The most effective managers connect the dots between executive priorities, team development, and individual performance - creating value at all levels of the organization simultaneously.
But how do you balance these competing demands when your time and attention are limited? We use a three-level framework that helps managers navigate this challenge and maximize their impact throughout the organization - while making their own jobs more sustainable and rewarding.
Reactive vs. Integrated Management
In a given day, managers naturally find themselves prioritizing one level of their organization at the expense of others. Sometimes you need to prepare high-level forecasting updates for executives. Other times, you need to unblock team members with coaching and development. And frequently, individual contributors need specific help closing their next deal.
This fragmented approach can create a constant sense of whiplash, with managers bouncing between competing priorities without ever feeling like they're making meaningful progress on any front. The result? Burnout for managers, disengagement for teams, and missed opportunities for the organization.
The opportunity isn't in better time management, but rather finding integration across these levels so that efforts in one area naturally strengthen the others. When managers fail to connect these dots, they end up working in isolation, missing the natural synergies that make leadership both more effective and more sustainable.
Three Levels of Managerial Impact
Based on our research and experience working with successful leaders organizations, we focus on three distinct levels where managers need to create value:
With Executives: Building Leadership Credibility
At the executive level, the primary currency is credibility. Leaders above you need two critical things:
First, they need evidence that the organization’s plan is both strategic and achievable. This means capturing and communicating success stories that validate strategic decisions and demonstrate forward momentum. These anecdotes are important proof points that build confidence in the organization's direction.
Second, executives need accurate forecasting. They need to know that there’s alignment across the organization on what to expect, which builds credibility for themselves and their team that they can use to drive conversations constructively.
When you deliver on these needs, you transform from a tactical manager into a strategic partner, giving leadership confidence that you understand both the big picture and the details.
With the Team: Leveraging Your Time
At the management level – your direct sphere of influence – effective leadership is about leverage. This involves managing pipeline, coaching reps, understanding opportunities and challenges, and leveraging your time to intervene in those areas in the ways that are specifically most effective to deliver on your team’s commitments.
The opportunity here is recognizing patterns across your team that inform where your time is best spent. The stronger your personal pattern recognition becomes, the more leverage you have to develop targeted interventions that address common challenges and opportunities.
This level can include public recognition, too: identifying what people did uniquely well and excellently to make things happen. By identifying and celebrating success in front of the team, you not only motivate individuals but also create models for others to follow — so you don’t have to personally work through the same challenges and can instead focus on the next level of growth.
With Individuals: Accelerating Performance & Growth
As a manager of individual contributors (or even other managers), you’ll often have opportunities to help them close their next deal immediately by using your expertise to provide specific, actionable insights that address their challenges.
Leverage here is in team-specific assets that are unique to the challenges facing your ICs: shareable case studies focused on the specific funnel stage they're blocked at, quotes and tactics and talking points that people have been having success with, or recommendations that have everything to do with getting things unblocked from their stage to the next.
This gives you the tools to empower individual contributors with immediate, practical help that directly applies to the deals they're working on right now — and ladders up to the additional impact of revenue, profit, and successful win stories.
The Integration Advantage
What makes this three-level approach so powerful isn't just addressing each level separately – it's finding the integration points where they naturally reinforce each other. When integration happens, each level becomes easier to manage:
- Success stories from individual contributors become proof points for executive discussions
- Pattern recognition across deals informs both strategic forecasting and tactical recommendations
- Strategic priorities from leadership help focus coaching efforts and individual support
This integration creates a virtuous cycle where work at one level naturally feeds into the others, reducing redundancy and creating a sense of flow for managers. Instead of feeling pulled in different directions, you begin to see how each activity serves multiple purposes simultaneously.
This helps managers get more leverage from the time they’re already spending, strengthen relationships across all levels, and experience fewer surprises that derail progress. Managers who master this integrated approach find themselves less stressed and more effective, able to shift smoothly between strategic and tactical thinking because they see the connections between them.
Implementing the Integrated Approach
So how do you put this framework into practice? Though there are patterns, it’s not one-size-fits-all. Every organization has its own culture, workflows, terminology, and priorities that must be respected and incorporated.
Here's the practical approach we take in our Diagnostics to get started:
- Map your organizational landscape: Understand the company goals and values, big initiatives, and strategic integration that drive the executive level. This gives you context for what matters at the leadership level.
- Identify success patterns: Look for patterns in existing deals and what success hinges on to inform both your coaching approach and the assets you create for individual contributors.
- Gather bottom-up input: Get input from the team on what makes this most useful to them, what they're proud of, what would help them close deals and send messages and relate, where the gaps are that they see. This ensures that your support at the individual level actually addresses real needs.
- Clarify management priorities: Define how you want to use this information, what visibility you need, what recognition you want to be able to give, and what you would do with team members if you had more time. This helps you optimize your own effectiveness at the management level.
By addressing each level while looking for integration points, you create a system where success at one level strengthens the others. Improved individual performance leads to better team results, which provides more positive stories to share with leadership, which in turn increases your credibility and influence.
The Future of Connected Management
As organizational decision-making becomes even more complex and fast-paced, the ability to connect dots across levels becomes increasingly valuable. Managers who can simultaneously satisfy the needs of executives, teams, and individuals while maintaining their own well-being will stand out as organizational force multipliers.
This approach brings out the best of both systematic thinking and emotional intelligence – understanding the processes that drive success and the human factors that people need to operate well at different levels. Technology can help by surfacing patterns and automating routine tasks, but the core skill is human: the ability to navigate stakeholder needs and create solutions that work and strengthen relationships and credibility.
How are you showing up integrated in your leadership role?
