screaming that the preschool’s director described as “sheer bedlam.” As the teachers were trying to restore order, my daughter ran to the front of the room and shouted, “She’s not real! There’s no need to be afraid!” Her classmates quickly collected themselves. The witch stayed, and the party continued.

When I ask CEOs during their forum meetings what caused all the commotion that day, they claim it was fear, along with a whole host of adjectives they suggest were running through the kids’ minds. There will always be one CEO who will say, “It was the first kid who started to cry, who triggered the second, the third, etc. I also suggest that while the teachers would have calmed everyone down eventually, it likely happened a little faster when one of their own said everything was okay.

I share that story with every peer advisory group I meet because it happens in their companies all the time—drama included. Every time a company announces a new policy, strategy, or change initiative, employees don’t just receive the information and go about their business. They look to one another. The employees engage in sense-making exercises just like the kids in my daughter’s classroom.

You Have to Lead Vertically AND Horizontally

Many CEOs tend to focus on their companies’ vertical construct. There’s the executive leadership team, the SVPs, VPs, Directors, Managers, and their teams. Yet when I ask CEOs to identify the people in their companies who may not have the loftiest titles but are influential with their peers, they know who they are. They also understand the weight they carry in the organization. Employees don’t make sense of what’s happening in their organizations solely from the top down. It may be where they first learn the information, but they look to one another to find out what it means and how they will respond. It’s a horizontally inspired act. The Edelman Trust Barometer confirmed this in 2019 when they asked employees: “How do you typically find out what is really happening within your organization?” The top response was informally from my co-workers. Remember that it’s not where they first learn the information but where they find out what it means.

Leading Horizontally Through Change

The next time you decide to change a policy or embark on a new strategy, consider those key influencers. Identify them and seek their input on any upcoming changes you plan to make. You’ll likely receive helpful feedback on the substance of the change itself and the messaging that would resonate best among the employees. At the very least, these key influencers should understand the why behind the change because when (not if) these sense-making exchanges take place, you want advocates that will promote giving the change a fair chance. McKinsey has reported that employee support is a leading cause of failure or underperformance of change initiatives. Consider the days of not strategically engaging your frontline employees to be over. Peter Senge wrote in his seminal book, The Fifth Discipline (1990, 2006), “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”

Why This Matters More Than Ever

The speed of change and the ramifications of its success require a different approach that is more inclusive than ever. FutureThink CEO Lisa Bodell once stated, “Change cannot be put on people. The best way to instill change is to do it with them. Create it with them.” People tend to invest in the success of an initiative they had a hand in creating. By 2025, millennials and Gen Zs will comprise 64% of the workplace, and by 2030, it will be 75%. The future workforce will not only expect to be included; they will demand it, and CEOs would be wise to listen.