Why peer relationships are the hardest to manage

When I taught my live management course for the last time, I asked where people struggled most. Managing up? Managing down? The answer surprised me. Almost everyone said the same thing: working with peers. Other EMs, cross-functional leads, the people they had no authority over and no obligation to report to.

I've been thinking about why that is.

Managing down comes with leverage. You're directly responsible for your team, you have authority, and your ideas and direction land with weight. That doesn't mean people always agree or that it's easy, but there's a shared understanding that you own the mandate, you set priorities, and the team operates in your context.

Managing up comes with a playbook. You know your audience is more senior, so you lead with trade-offs and get to the point first before expanding. You're crafting your message for someone who has less context than you and needs the digest version, and there's a rhythm to it once you learn what they care about.

Both directions assume some level of contextual understanding. Your manager knows the org and has a stake in your team's success; your team knows you, they're in the same meetings, they see the same roadmap.

Sideways is different. When you work sideways, that assumption falls apart. You're part of a broader org and you might share a manager or a goal, but you're not living in each other's context. You're focused on your team's deliverables, they're focused on theirs, you've got a deadline and so do they. "We have a deadline to hit, so we can't budge." Yeah. So does everyone.

That's not selfishness. It's the nature of the structure. Everyone is holding the line for their own team, no one has authority to tell the other what to do, and you're both trying to ship. When your priorities collide, the usual shortcuts don't work. Two teams need the same shared resource, one EM has promised a date and the other has promised a different date, and both are right from their own vantage point. "We can't move" meets "we can't move," and someone has to find a different lever.