Managers manage people.

Not just the people who report to you—that’s the easy part. I’m talking about managing up to executives who’ve lost touch with reality, down to people doing the work, and sideways to peers who are simultaneously your collaborators and competitors in this weird corporate theatre we all participate in.

Andy Grove at Intel got this. That guy didn’t just run a chip company—he managed the entire ecosystem of relationships that could make or break Intel’s momentum. When he said, “Only the paranoid survive,” he was talking about the exhausting work of constantly reading the room, anticipating how personalities clash with processes, how egos interfere with execution.

Grove had to manage up to visionaries like Gordon Moore while translating their big ideas into concrete instructions for engineers who needed to know exactly what to build. He became a translator between strategy and reality.

When Relationship Management Falls Apart

I’ve watched this fail in real time. Organizations turn into isolated kingdoms where each department head only manages downward while treating other departments like enemy territory.

Yahoo’s collapse wasn’t just about missing mobile. Jerry Yang, smart as he was, couldn’t manage the web of relationships around him. When Microsoft offered $44.6 billion in 2008, Yang’s inability to handle board members, shareholders, and Microsoft executives led to one of the most expensive relationship failures in corporate history.

The Yahoo executives were all playing different games simultaneously, each convinced they were right. Technical competence without relationship awareness is just expensive chaos.

Managing Down: It’s More Than Just Delegation

This is the obvious one. Yes, you’re supposed to manage your team. But not just by assigning tasks or doing performance check-ins. Great downward management is about clarity, emotional intelligence, and building a culture where people want to take ownership.

Tim Cook is a master class here. When he took over from Steve Jobs, the world didn’t expect him to be flashy, and he wasn’t. But Cook excelled at managing Apple’s massive internal machine. He wasn’t just giving orders; he was listening, aligning, and ensuring everyone understood the mission.

He treated operational excellence as a team sport. Suppliers, engineers, product managers, and designers weren’t just executing, they were bought in. And he built that buy-in every day through measured, consistent leadership.

Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos had smart people working for her. Talented scientists, respected engineers. But she didn’t manage down, she manipulated down. Information was tightly controlled. Feedback loops were severed. Employees were kept in silos, afraid to speak up or challenge the narrative.

And when the narrative collapsed, there was no trust left to hold the company together.

Managing Sideways: The Hidden Power of Peer Influence

This is where many managers drop the ball. Lateral management, working effectively with your peers, can make or break an organization.

Let’s rewind to Microsoft, pre-Nadella. Back then, internal teams competed for resources like it was “Survivor: Redmond Edition.” The Windows group undercut the Office group. The cloud teams got blindsided by product teams defending their turf.

Managers were so focused on managing down that they ignored sideways altogether. The result? Internal politics that dragged down product innovation and slowed decision-making to a crawl.

Reed Hastings at Netflix had a leadership team that wasn’t just expected to deliver results; they were expected to challenge each other constructively. If someone sat quiet during a meeting and didn’t raise concerns, that was considered a failure too.

Lateral accountability was baked into the culture. Managers weren’t just collaborating, they were sharpening each other, raising the bar across the board.

So What Does “Managing People” Really Mean?

It means understanding that people exist at every level of your organization, and your ability to move the needle depends on how well you work with all of them.

1. Managing up means knowing how to frame, influence, and advocate.
2. Managing down means leading with clarity, consistency, and care.
3. Managing sideways means building coalitions, avoiding turf wars, and aligning efforts without pulling rank.

Ignore any one direction and the system wobbles.

The truth is, management isn’t just a job function. It’s a relational art form. And the best managers? They aren’t just directing traffic, they’re conducting an orchestra.

Leaders Manage Complexity Itself

There’s a common assumption in the corporate world that leaders are just upgraded managers. Same skills, more power. But anyone who’s ever sat in a real leadership chair knows that’s a fantasy. Management is about clarity. Leadership? That’s about complexity. And the best leaders don’t run from complexity; they learn to move with it. Here’s what I realised over time: A leader manages complexity. Not people—complexity.

Why Great Leaders Don’t Just Solve Problems, They Dance With Chaos. If a manager’s day revolves around the three E’s, efficacy, efficiency, and effectiveness, then a leader’s world starts where those things stop working. Leadership begins when the org chart buckles under pressure, when workflows break down, and when the outside world refuses to play by the rules you built for it.

This is what makes leadership fundamentally different. A manager operates a machine; a leader shapes an ecosystem.

People are how organizational chaos expresses itself. The patterns, tensions, and weird behaviours that emerge when human systems get too big for anyone to understand completely.

Let’s go back to Microsoft. Satya Nadella didn’t just become Microsoft’s CEO—he became their complexity manager. He didn’t walk into a failing company. Microsoft was massive, profitable, and still pushing products like Windows and Office. But it was also calcified. Teams competed instead of collaborating. Politics reigned. Internally, the culture was “know-it-all”, a badge of intelligence, but a barrier to growth.

Nadella didn’t try to optimize his way out of the problem. He reframed it. He shifted Microsoft’s DNA from knowing to learning. The “learn-it-all” mantra wasn’t a clever rebrand, it was a strategic intervention aimed at making the company resilient in the face of constant disruption. Azure’s rise wasn’t just about cloud infrastructure. It was about managing the complexity of thousands of minds moving in the same direction without stepping on each other’s toes.

He didn’t eliminate entropy. He built a system that could metabolize it.

When You Stop Fighting Complexity and Start Using It

Empowerment Isn’t Delegation, It’s Engineering. One of the most misunderstood parts of leadership is the word “empowerment.” People throw it around like it’s a motivational sticker. But real empowerment is architectural. It means designing systems where teams can make decisions, take risks, and recover from failure without bringing down the house.

Reed Hastings taught me something that violated everything I thought I knew complexity isn’t your enemy—stagnation is. While Blockbuster was optimizing for efficiency, Netflix was optimizing for adaptability.

Hastings didn’t try to reduce complexity; he built systems that could thrive within it. The Netflix culture deck wasn’t HR propaganda—it was complexity architecture. “Keeper test,” unlimited vacation, radical transparency—these weren’t feel-good policies but systematic approaches to managing organizational chaos.

Hastings created a company that could destroy its own successful models (DVD-by-mail to streaming to original content) because he built adaptation into the organizational DNA. Most companies die when they have to reinvent themselves. Netflix built reinvention into its identity.

When Culture Becomes the Battlefield

Leadership is culture work. And culture is messy, because people are messy.

Look at the cautionary tale of WeWork under Adam Neumann. At one point, it was valued at nearly $47 billion. Investors couldn’t throw money at it fast enough. But beneath the glow of kombucha taps and mission statements was a complete failure to manage complexity.

Neumann was a charismatic leader who inspired, but he didn’t lead in the true sense. He created a cult of personality rather than a resilient organization. Instead of empowering teams, he concentrated power. Instead of building a system that could evolve, he fed the illusion that he alone was the vision. And when the complexity of a ballooning global footprint, a tech-bubble narrative, and a messy business model finally caught up with him, it all came crashing down.

Culture that isn’t designed to handle entropy will crack the second it’s tested.

When Control Becomes Delusion

I’ve also seen spectacular failure. Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos thought she could manage complexity through secrecy, compartmentalization, and force of will. She tried to reduce organizational chaos through control instead of building systems that could handle it.

Theranos became a textbook case of what happens when leaders confuse managing complexity with suppressing it. Holmes managed people through intimidation and isolation, but she never managed the underlying complexity of developing revolutionary medical technology. The technical challenges weren’t going to be solved by better people management—they required handling the complex interactions between scientific research, regulatory requirements, market expectations, and technological limitations.

The company collapsed because Holmes fundamentally misunderstood that complexity can’t be controlled—only channelled.

Evolution: The Final Marker of Leadership

Ultimately, great leaders don’t just keep things running. They evolve themselves, their teams, and their entire organizations.

Take IBM under Ginni Rometty. While not every strategic bet paid off, she led a massive pivot from hardware to cognitive computing and AI. That’s not a switch you flip. That’s a long, painful molting process. And yet, under her leadership, IBM exited legacy businesses, bet big on Watson, and laid the foundation for long-term transformation.

Contrast that with Kodak, once the king of photography. They had the technology. They even invented digital photography. But leadership refused to cannibalize their existing business. They managed for efficiency in a world that demanded evolution. And they paid the price.

What I Actually Know Now

The uncomfortable truth is that most Organisations are playing the wrong game. They’re optimizing for efficiency in systems that require adaptability. They’re managing down in structures that demand multidirectional relationship navigation.

The future belongs to people who can simultaneously architect relationships and choreograph complexity—people who understand that every human interaction is a complexity node, and every complexity challenge shows up through human relationships.

Because the organizations that actually thrive aren’t the ones with the best managers or the best leaders—they’re the ones with people who understand that management and leadership are just different ways of expressing the same fundamental challenge: making sense of human systems complex enough to change the world.