Managing Up When Leadership Is Stuck in the Weeds

The leaders supervising the work get lost in unnecessary details when we manage a project or advance a new initiative at work. How do you keep the project moving forward? The authors present three strategies to get leaders out of the weeds on a project, based on a real-life scenario of how a director at a tech company built a propensity model to streamline sales and presented it to his leaders as well as the salespeople using it.

The sales people at a global technology company were confused about which accounts to focus on. Mark is a rising director on the go-to-market team. The model took a lot of data and gave salespeople leads. While leaders were excited about the model and the problem it would solve, they often got stuck in the details of the presentation. Mark was getting upset. He needs to get his leaders out of the weeds so he can advance the work.