The three levels of relationships that exist for all employees, at any level, are:
1. with those who are above you in the hierarchy
2. those who are below you
3. those who are at the same level as you
In my experience, people tend to be good in one or two of these “directions” but rarely at all three. For instance, you might have a mid-level manager who’s really cruel and demanding of his subordinates but liked by him superiors and colleagues in the same role because he’s a suck-up (assuming they don’t see through this!)
Or you might have a group of mid-level supervisors who exclude one member of their cohort because that person has a reputation for always running to higher level people to share what’s being discussed. Or someone else might be excluded because they’re very self-centered and end up making any discussion about themselves creating a negative relationship with people at the same level.
Most people would probably assume that the most important relationship is with the people above you – your own boss and others who are higher level managers – but I actually think the opposite is true.
The most important relationship is with the people below you. This is the “inverted pyramid” theory of leadership/management and means that the people who most often deal with your customers – front line service reps, delivery drivers, shelf stockers and others who are the “face” of the organization – are the most important people and therefore, the most important relationship that you want to be a good one if you’re higher up in the hierarchy.
(Separate post maybe but I recently came across the concept of “bullshit jobs” which says that a lot of higher level positions are actually unnecessary and exist just to exist which is a very interesting take that I might explore further at some point.)
Another aspect of the “different relationship levels” idea is about feedback. Many organizations only use top-down feedback where a superior ranks and reviews a subordinate. But as the left-wing commies at <checks notes> Harvard Business Review point out – traditional performance appraisals are an idea on the way out as a third of companies are abandoning them in favour of more instantaneous, informal check-ins with employees.
This is why I have been a long-time advocate for 360 feedback where the feedback isn’t an old-fashioned, top-down process but instead, all three relationship levels are taken into account as colleagues and subordinates are enabled to give feedback which provides insight into which of the three levels of relationship someone might excel at and which ones might need work – something that’s not captured in traditional performance review processes.
This also ensures that the people who work most closely together are providing feedback – I’ve had situations where off-site managers are doing my performance review whereas the people who I worked with every single day weren’t included in the process and unable to give feedback (although I did make sure to ask them informally as frankly, I knew they would have more insight into my work than someone who I saw maybe once a week for a meeting or whatever.).
I’ve asked multiple outside consultants who’ve been brought into my workplace to give supervisory/leadership/management training and all of them think that having a 360 degree review process is a great way to ensure that the feedback process isn’t just top-down and based on a single direction of relationship (they might not use the same terminology I do!).
Does your organization use 360 feedback? If not, why not? Are they afraid of the feedback they’ll get if the microscope points the other way?
