I’ve had a couple of TheSafe.Place coaching conversations lately that ended with the same sentence: “I can’t demand people do something, I’m not their manager.”
I get it. When you’re accountable for an outcome and nobody on the project reports to you, it feels like pushing on a door marked “pull.”
I can’t demand people do something, I’m not their manager.
That sentence mixes up two very different jobs. Untangling them changes how you approach being collaborative and productively so.
Two Different Jobs
Managing people is about the person: their performance, their growth, their comp, whether they show up and do the work they were hired to do, along with all the administrivia that comes with people management.
Leading people in a workstream is about the outcome: what needs to get done, why it matters, and whether it happens.
Sometimes one human does both, but plenty of the time they don’t. You can be a leader and lead without ever being a manager.
Leaders … Lead
In practice, a leader does three things:
- Drives collective agreement on what needs to get done and why. That covers the outline of the work, what success looks like, the outcome, the tactical action plan, the deliverables, and who agreed to own each one.
- Manages the process. Tool of choice: a spreadsheet, a doc, Asana, Jira, whatever your team will open (the best tool is the one people use and update, full stop).
- Provides regular status reports. Same rhythm, same place, every time, so nobody has to wonder where things stand.
Not one line of that list requires a direct report.
Tracking, The Part That Gets Missed
Capturing all of that, tracking it, and sharing status on a rhythm is The Mechanism. It’s how you influence, and yes, demand, execution well beyond any span of control.
Think about what changes once there’s a shared doc with a name next to every deliverable and a date next to every name. Add a status update landing in the Slack channel and everyone’s inbox every Friday, rolled up to your LT, and suddenly things are transparent, visible, and get done. And nobody was ordered to do anything.
What happened is that the gap between “we agreed to this” and “this is done” is now visible to everyone, including the people who agreed. Non-execution is now hard to miss and can be poked on (gently, this is not a shame board).
Visibility does the demanding for you.
Note: this only works if step one was real. A tracker full of names and actions people never agreed to is a list of your hopes with deadlines attached. Get the agreement first, then build the scaffolding around it.
Here’s what that looks like once it’s built: a worked status report example, activity, owner, due date, and status, rolled up into the summary that actually goes to your leadership team.
The Robots Do the Nagging
This is also where AI is incredibly efficient and effective.
A robot builds the template in about ninety seconds. It sits in on the meeting and turns the recording into a transcript everyone can read instead of a set of half-remembered notes. It runs on a schedule, posting to the Slack channel and sending the status email every Friday, whether you remembered to write it or not.
I used to treat all of this as slightly beneath the real work, it was that “ugh” task. A lot of PMMs quietly believe status updates and reminders are an inherently prickly activity. Someone chasing someone else. Someone feeling chased. They don’t have to be, you can remind a person of what they agreed to, quietly, before that status ever reaches a management chain, and there’s nothing hostile about it.
Here’s the part I like best: A scheduled reminder has no tone. It doesn’t get passive-aggressive and it doesn’t feel like a confrontation. There’s a date, there’s an action due, and this is the follow-up. Nobody’s editorializing, nobody can feel emotive about it. Robots just did robot things.
The human part stays yours: deciding what belongs on the plan in the first place, having the actual conversation when a deadline needs to move, and reading whether a “not yet” means “give it a day” or “we have a real problem.” The robots run the reminder, you still decide what to do when it fires.
The Great Org Chart Reduction
This is the part I care about the most, and it reaches well beyond one tricky project. The further you go in your career, the broader your influence has to be relative to your span of control.
Early on, most of what you need happens inside your own lane. Later it’s cross-functional partners, executives, agencies, customers, and people who will never report to you and don’t owe you a thing. The org chart stays roughly the same size … the list of people you need to move keeps growing.
If you’re waiting for the manager title to practice this, for me you’re chasing the wrong thing in the wrong way. You may get the title and find you never built the muscle: agreeing on a plan, tracking it, and reporting status, these are leadership activites that also make you a better manager. so start practicing now.
Managing Is Many Things
To be fair to managers: managing is a big job. Coaching, hiring, feedback, career paths, comp, hard conversations, and yes, demanding execution is one piece of it. It’s a real craft and in my experience we are all in continual learn mode and will never perfect the art.
(Managers reading this, I know I’m squeezing a lot into one paragraph, and there’s way more to it than that.)
Leadership and management overlap without being the same thing, so the next time you hear yourself say “I can’t demand,” run three checks: whether the group agreed to the plan, whether it’s written down where everyone can see it, and when status last went out. Usually at least one of those is a “not yet.”
If you aspire to be a manager, start by being a leader.
Adam