HBR Guides to Performance Management Collection (4 Books) (HBR Guide Series)

Chapter 13

Manage Outside the Team

You’ve already done a lot of work to organize, motivate, and manage your team. But to meet your goals, it’s equally important to motivate and manage people outside your team, up and down the hierarchy.

MIT management professor Deborah Ancona calls this boundary management: You cultivate mutually beneficial relationships with colleagues elsewhere in the organization—particularly the people your team relies on for information and resources. If you don’t manage boundaries, team performance suffers.

Consider this cautionary tale: A branch manager at a regional bank had high aspirations (task goals) for innovative customer service, so he worked with his team of 10 employees to define them and put them into practice. ...