I’ve had the pleasure of working with incredible cross-functional collaborators throughout my career—leaders who naturally orchestrate organizations to the shared company outcome while never attacking, always galvanizing. Between this reflection and catching up with former team members at Config who are now taking on higher level scope, cross-functional craft was top of mind for me.

Though different in output, leadership is a craft that requires develop skills to do effectively. The higher the altitude, the more ambiguous it becomes. In this issue, we’ll cover the levels of influence, the horizontal skills needed, and how you can develop your cross-functional craft.

Levels of influence

Titles and levels are different at every company. This is not and attempt to standardize but provide a high level concept of the layers of influence of lead individual contributors and managers.

• Level 1: Direct line with your team. May be an entry level manager or lead designer. Evaluation is focused on your team.

• Level 2: Direct team and cross-functional. May be a manager, senior manager, or lead. Evaluation spans across pillar and other working groups.

• Level 3: Direct team, cross-functional, and upward. May be a senior manager, director, or principal. Evaluates across and upward.

• Level 4: Direct team, cross-functional, upward, and outward. May be VP or distinguished individual contributor. Evaluates the entire company/pillar or industry.

Why does this matter? If have more scope at higher levels, you will be more directly responsible for the overall company outcome. This is true for people managers and individual contributors in lead roles. Now that you have a the lay of the land, let’s cover some of the horizonal skills.

Horizontal skills

A software engineer's vertical skills are knowledge in programming languages/frameworks, product development cycles, collaboration and communication, crafting scalable/reusable code architecture, etc. In most companies, you'll notice the vertical skill of your craft, though crucial, is only one fraction of the growth attributes for your career. Other performance indicators include horizontal skills that are required to successfully deliver outcomes. Let's look at a few focus areas on how you can grow in your horizontal skills.

Evaluating people outside of your craft

One of the most uncomfortable skills to learn initially is evaluating people outside of your craft. It initially feels like encroaching in other people's responsibilities, but you can't have healthy collaboration without shared perspectives. Evaluating people outside of your craft doesn't necessarily mean you're giving verbal feedback on how you think they're doing. The most productive start is to share your perspective instead of projecting onto others. Two phrases I use are, "My POV is" and, "The way I view it" (one I stole from Tim Cook). It defuses any personal criticism and allows conversation around your perspective.

As people develop trust with your craft of evaluation, people may look to you to help in their professional development. I believe that the best leaders are the ones who makes everyone around them better by how they conduct themselves—individual contributor and people manager.

Observing what "good" looks for others

When it comes to experience, the default is looking at our own direct experience—what we've done and learned. Though that's naturally the default, it's important to remember that indirect and observed experiences are also inputs to experience.

Indirect experience is what you learn from others without you experiencing it yourself. In the professional sports world, this might be a basketball player studying a hall of famers movies to add to their arsenal. In the professional world of software and tech, this is learning from other leaders in the industry. I have never worked at Airbnb and Dropbox, but I've gained a lot of indirect experience working with leaders from those organizations that at times it felt like I worked there.

Observed experience is when you witness other operators being great at their craft. I now have a high standard for Finance orgs and how they operate. I have no Finance background and honestly barely get my taxes done on time every year! Is my standard based on my own direct experience leading a Finance team? Absolutely not. My high bar for Finance is because I had the pleasure of working with an incredible Finance leader. I saw how he articulated his philosophy on where we invest, how to know when to spend more aggressively or cut back, and how effective everyone in his org was.

Leading organizations have a universal skill

Whether you're a designer, product manager, engineer, or marketer, leading organizations comes down to one skill...the ability to manage towards outcomes. You cannot design your way to business outcomes if you are not working well together. I've worked with a Head of Product who managed Engineering in the interim when the org was leaderless. I managed Marketing in the interim for a few months at Replit (it ultimately became permanent).

Developing the skills

Like any type of craft, cross-functional craft requires intention and deliberate practice to develop. Here are a few activities I do myself to develop my skills:

• Find a cross-functional mentor who can teach you about their craft. My mentors these days are executives, general managers, and CMOs.

• Keep a work journal. I use Obsidian to journal what I’ve learned from how people lead cross-functionally. Make notes on indirect and observed experiences to develop your way of operating.

• Immerse yourself in reading about the craft of other disciplines. Lenny’s Newsletter is my favorite for Product.

• Understand industry standards of success. You’d be amazed how much you can learn from reading Harvard Business Review, newsletters from experts, and even SEC S-1 filings when a company IPOs. If you don’t have time, use Perplexity.ai to harness that knowledge faster.

A mentor once said to me, “The role of leadership is going from heads down to heads up.” As you do, study those around you as you may be in a similar position to lead in that manner.

Weekly recap

• I joined Atlassian to lead AI Design and hiring a Senior Design Manager.

• Congrats to Visual Electric on launching VE2!

• I tried out Coral this week; very cool AI product to search and summarize documents

• Dive - Will Figma become an awkward middle ground? → A great post by Ridd