Build a relationship with your manager. Develop your team. Get a mentor above you. Invest in the people below you. Most leadership development advice is oriented vertically. The vertical axis of your organization gets all the attention and for good reason. Those relationships matter enormously.
But there’s a whole other dimension that rarely gets the same airtime: the horizontal one. The peers sitting next to you on the org chart. The managers of other departments whose work intersects with yours. The counterparts in other functions you occasionally collaborate with and more frequently depend on.
In my experience, your peer network built deliberately across the organization is often the single biggest determinant of whether you can actually get things done at the mid-level. And it is almost universally underdeveloped.
Why We Neglect It
It’s not hard to understand why lateral relationships get less investment. There’s no formal accountability structure pushing you toward them. Your manager doesn’t evaluate you on how well you know your peers. There’s no annual review category for cross-functional relationship quality. The incentives, such as they are, all point up and down.
There’s also a competitiveness dynamic that mid-level managers don’t always want to admit exists. The people sitting at your level in the org are, in some sense, competing with you for resources, for visibility, for the next opportunity. Investing in those relationships can feel counterintuitive, even naive. Why would I make my peer more effective when we’re both angling for the same promotion?
I think that’s a short-sighted read of the situation, and I’ll explain why. But first it’s worth acknowledging that the competitive tension is real. Pretending it doesn’t exist doesn’t make you more collaborative; it just makes you less honest about what you’re navigating.
What Peer Relationships Actually Do For You
Let me be specific about the practical value here, because this isn’t just about being friendly for its own sake.
They get things done that authority can’t. At the mid-level, you don’t have the organizational authority to simply direct other departments. If you need something from finance, legal, operations, or any other function that doesn’t report to you, you are dependent on goodwill, reciprocity, and relationship. The manager who has invested in those relationships across the organization will consistently get faster responses, more cooperation, and better outcomes than the one who only reaches out when they need something.
They give you early information. Organizational changes, shifting priorities, new initiatives, budget movements. These things rarely arrive fully formed. They travel through informal networks first, often weeks or months before anything is announced officially. If you have strong peer relationships across the org, you are more likely to have visibility into what’s coming. That’s not gossip, it’s situational awareness, and it directly affects your ability to lead your team effectively.
They make you better at your job. The people doing adjacent work to yours often have perspective on your function that you can’t get from inside it. A peer who will tell you honestly that your team’s output creates problems downstream is more valuable than a dozen performance reviews. If you’ve built enough trust with peers to have real conversations, you’ll learn things about your blind spots that no upward feedback process will surface.
They build your reputation without self-promotion. Reputation at the mid-level travels horizontally as much as vertically. Your manager knows what you do. But the broader perception of you as a leader (your judgment, your reliability, your character under pressure) is shaped significantly by how your peers experience you. Build strong lateral relationships and your reputation builds itself, through the natural conversations people have about who they like to work with and why.
On the Competition Question
Back to the competitive tension I mentioned earlier. I want to address it directly because I think it trips people up.
Yes, your peers are sometimes competing with you. Yes, there are situations where one of you will get a promotion or an opportunity that the other won’t. That’s real, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But here’s what I’ve observed over a couple of decades in mid-level roles: the managers who treat their peers primarily as competition tend to underperform over time, even when they’re individually talented. And the managers who invest genuinely in lateral relationships tend to accumulate influence and opportunity at a rate that more than compensates for any edge they might have given away.
The reason is simple. Organizations run on trust and collaboration far more than org charts suggest. The person who is genuinely well-regarded across functions, who peers actually want to work with, ends up being called in on more important work, included in more critical conversations, and considered for more opportunities, because they’ve demonstrated they can operate across boundaries. That’s a skill senior leaders actively look for when they’re filling roles above the mid-level.
So investing in peer relationships isn’t naive. It’s a longer-term play than hoarding your competitive advantage, but it tends to pay off more reliably.
Building It Deliberately
Most peer relationships at the mid-level happen by accident. You end up working on a project together, or you sit near each other, or you both arrived at the company at the same time. That’s fine as a starting point, but accidental relationships are shallow ones. Building a real peer network requires some intentionality.
Start with adjacent functions. You don’t need to be close with every peer in the organization. Start with the people whose work most directly intersects with yours: the functions you depend on and who depend on you. Invest in those relationships first. Understand their priorities, their constraints, what makes their job harder. Go out of your way to make their work easier when you can, without expecting immediate reciprocity.
Have conversations that aren’t about asks. One of the clearest markers of a transactional peer relationship is that you only hear from someone when they need something. Don’t be that person. Make time for conversations that are genuinely about understanding each other’s world. Things like what they’re working on, what’s going well, what’s difficult, their life outside of work all go a long way towards building a bridge. Those conversations build the reservoir of goodwill that makes the working relationship functional when things get complicated.
Be honest when you have friction. Peer relationships will sometimes involve conflict due to competing priorities, misaligned incentives, real disagreements about direction. The temptation is to route those conflicts upward and let leadership sort it out. That works occasionally but it’s expensive and slow, and it signals to leadership that you can’t manage lateral complexity. When friction is manageable, address it directly with your peer. Done well, navigating conflict with a peer often strengthens the relationship.
A Word on Reciprocity
The best peer relationships are reciprocal in that both people are investing, both are getting value, and both feel that the exchange is reasonably balanced over time. That doesn’t mean you keep score. It means you pay attention to whether a relationship is genuinely mutual or whether one person is consistently doing the work of maintaining it.
If you’re always the one initiating, always the one sharing, always the one accommodating, that’s worth noticing. Not every relationship will be perfectly balanced at every moment, but over time, reciprocity is what separates real peer relationships from polite professional acquaintances.
And on the flip side: when a peer invests in you (gives you honest feedback, shares information that helps you, goes out of their way to cooperate) notice it and reciprocate. Don’t take it for granted. The peer who feels like their investment is appreciated will keep making it. The one who doesn’t will eventually stop.
The Horizontal View
Leadership development tends to be taught as a vertical discipline. Manage up. Develop down. But at the mid-level of most organizations, the horizontal dimension (who you know, who trusts you, who you’ve invested in across functions) is often the most practically important.
The peers around you aren’t just context for your career. They’re collaborators, informants, advocates, and mirrors. Invest in those relationships with the same intentionality you bring to managing your team or building your relationship with your manager, and you’ll find that the work gets easier, the information gets better, and the opportunities become more visible.
Who in your organization do you wish you had a better relationship with — and what’s actually stopping you from building it?
View from the Middle 