Play Your Part

Top-down Meets Bottom-up

Two weeks ago, just before taking off on my annual retreat, I had three separate conversations that all ended up covering the same topic. And my standing rule is that whenever that happens, the topic jumps the queue to be my next post.

A standard question I used to ask newer employees at Microsoft was, “When do you become a leader at Microsoft?” The answers typically fell into one of the following three buckets:

1. “When I reach level X.”

2. “When I become a manager (Level 1 | Level 2 | …).”

3. “When I’ve been at the company for X years.”

It’s actually somewhat of a trick question, because you don’t become a leader. You seize enough leadership opportunities to become recognized as a leader. You are promoted into a senior level in an organization (either as a manager or as an individual contributor) by having a track record of demonstrated leadership.

Organizational leaders are the individuals that are higher up in the organizational structure. They have “leader” in their name. These are the obvious leaders of the organization. The CEO, the executive leadership team, the vice presidents, the department heads, etc. all demonstrate top-down leadership. These organizational leaders lay out the vision, the direction, and the strategy at the top, and then this clarity cascades down through the organization. When Bill Gates got several thousand employees into a conference hall in 1995 to tell us that we were restructuring our division to bet big on the internet, that was top-down leadership.

With the organizational leaders in place dispensing top-down leadership, is the leadership story complete? Not even close. Far more leadership is coming from below. Everyone else from first line employees up through middle management demonstrate bottom-up leadership. They initiate grassroots efforts that start at the bottom of the organization and, through progressive successes, gain momentum to be propelled up the organizational hierarchy. When Xbox engineers partnered with disabled gamers to highlight the opportunity for a more inclusive controller design that resulted in the creation of the Xbox Adaptive Controller, that was bottom-up leadership.

A successful organization relies on a healthy combination of top-down leadership and bottom-up leadership. So don’t tell yourself you’re not a leader yet just because you’re not high enough up the corporate ladder. You are capable of leading wherever you choose to invest the focus, energy, and time. And you can start leading today. You don’t need the title. You don’t need permission. All you need is the initiative, because no one is going to tell you to lead.

By the Numbers

I remember a developer approaching me about an idea he had. He was reaching out to me because he wanted advice on how to sell his idea. He said, “I emailed Satya but never heard anything back.” I visibly chuckled at that, not to humiliate this engineer, but to hopefully help create a moment of insight for him. I said, “There are 140,000 capable employees at Microsoft. If each of us had one idea that we pitched to Satya, it would inundate him, right?” As it goes for Satya, so it goes for anyone else in your management chain. By design, in any management structure, there are more subordinates (not using that as a demeaning term) than managers. So there is more sustainability in empowering the masses to make change than the fewer managers.

I was introduced to the phrase “nail it, then scale it” by one of my colleagues a while ago. I had practiced this for decades, before this succinct phrase was shared with me. For any new idea that you want to test out, you start by piloting it cheaply to a small slice of the intended target audience. You iterate in this more controlled setting, adding details on-demand, until you “nail it.” Then you use this success to justify additional investment, expanding the pilot to a larger portion of the intended audience. As each successive expansion in scope demonstrates wins, you are validating the worth of this program and getting buy off from management for continued growth. Bottom-up leadership uses the “nail it, then scale it” approach.

Grassroots efforts arise from the population. Some don’t resonate as broadly with the population, and they wither and die. Others gain broader appeal and, as they do so, grow out amongst the org, and up the organizational chain, increasing their visibility. This is the natural progression of bottom-up efforts. One of the roles of management is to help with the synthesis of bottom-up efforts, and either align them to existing top-down efforts, or recast the bottom-up effort as a new top-down direction that the organizational leaders should officially espouse.

If an organization is over-reliant on top-down leadership, then they run the risk of ignoring the voice of the organization, and also won’t be able to keep up with the organization. By encouraging bottom-up leadership, individuals throughout the organization are empowered to step up. And this decentralized leadership will create growth in a very sustainable and scalable way.

Top-down ensures alignment across the organization. Bottom-up ensures relevance to the organization.

The Best Example

James Doerr tells the story behind Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in his book, “Measure What Matters.”¹ OKRs are a goal-setting framework used to align teams and track progress. In this system, there is a standard format that all employees use to describe their objectives for a given period (typically three or six months), and the key results for each objective that will validate that the objective has been met. And there is a tool that all of these OKRs are entered into and linked together. This codification is what makes OKRs such a terrific example of the power of combining top-down and bottom-up leadership.

James describes this superpower of OKRs. “With OKR transparency, everyone’s goals -- from the CEO down -- are openly shared. Individuals link their objectives to the company’s game plan, identify cross-dependencies, and coordinate with other teams. By connecting each contributor to the organization’s success, top-down alignment bring meaning to work. By deepening people’s sense of ownership, bottom-up OKRs foster engagement and innovation.” (emphasis mine) He then celebrates the value of empowering everyone. “Good ideas aren’t bound by hierarchy. The most powerful and energizing OKRs often originate with frontline contributors.” And then James brings it all together by highlighting the need for both. “High-functioning teams thrive on a creative tension between top-down and bottom-up goal setting, a mix of aligned and unaligned OKRs.”

Choose Your Battles

A wise manager of mine at Microsoft described the role of management as, “Letting people down at a rate that they can tolerate.” Yes, there’s a coldness to this definition, but it does succinctly capture the management trend in the corporate context of increasing efficiency for increased growth. “We’re cutting back on the food we provide at our conferences.” “We’re streamlining our expensing process by reducing the scope of allowed expenses.” “We’re unable to offer performance raises this year because of our profit challenges this year.”

Employees often take issue with such “let downs”, and now thanks to websites like Blind², people have a place to commiserate on the decline of perks. But, unfortunately, most of the time the collective focus is on the overall trend of let downs, with questions like, “Is this the straw that breaks the camel’s back?”, “Does this let down cross the time?”, and “Have I had enough of this?”

Let’s instead look at this situation through a top-down / bottom-up lens. Whenever management makes a change, they are making a top-down decision. And whenever employees are presented with such a change, they have an opportunity to make a bottom-up response. If every management change is met with an employee response, then management will over time deafen to the reaction. But if only specific changes yield responses, then management is more apt to listen to these. After all, they are trying to make these changes tolerable, per the above definition.

This is where the wisdom of “choosing your battles” comes in. And this is where the power of bottom-up can be demonstrated. When you are faced with a top-down change that you don’t like, what do you do about it?

1. Ask yourself how much you care about this change. In the grand scheme of things, does this rise above the noise to be something truly irksome?

2. Poll your colleagues to see if they are similarly bothered. Are the majority of the people around you also unhappy about this change? Work together with this group to create a thoughtful response.

3. Vet your response with near management. Between you and the point in the org where this change emanated from, are there managers that share your concern? These managers will be able to add context to your response that will increase the likelihood of it resonating with the initiators of this change.

4. Leverage near management to make an official response. With the momentum built through colleagues and involved management, and with a clear articulation of the concerns, it’s time to present your pushback to the change creators.

This is how you play your part in the leadership of an organization. You won’t always get your way, but you will always gain experience in how to have a productive engagement and earn trust with upper management. My closing words in my final “Ask Jeff Anything”³ session at Microsoft were, “If you are really smart about choosing your battles, you can bend anything.”

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Footnotes

1. Measure What Matters, John Doerr (Goodreads)

2. Welcome to Blind

3. “Transcend the Company” section of Raising My Voice