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.