How Do I Lead People Who Don’t Report to Me?

Six ideas from Adam Grant’s conversation about effective teams, applied to leading people across reporting lines.

An October 2026 HBR IdeaCast conversation with Adam Grant, Why Great Teams Don’t Need to Like Each Other, prompted me to think about an especially demanding leadership situation: being responsible for people who do not report to you. They may be seconded from different functions, working on a transformation programme or contributing to a project alongside their regular jobs. They bring different expertise, loyalties and expectations. You need them to work together, but you cannot simply manage them as if they were your direct reports.

Grant’s discussion offers a more useful starting point than the familiar instruction to build a close-knit team. It asks what kinds of relationships, contributions and disagreements actually help people do good work together. The following six ideas are drawn from that conversation; the practical suggestions are my application to matrix leadership.

Do people need to be friends to work well together?

Grant discusses four kinds of relationship: associates, allies, pals and companions. They differ in what connects people. This is a valuable distinction for a matrix leader because a group of colleagues can be friendly without being committed to a shared result, or relatively unfamiliar with one another yet highly effective. You do not need everyone to become friends. You need people to recognise that their success depends, at least in part, on helping one another succeed.

A seconded team may begin as a collection of associates. Finance needs information from Operations; IT needs decisions from Commercial. The leadership opportunity is to help them become allies, not by insisting on greater social closeness but by making their shared stake in the outcome visible. The 6Cs of collaboration offers a related, though different, way of considering what level of working relationship a particular task needs.

Four ways to build allies

1. Ask what connects people now: Are they exchanging favours, pursuing a common result, or merely attending the same meetings?
2. Define a goal that requires joint success: Make it clear where separate functional outputs must come together.
3. Discuss mutual expectations: Ask what each person needs from colleagues and what others can reliably expect in return.
4. Do not force friendship: Create respectful, dependable working relationships and allow personal closeness to develop naturally, if it does.

How do I build commitment to the work, not just the team?

Grant distinguishes social cohesion, the degree to which people like one another, from task cohesion, their commitment to achieving something together. The distinction matters in a matrix because people may identify strongly with their home function and still make an excellent contribution to a temporary team. The task is to establish what they are jointly trying to achieve, why it matters and what they must be able to count on from one another.

There is, however, a practical complication. A shared purpose does not automatically resolve competing instructions or free up someone’s time. In a matrix, commitment must be supported by agreements with contributors and, where necessary, their functional managers. This is where creating commitment across reporting lines becomes more than an exercise in enthusiasm.

These are not six bureaucratic forms to complete. They are six conversations that prevent apparent agreement from turning into avoidable frustration. A team charter can capture the essentials, while my article on competing priorities explores what to do when the agreements come under pressure.

Four ways to build commitment to the work

1. Make the beneficiary visible: Connect the team’s work to the customer, colleague or stakeholder who will experience the outcome.
2. Identify genuine interdependence: Ask, “What can we only achieve by working together?”
3. Negotiate commitments openly: Involve functional managers when they control the capacity or priorities behind a promise.
4. Review agreements when circumstances change: Renegotiate early rather than waiting for a missed deadline.

How do I help people contribute rather than simply fit in?

Grant discusses onboarding and the distinction between culture fit and culture add. New colleagues should understand how the team works, but they should not be encouraged to suppress the very strengths and perspectives that made their contribution valuable. In a matrix, that risk is particularly acute: someone from Finance, HR, Technology or Operations may feel pressure to adopt the dominant language and assumptions of the project group.

The advantage of a team drawn from several functions is not that its members eventually think alike. It is that they bring different ways of noticing problems and opportunities. Effective onboarding therefore combines clarity about purpose and working expectations with a genuine invitation to contribute something distinctive. This connects with convening people across a matrix: bringing people into a room is not the same as enabling them to contribute.

Four ways to invite contribution

1. Start before the first meeting: Share the purpose, current decisions, key people and immediate expectations with incoming contributors.
2. Ask what each person brings: Invite them to identify expertise, experience or concerns the team might otherwise miss.
3. Make functional perspectives legitimate: Explicitly ask how a proposal looks from different parts of the organisation.
4. Agree common standards without demanding conformity: Be clear about reliability, respect and decision-making while preserving different approaches and opinions.

How do I make disagreement productive?

Grant’s discussion of conflict is particularly useful for matrix teams. Different functions often disagree because they are looking at different consequences of the same decision. Some disagreement improves thinking; other disagreement creates confusion or damages relationships. Treating all conflict as something to eliminate risks silencing the expertise the team was assembled to bring together.

The categories are useful diagnostic tools, not guarantees that task conflict is always beneficial. Debate can become personal, and disagreements about process can reflect incompatible demands from different managers. Before asking colleagues to “communicate better”, examine the organisational conditions behind the dispute. See resolving conflict between departments and how decisions get made in a matrix.

Four ways to make disagreement productive

1. Invite differences before decisions harden: Ask each function what risks, assumptions or consequences others may have overlooked.
2. Name the disagreement: Is it about the idea, the way of working or the relationship?
3. Separate structural tensions from personal behaviour: Resolve competing priorities or unclear authority at the right organisational level.
4. Close the debate clearly: Explain who decides, what has been agreed and how the team will proceed.

How do I value people who challenge constructively?

Grant also distinguishes between people who are agreeable and people who contribute generously. The colleague who is easy to get along with is not necessarily the one most committed to the team’s success. A “disagreeable giver” may be direct, sceptical or demanding, yet challenge an idea precisely because they care about the quality of the outcome. Conversely, someone who readily agrees may be protecting their own interests or avoiding a difficult conversation.

Matrix leaders can be particularly vulnerable to rewarding agreeableness because they have limited formal authority and depend on goodwill. Yet the team may need someone to say that the deadline is unrealistic, the customer has been misunderstood or an apparently simple decision will cause serious problems elsewhere. The issue is not whether the challenge feels comfortable but whether it is informed, constructive and directed towards the shared goal.

Four ways to value constructive challenge

1. Distinguish tone from intent: Explore what a difficult challenge is trying to protect or improve.
2. Ask for evidence and alternatives: Help challengers turn objections into useful contributions.
3. Recognise valuable dissent: Thank people who expose a risk or improve a decision, even when they complicate the discussion.
4. Challenge unhelpful behaviour too: Constructive intent does not excuse disrespect; give specific feedback to people you do not manage.

How do I create candour, not just politeness?

Grant’s final challenge concerns the difference between an apparently harmonious team and one in which people genuinely speak openly. Silence may mean agreement, but it may also mean people have learned that questioning decisions is unwelcome. This matters when contributors have different reporting lines: someone may worry that challenging the project leader will affect their reputation with a sponsor or functional manager.

Inviting candour is not enough. Leaders must demonstrate that they can receive it, acknowledge their own limitations and act on useful concerns. Psychological safety supports speaking up, but it does not remove the need for standards or accountability. In fact, open conversations make accountability without authority more achievable because people can surface difficulties before they become failures.

Four ways to build candour

1. Admit something you may have missed: Model the willingness to be corrected before asking others to do the same.
2. Ask for challenge explicitly: Try “What are we overlooking?” rather than “Does everyone agree?”
3. Respond well to unwelcome information: Explore the concern before defending your position.
4. Show that speaking up matters: Explain what changed because of a challenge, or why you chose a different course.

Ten questions for a matrix leader

The following questions bring the six ideas together. They are intended as a practical check, not another assessment model.

Three questions for reflection

1. Where am I expecting friendship or goodwill to do the work that shared goals and clear commitments should do?
2. Whose distinctive perspective or constructive challenge is our team currently missing, dismissing or discouraging?
3. What could I change in my own behaviour to help people who do not report to me become more effective allies?

Leading a matrix team is not about turning everyone into close friends, nor about imposing a single way of thinking. It is about helping people become allies around worthwhile work, contribute what makes them different and challenge one another without losing their shared commitment.

References

• Grant, A. (2026) ‘Why great teams don’t need to like each other’, HBR IdeaCast, October. Available at: https://hbr.org/podcast/2026/10/why-great-teams-dont-need-to-like-each-other (Accessed: 23 October 2026).
• Beal, D.J., Cohen, R.R., Burke, M.J. and McLendon, C.L. (2003) ‘Cohesion and performance in groups: a meta-analytic clarification of construct relations’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(6), pp. 989–1004.
• Edmondson, A. (1999) ‘Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), pp. 350–383.
• Jehn, K.A. (1995) ‘A multimethod examination of the benefits and detriments of intragroup conflict’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 40(2), pp. 256–282.