Lateral Leadership: How to Lead Across Without Authority

Lateral leadership is the ability to drive outcomes through people you do not manage, by building credibility, alignment, and momentum without relying on positional authority. In marketing, it is one of the most commercially valuable skills you can develop, and one of the least talked about.

Most leadership development focuses on managing up or managing down. But the work that actually moves a business forward, getting product, sales, finance, and operations rowing in the same direction, happens sideways. If you cannot lead laterally, you will spend your career waiting for permission that never comes.

Why Lateral Leadership Matters More Than Most Marketers Realise

Early in my career at Cybercom, I found myself standing at a whiteboard in a Guinness brainstorm with a felt-tip pen in my hand and a room full of people looking at me. The founder had been pulled to a client meeting and handed me the session mid-flow. My internal reaction was something close to panic. But the only real option was to lead the room, so I did. What I learned that day had nothing to do with Guinness. It was about the fact that authority is often situational, and the people who step into a gap are the ones who build influence.

That dynamic plays out every day in marketing departments across every industry. The brief lands. The campaign needs to ship. But half the dependencies sit with people you have no line management over: the web team, the data team, the sales enablement function, the regional MD who controls the local budget. You either find a way to bring those people with you, or the work stalls.

This is not a soft skill problem. It is a commercial problem. Go-to-market execution has become harder precisely because modern organisations are more cross-functional than ever, and the people responsible for marketing outcomes rarely control all the inputs. Lateral leadership is the mechanism that closes that gap.

If you are thinking about how this connects to broader growth strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the full picture of how organisations build and execute plans that actually move the commercial needle.

What Lateral Leadership Actually Looks Like in Practice

There is a version of lateral leadership that gets talked about in business schools and leadership books, and then there is the version that actually happens in organisations. They are not always the same thing.

The textbook version tends to focus on communication styles, stakeholder mapping, and influence frameworks. All useful. But what I have observed across 20 years of agency and client-side work is that lateral leadership is far more pragmatic than that. It comes down to a handful of behaviours that either build or destroy your ability to move things forward without formal authority.

The first is knowing what the other person actually cares about. Not what you think they care about. Not what their job title suggests they care about. What they are actually measured on, what keeps them up at night, and what a win looks like from where they are sitting. When I was turning around a loss-making agency, one of the most important things I did was sit down individually with heads of departments I was not directly responsible for and ask them a simple question: what is making your job harder than it needs to be? The answers were almost never what I expected. And once you know the answer to that question, you have something to work with.

The second behaviour is specificity. Vague requests get vague responses or no response at all. If you want someone from another function to support your initiative, you need to be clear about exactly what you need, by when, and what it will cost them in terms of time and resource. Respecting someone’s capacity is a form of respect for them as a professional. It signals that you have thought it through, rather than just lobbing a request over the fence.

The third is follow-through. Nothing destroys lateral credibility faster than being the person who pulls colleagues into a project and then does not deliver on your own side of it. If you say you will have the brief ready by Thursday, have it ready by Thursday. People remember who made their lives easier and who made them harder.

The Credibility Problem: Why Influence Has to Be Earned

Influence without authority is not something you can claim. It accumulates through repeated demonstrations of competence, reliability, and commercial judgment. This is slower than most people want it to be, and there are no shortcuts.

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to close to 100, the internal leadership challenge was not the people I managed. It was the senior hires I brought in who needed to earn trust across the business quickly, in functions that were not theirs. The ones who did it well had a particular quality: they were curious before they were opinionated. They asked good questions. They listened carefully before they proposed anything. And when they did propose something, it was grounded in an understanding of the commercial context, not just their own area of expertise.

The ones who struggled tended to arrive with a point of view that was technically correct but commercially disconnected. They were right in the abstract. But they had not done the work of understanding the specific business they were now operating inside. Credibility requires you to demonstrate that you understand the whole system, not just your corner of it.

This is particularly relevant in marketing, where the function has historically had a credibility problem with other parts of the business. Finance does not always trust that marketing spend is working. Sales does not always believe that leads are qualified. Operations does not always think that campaign timelines are realistic. If you are leading laterally in a marketing context, you are often starting from a deficit of trust, not a neutral position. That means the bar for follow-through and specificity is higher, not lower.

How Go-To-Market Failures Are Usually Coordination Failures

I have judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically designed to recognise marketing effectiveness. One of the things that becomes clear when you read through hundreds of case studies is how often the difference between campaigns that worked and campaigns that did not comes down to internal alignment rather than creative quality or media spend.

A campaign can be strategically sound and creatively strong and still fail because sales was not briefed properly, because the product team changed the offer mid-flight, or because the regional teams localised it in ways that undermined the core message. These are coordination failures. And they are almost always a symptom of weak lateral leadership somewhere in the chain.

BCG’s work on commercial transformation makes the point that go-to-market effectiveness depends heavily on how well functions are aligned around a shared commercial objective. That alignment does not happen automatically. Someone has to build it, maintain it, and repair it when it breaks. In most organisations, that someone is a marketer who has learned to lead sideways.

The practical implication is that before any significant go-to-market initiative, someone needs to own the internal alignment work explicitly. Not as a side task, not as a series of brief check-in emails, but as a structured effort to ensure that every function with a dependency on the campaign understands what is being asked of them and has agreed to deliver it. This is not bureaucracy. It is the work that prevents expensive failures.

Lateral Leadership in Agency Relationships

The dynamics of lateral leadership extend beyond internal organisational boundaries. If you are a client-side marketer managing agency relationships, you are leading laterally almost constantly. The agency team does not report to you. You cannot manage them in any traditional sense. But you need them to prioritise your work, bring their best thinking to your briefs, and care about your outcomes.

Having spent the majority of my career on the agency side, I can tell you exactly what separates clients who get great work from clients who get adequate work. It is not budget. It is not the size of the brand. It is whether the client makes the agency feel like a genuine partner or a vendor being managed at arm’s length.

The clients who get the best from their agencies are the ones who share context generously, give honest feedback without brutalising the relationship, and treat agency time as a finite resource to be respected rather than an unlimited service to be consumed. They lead laterally across the client-agency relationship in the same way that effective internal leaders lead across functions.

This matters commercially. When agencies are invested in a client’s success rather than just executing against a scope, the quality of thinking goes up. They bring ideas that were not asked for. They flag risks early. They push back on briefs that they believe will not work. That is the difference between a transactional relationship and one that actually drives outcomes.

The Pricing and Resource Dimension of Leading Laterally

One of the less obvious dimensions of lateral leadership is how it intersects with resource allocation and pricing decisions. When I was restructuring an agency that had been running at a significant loss, part of the problem was that different functions were making commitments to clients without understanding the margin implications for the business as a whole. The commercial team was pricing work without full visibility of delivery costs. The delivery team was scoping work without understanding what had been sold. These were not malicious decisions. They were the result of functions operating in silos without anyone leading laterally across the commercial chain.

BCG’s research on pricing strategy highlights how pricing decisions made in isolation from delivery reality consistently erode margin. The fix is not always a new pricing model. Sometimes it is simply ensuring that the people who price work and the people who deliver it are in genuine dialogue, with someone facilitating that conversation across functional lines.

In a marketing context, this plays out in how campaign budgets are allocated across channels and functions. If the media team, the content team, and the analytics team are each optimising for their own metrics without someone coordinating the whole, you end up with a budget that looks efficient at a line-item level but is inefficient at a campaign level. Lateral leadership is what prevents that fragmentation.

Building the Conditions for Lateral Leadership to Work

Individual skill only gets you so far. Lateral leadership is also a structural and cultural question. If an organisation is built in a way that makes cross-functional collaboration difficult, even the most skilled lateral leader will hit walls.

The structural conditions that support lateral leadership include clear ownership of outcomes at the initiative level rather than just at the function level, shared metrics that give different departments a reason to care about the same result, and forums where cross-functional issues can be surfaced and resolved without requiring escalation to the top of the org chart.

Forrester’s work on agile scaling identifies cross-functional alignment as one of the most consistent failure points when organisations try to move faster. The issue is rarely that people do not want to collaborate. It is that the systems and incentives do not make collaboration the path of least resistance.

The cultural conditions are harder to engineer but equally important. Organisations where lateral leadership thrives tend to have a norm of psychological safety, where people can raise concerns across functional lines without it being read as political. They tend to have leaders at the top who model the behaviour themselves, visibly deferring to expertise rather than rank. And they tend to have a shared language around commercial outcomes, so that conversations across functions start from a common understanding of what success looks like.

If you are trying to build these conditions from within a marketing function, the most effective starting point is usually a shared dashboard. Not a marketing dashboard. A business dashboard. One that shows the metrics that matter to sales, to finance, and to operations alongside the metrics that matter to marketing. When people see their numbers alongside each other, the conversation about alignment becomes much easier to have.

When Lateral Leadership Breaks Down

It is worth being clear-eyed about the conditions under which lateral leadership fails, because they are common.

The first failure mode is when someone mistakes influence for authority and starts behaving as though they have decision-making power they were never given. This creates resentment quickly. People who are led laterally can tell the difference between someone who is building genuine alignment and someone who is trying to co-opt their function into someone else’s agenda. The moment it tips into the latter, the relationship breaks down.

The second failure mode is when lateral leadership is used as a substitute for a conversation that should happen at a senior level. If two functions are fundamentally misaligned on priorities, no amount of lateral leadership will resolve it. At some point, someone with authority over both functions needs to make a call. Recognising when you have hit that ceiling, and escalating appropriately rather than trying to work around it indefinitely, is itself a form of good judgment.

The third failure mode is overextension. Lateral leadership is energetically expensive. It requires sustained attention to relationships, context, and communication across multiple workstreams simultaneously. The marketers who do it well tend to be deliberate about where they invest that energy. They pick the cross-functional relationships that matter most for the outcomes they are responsible for, and they invest deeply in those rather than spreading thinly across everything.

Understanding where lateral leadership fits within a broader growth framework matters. The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers how alignment, execution, and commercial thinking connect across the full arc of building a marketing operation that actually delivers.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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