You know the situation. Maybe you’re inside it right now.
Leadership, which has always been problematic, is worse than ever as funding is cut and changes just keep coming. With four leaders at the top in five years, you and your team have never had a chance to get your bearings.
The people who used to speak up have been silenced.
You show up, do your work, go home, and try to avoid thinking about all the things that are out of your control. You’re not sure what’s coming because you don’t know who to trust anymore.
The worst part? Your team has never had a chance to function as an aligned group. Everyone’s so worried about whether they’ll get to keep their jobs, they don’t have time to collaborate or understand each other’s work.
Sure, leadership problems are partly to blame. But you know that while you’re waiting, again, for leadership to get it together, the distance between you and your team members is growing.
Good news. That distance is something you can help close.
Vertical Trust v Lateral Trust
When you name an idea, you earn power over how you will engage with it. – Seth Godin
Vertical trust is about the actions of the leaders at the top. When trust in that leadership is broken, it’s easy to focus on their failures, like poor communication and all those seemingly random decisions that come down from on high with no warning.
But there’s another, important type of trust that’s not talked about much – lateral trust.
Lateral trust is built between and among peers. It’s trust that your team has your back, sees your work, and will show up for you even when the organization isn’t showing up for anyone.
Vertical trust is out of your control. Lateral trust is something you can control and, more importantly, build with your team.
Building lateral trust with your team creates lateral power. And that’s magic.
Claiming Agency
Before we go any further, here are two definitions worth knowing.
Agency. Agency is our birthright. It doesn’t have to be earned. But, sometimes, it has to be reclaimed. Agency is about choice. It’s about understanding and believing in our ability to influence our outcomes. It’s the idea behind “I’m going to do something about this situation.” When we understand, believe, and embrace our agency we become empowered and motivated. We gain confidence. It’s easier to show up for the people around us.
Allyship is about trust and being there for each other. It’s about supporting and lifting each other up. It’s about surfacing the great work of our teammates and colleagues. It’s about collaborating to deliver a better result for everyone both on the team, and, believe it or not, for the organization.
Here’s the thing: Neither agency nor allyship require permission from anyone above us. Agency doesn’t reside at the top of the org chart. It’s available for us to claim right now, in the relationships we already have with our team and colleagues.
The question becomes how to best develop a practice of agency and allyship that leads to team success.
Five Moves that Build Lateral Power
First, some context. Building and supporting lateral power focuses on recognizing each individual’s power within the team and creating strategies to combine that individual power with the power of the group.
When the team combines their individual power, it compounds and can be used to create a supportive, thriving, cohesive, and productive team.
Move 1: Name it before you navigate it.
Before a team can move forward, it has to acknowledge the excess weight it’s carrying because of leadership issues. This has to be done candidly and honestly, without resorting to euphemisms.
What have you been navigating alone or as a team? What has gone unspoken and unrecognized?
Try this. As a team or as an individual ask yourself one question:
What do I need to do my best work with my team?
What do you need, separate from what’s wrong and what leadership could do?
This reframe moves you from resignation to agency and changes everything about the conversation that will follow.
Once you’ve answered the question, take your answers and sort them into two buckets: things that only organizational leadership can change, and things that are yours to build on right now.
The first bucket contains valid items and concerns.
But, the second bucket? That’s where your agency and power lives, waiting to be combined with the agency and power of the team.
Move 2: Take a candid inventory of where you’ve gone quiet.
When we’re in survival mode, it’s easy to pull back, stay in our lanes, keep our heads down, and stop volunteering what you know. It’s real; it’s understandable. It feels safe.
The problem? There’s a cost to the team. You probably understand that at some level, but you’re stuck because you can’t see a way forward.
So, ask yourself three questions:
- Where am I showing up as an ally to my colleagues actively, visibly, and specifically?
- Where have I felt the need to be quiet, pull back, and stay in my lane?
- How could that have left team members without support they could use?
Note: These questions are private. Nobody needs to see your full answers. But you do. You need to write down those answers. When you name them, you reclaim your agency and your ability to change your outcomes.
Move 3: Make invisible work visible.
Note: If you’re doing this as a team, create psychological safety for everyone on the team by offering the quieter voices a path into the conversation by giving plenty of time for everyone to think, then provide different ways to respond other than out loud.
When teams struggle with alignment and communications, it’s virtually impossible to know what their teammates are doing. People see the output but not the effort that went into creating it.
They receive the result of the work of others’ but not the context for the work. Work becomes invisible, and invisible work is easy to undervalue – especially when it’s yours.
Ask yourself, then ask each other:
What does my work create, and who needs it to do their job well?
Write it down and share it. Everyone will be surprised at what they don’t know about their teammates’ work.
Here’s the magic. When people see how their work touches other people’s work, the silo starts to break open.
Making contributions visible is exercising agency and an act of redistributing power.
Move 4: Design what’s yours to create in the next 45 days.
This is where hopelessness, helplessness, and resignation are replaced with a healthy measure of collective confidence created by exercising collective agency.
You know there are things you cannot control. Those things are real and they matter.
However, there are outcomes that belong entirely to you and your team, regardless of what happens above you. These include:
- How you communicate with each other.
- How you surface each other’s work.
- How you handle conflict.
- How you make decisions when leadership is unavailable or untrustworthy.
Pick one of these outcomes. Make it specific. Make it achievable in 45 days, not 90 days or a year from now. Make the date close enough that you can feel the win.
Then, name how you will know you’ve achieved it.
This is collective agency made tangible and real.
Move 5: Make your commitment to a named person, not the team.
Broad commitments never work. They’re also frustrating as in, who’s doing what for whom? There’s no starting place.
Instead, be specific.
Statements like “I will ask you what you’re working on before each all-hands.” Or “When I’m stuck, I’ll come to you before I go quiet.”
Then name the teammate you’re making the commitment to.
And say it out loud to them.
The act of saying it out loud to the person changes the stakes. It becomes personal, between the two of you. Plus, since you and your teammates have committed to claiming your individual and collective agency, you’ll remember to do it.
This Is a Practice.
This practice will lead your team to align itself naturally because it creates and builds connection between teammates.
It will help each teammate and the team as a whole claim its collective ability to affect change within the team.
The practice also emphasizes and builds on the lateral power between team members. Team members no longer feel alone when sudden changes happen. Instead, you move through uncertainty together, knowing you have each other’s backs.
Building lateral power is a practice, not a one-time event, in the same way allyship is a practice, not a personality trait. The commitments the team has made need tending. The outcomes you designed need follow-through.
The Team That Didn’t Wait
I recently worked with a team carrying all of this at once. They’d experienced leadership instability, loss of funding, silos, silence, intergenerational tension, and the exhaustion of people who’ve been undervalued too long.
They didn’t wait for leadership to fix it. They named what was true. They examined where they’d gone quiet. They mapped how their work connected to each other’s. They designed outcomes that were entirely within their control. And they made specific commitments to specific people, out loud, in the room, and on the record.
They left with a structured way forward, including a co-authored team agreement, a 45-day plan, and something impossible to capture on paper – the experience of doing something powerful together when everything above them was uncertain.
That’s lateral power in action. Agency, allyship, and lateral power are claimed to make change.
Collective agency creates collective power. Use it.
I’d love to hear about your experiences with building lateral power (even if you didn’t call it that). If you haven’t experienced it, I’d love to hear when it would have helped.
Never Settle.
Becky