How to Delegate to Someone Who Doesn’t Report to You

Delegating to your direct reports is simple. They report to you, so when you assign work, they know it’s part of their job. But with peers, it’s trickier. Take what happened to Preston, who had recently stepped into a VP role leading Customer Experience. His first major initiative involved rejiggering workflows across Sales, Support, and Product—all overseen by fellow VPs with aggressive quarterly targets of their own. “I used to just tell my team what to do,” he told me. “But now I spend half my day convincing colleagues to prioritize my projects alongside theirs.”