Our numbers, My recommendation

When we speak of "getting things done through people," we assume the organizational chart shows how work actually gets done. The phrase turns relationships into lines of authority, with ideas moving up and instructions moving down along those lines.

And, of course, life has a way of resisting that. A few samples: A junior analyst spots a pattern others have missed. A new hire questions an assumption no one has challenged in years. A quiet team member connects two pieces of work and changes the direction of the project. None of these contributions travel along the reporting line. They happen when people think together without first checking rank.

Working with people starts from that fact.

Formal authority remains one part of the relationship, but it did not produce the analyst's pattern or the new hire's question. The manager's job becomes taking part in those conversations and cultivating the conditions that make them possible. The hierarchy is real, and much of the best work still happens outside it, in exchanges between people whose boxes on the chart never touch.

The shift asks something uncomfortable of the manager. Like that time when someone on my team corrected our numbers in front of my boss. It was not unusual to have the people who did the work attend the meetings. But, as the manager, it was my meeting and my recommendation to answer for.

The numbers were wrong and she said so out loud. She was right.

What to do? Thank her, note the correction, and carry on with the recommendation I walked in with? Or let her correction change the recommendation itself, right in front of my boss? The former would be "polite." The latter was real: living "we're a team."

"Getting things done through people" and "we're a team" are both things managers say. In that room, in front of my boss, only one of them could be true.

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