Managers Leading Managers mantra:

Other managers are much more capable than I think, but only when they unleash their full potentials of competencies, productivity, motivation and alignment.

When I was head of a business unit with seven managers reporting to me sometimes I felt like I was being pulled in seven different directions.

At other times I marveled at how much they could get done when we spent the time getting focused on everyone's tasks, roles and responsibilities.

Some of the key challenges to managing mangers:

• Integrating cross-functional agendas when decisions are being made. The manager of sales and marketing has a different agenda than the production manager. A manger's job is to work with seemingly diverging views so that they understand and commit to the larger company goals.
• Dealing with the complexity of multi-functional manager roles. A decision made in one area can have a big impact on another area. The manager of the managers has to teach, "down-the-board" thinking to direct reports so that they learn to appreciate the impacts of various decisions.
• Managing the politics is always a fun time. I accept the existence of organizational politics. But when the political maneuvering was getting out of hand it was a symptom that I had failed to get my team aligned and committed to the larger company goals.
• As a leader of mangers I was constantly selling ideas to different managers in order for them to buy into the longer-term goals while keeping their eye on the day-t-day "stuff' that had to get done. I also wanted my managers to make the effort to get the other managers to buy into sometimes conflicting initiatives. "We are all customers of each other," was our mantra.

The skills I had to develop and model were:

• Self-awareness and self-management. Being aware of how my behaviours were affecting people and making sure I always kept the end in mind.
• Functional agility. Being able and willing to step into my managers' shoes to have empathy for what they were trying to accomplish in their functional areas of responsibility. Sometimes this was very, very difficult as I, for example, had never managed an IT department.
• Communication. I was impressed with all of our abilities to mis-communicate, particularly in times of stress or tight schedules.
• Influence. I had very little power to make people do what I wanted them to do. Influence was what I had to develop by letting my managers get to know me, respect me, value my contributions, take risks when they were wondering how the heck was this present decision was going to affect them and, over time, trust that I had their professional and personal best interests in mind.

The joys and challenges of leading those managers is something I think about to this day.