Lateral Leadership
This article is a summary of a presentation by Sandy Ruhl, RN, and Yule Lee, MD, MPH, at the 2024 Pacific Coast Conference.
In our workplace, we often hear and directly experience vertical leadership. Yet, we rarely notice how lateral leadership impacts our day-to-day work or how we exert this type of leadership in the document development process. Equipped with years of experience as a medical writer and a project manager, Sandy Ruhl and Yule Lee, respectively, shared what lateral leadership is and how we can develop or hone relevant skills and behaviors to be effective lateral leaders.
Defined as the ability to influence colleagues across different teams or departments to achieve goals, lateral leadership is primarily based on building trust, fostering open communication, and developing strong interpersonal skills. This type of leadership involves collaboration among colleagues, building relationships, open discussions, diverse perspectives, and collective decision making.
Sandy and Yule guided the attendees through different steps of building coalition, trust, credibility, and problem-solving as well as approaches to conflict prevention and resolution. They recommended identifying appropriate people to form a body of authority and involving key decision makers early on in the document development process. To build trust as a key to leadership, they asked the attendees to develop or hone their sense of integrity by following through their promises, build credibility by demonstrating technical expertise, strive for open communication, appreciate team members and enable them, own and analyze mistakes, share lessons learned, and finally make communications clear, concise, and easy to understand.
Yule and Sandy reminded the attendees of the importance of problem-solving and decision-making skills as key features of lateral leadership. In doing so, they mentioned how focusing on actions to resolve an identified problem and setting aside biases as well as brainstorming for ideas and solutions based on deductive reasoning for making an inference based on widely accepted facts or premises could lead to effective resolution of issues.
Their well-rounded presentation ended by two key messages; one on highlighting the power of negotiations not just as a tool for manipulation but as a way to reach to solutions that would benefit all parties involved, and the other on clarifying boundaries and scope of responsibilities when there is an overlap in document ownership. The useful information Sandy and Yule provided was further enriched by comments and experiences the attendees shared about the main aspects of lateral leadership, leaving everyone more confident to tap into the leader in themselves next time they lead a document through the development process.
About the author: Fae Koohestani, PhD, MS, is a director of medical writing at IDEAYA Biosciences. She earned her PhD and MS from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
