Most leaders start investing in relationships when they need something.
That’s usually too late.

In a recent piece, I wrote about why influence matters more than positional power in modern leadership. This is the other half of that conversation: how influence actually gets built.

By the time a project is blocked, another department won’t cooperate, or a boss is frustrated, you’re no longer building influence. You’re trying to spend “relationship capital” you haven’t earned yet.

The leaders who are consistently good at managing up and across understand something most people miss: influence gets built long before it’s needed. Not through charisma. Not through politics. Through small, deliberate actions repeated consistently over time.

Investments.

Influence Starts Before the Ask

Relationships are like a bank account. You have to make deposits before you can make withdrawals.

Most people get this backwards. They invest in a relationship when they need something from it. By then, the ask feels transactional, even when it’s reasonable.

I worked with a leader at CDnow who never built relationships with his peers. He was smart and capable. We had seven hundred people in one building with a full cafeteria. He had every opportunity to get to know the people he depended on most. He just chose not to. He never saw it as part of his job.

And he got away with it for a while because when things got stuck, he escalated directly to the CEO.

Then one day it didn’t work anymore. He had to report to me, and I told him he had to figure it out with his peers on his own.

Without relationships to fall back on, he had nothing. He quit.

The leaders who are effective across functions started building before there was any immediate reason to. Peer one-on-ones. Small favors. Asking how a kid’s baseball game went. How a sick dog is doing. Showing interest in someone else’s priorities before asking them to care about yours.

That’s how influence compounds. And how you start to “manage across.”

Know What They Actually Need

Your boss is dealing with pressures and constraints you probably don’t fully see. One of the fastest ways to lose influence is to make every conversation about what you need. Meanwhile, they’re sitting in rooms you never see, dealing with pressures you may not know exist.

The leaders who “manage up” well pay attention to what their boss talks about. What they get measured on. What creates pressure from above. What problems they’re trying to solve.

I worked with a team whose leader came from a sales background and suddenly found himself overseeing the product team. He knew he wasn’t deeply experienced in that functional space. The team knew it too.

At first, every conversation reinforced that gap, which made him defensive. Not because the ideas were wrong. Because the approach felt like he was constantly being challenged. He heard his team telling him he was in over his head and they were making decisions without him.

Eventually, the team changed their approach.

Instead of conclusions and fully formed plans, they started bringing questions.

Could this help solve the adoption problem you mentioned last week?
Would this simplify the experience for the segment sales keeps struggling with?

Their ideas were often the same.
The conversation became collaborative because the leader no longer felt like he was being corrected in his own meeting.

Influence isn’t just having the right answer. It’s understanding how the person across from you experiences the conversation.

Managing Across Changes the Equation

Your peers have their own goals, timelines, pressures, and priorities. They are not waiting to help you succeed.

The instinct in cross-functional conflict is escalation. Find someone higher up and force alignment through authority.

That works once, maybe twice.
After that, people stop wanting to work with you.

A Customer Service leader I worked with constantly needed tighter timelines from an engineering team that was underwater and chronically behind schedule. Instead of escalating, she offered two people from her own team to help with QA and documentation during their next release cycle. She reduced the pressure they were under before asking for more from them.

That changed the relationship.

Both teams started treating each other like partners instead of obstacles.

You can’t compel peers to prioritize your work.

You can make it easier for them to say yes.

Remote Work Changed the Medium, Not the Principles

In an office, some rapport happens organically. Lunches, hallway conversations, parking lot chats, beers after hours. Remote work removed most of that.

What used to happen naturally now has to happen intentionally. Most organizations never adjusted. They filled calendars with status meetings and wondered why collaboration got harder.

I ask leaders how often they meet one-on-one with the peers they depend on most.
The answer is almost always never. Then they’re surprised when cross-functional work feels difficult and transactional.

Peer one-on-ones are one of the most underused tools in a distributed team. Not quarterly, not when something breaks. Regularly, before you need anything. Schedule them with the peers you depend on most, not just your direct reports. Own the invite. Write a simple agenda.

I worked with a marketing team that was constantly in conflict with sales. The marketing manager started meeting regularly with the VP of sales to share what his team was asking for and what marketing already had planned. The sales leader had no idea his team's requests had started crowding out lead generation work. For the first time, both sides were working from the same information. The friction didn't disappear overnight. The conversations got better.

The rapport you need in a crisis gets built before the crisis.

Remote work just makes that reality harder to ignore.

When Influence Doesn’t Work

Not every relationship responds to investment.

I had a boss once who operated almost entirely through positional power. I invested heavily over a long period. Tried to find common ground. Tried to understand what mattered to him.

One day he told me he could see what I was trying to do. He said that I was trying to change him and that it wasn’t going to work.

I quit three weeks later.

Some people interpret rapport as manipulation. Others are so authority-driven they won’t respond to influence unless power backs it up.

At that point, the skill shifts from influence to negotiation. Understand what they want, find the overlap, and frame your asks in terms of their priorities instead of yours.

And sometimes, despite all of that, the situation isn’t fixable.

Knowing when to stop investing and redirect your energy is part of managing up too.

What This Means if You’re the CEO

Most of the tactics above apply to leaders who have a boss to manage up to and peers to manage across. If you're the CEO, that dynamic looks different. You probably don’t have much managing up to do anymore (unless you were hired by a Board).

Your team does.

The best executives intentionally build environments where managing across is expected and rewarded. Shared goals. Shared language. Clear values. Space for disagreement without punishment. A culture where people are encouraged to solve problems together instead of escalating them upward.

Without that foundation, every cross-functional interaction starts feeling political. Departments optimize for themselves. Information gets guarded instead of shared. And without clear delegation and accountability, every dispute, every misalignment, every problem that can't be resolved between peers ends up back on the CEO's desk.

The leaders below you are either building those relationships or they aren't. How you structure the organization determines which one is easier.

The Leaders Who Are Best at This Usually Started Earlier

The people who are consistently good at managing up and managing across usually aren’t the most charismatic.

They’re the ones who started building relationships before they needed anything. Who scheduled the one-on-one nobody else thought to schedule. Who showed up with something useful before making an ask. Who owned mistakes quickly instead of explaining them.

None of those things feel urgent in the moment.

Until suddenly they are.

And by then, the leaders who invested early already have something to stand on.