Understanding 'lateral relations' in the workplace

We often frame some of the trickiest problems at work as failures of leaders and leadership. But what if they are actually about lateral relations and collaboration between peers. What if key issues weren’t just about the way in which authority is taken up and perceived by leaders and followers, but about rivalry, envy and competition among ‘equals’?

Clare Huffington and Sarah Miller's 2008 paper, "Where Angels and Mere Mortals Fear to Tread," offers a fresh lens. Taking a psychodynamic approach to understanding group dynamics, they focus on sibling relationships, rather than the traditional parent-child models of leadership, to show how lateral tensions shape our working lives in profound ways.

Moving beyond the vertical

Traditionally, organisations have often been understood in a vertical sense, where hierarchy, authority and clear lines of command are key which has lent itself to looking through the lens of the parent child dynamic. But Huffington and Miller argue that this view is no longer enough.

As hierarchies flatten, leadership becomes more distributed and collaboration across organisations becomes the norm, lateral relations - the connections between peers - have become much more important. Seeing colleagues as 'siblings' rather than 'children' changes how we understand things like rivalry, collaboration and succession.

The rise of laterality

Several social and organisational trends are pushing this shift. Leadership now needs to happen at many levels, often close to where services are delivered. Working across agencies or organisations demands negotiation among equals not just top-down instruction.

Organisations also need to work harder to engage and retain talent. This means offering a different kind of psychological contract, where people expect a say in decisions, not just orders to follow. Middle managers are expected to show strategic leadership, not simply pass on instructions. The background dynamics of lateral relations have moved into the foreground. But this shift brings its own anxieties and difficulties.

Sibling dynamics: rivalry and ambivalence

Drawing on the work of Juliet Mitchell, Huffington and Miller show how sibling dynamics can explain many organisational behaviours. Siblings can provoke feelings of rivalry, envy, displacement and difference. But they can also be sources of support, solidarity, and recognition.

The authors use the biblical story of Jacob and Esau to illustrate how struggles for favouritism and recognition can play out at work. Jacob and Esau, twin brothers, battled for their father Isaac's blessing. Jacob, through trickery, secured the birthright meant for Esau, leading to a rift that lasted decades. The story highlights the powerful emotions stirred when individuals compete for limited resources: the desire for recognition, opportunity and legacy.

At work, similar dynamics emerge when colleagues vie for leadership roles or influence. Feelings of betrayal, resentment or longing for fairness often sit just below the surface.

Mitchell's idea of the "Law of the Mother" is key here. Vertical leadership - "the Law of the Father" - focuses on hierarchy and sameness. Sibling relations require something different: an ability to hold and work with difference and ambivalence. Organisations that move towards flatter structures will stir up deep emotional questions about fairness, identity, and survival.

Barriers to healthy lateral relations

Huffington and Miller point to several barriers that make sibling or lateral relations hard to manage at work.

First, changes in family life mean that many people have fewer experiences of managing sibling dynamics in early life. Smaller families and more individualistic upbringings mean fewer opportunities to practise negotiation, sharing and the management of rivalry.

Second, organisational cultures shaped by survival-of-the-fittest mentalities, especially after waves of downsizing, make collaboration difficult. People are often primed to compete rather than to cooperate.

Third, generational tensions add to the mix. Younger workers, often more comfortable with speed and change, can clash with older colleagues who are used to different rhythms and expectations.

Finally, while many organisations talk about equality and flat structures, deep anxieties about fairness and recognition persist. Equality can become a fantasy rather than a reality.

In short, healthy lateral relations are not natural. They are an achievement.

A case study: succession struggles in an IT company

The paper brings these ideas to life through a case study of a successful IT company facing the retirement of its charismatic founder/CEO.

The CEO, who had built the company around his vision and personality, struggled to step back. His top team, largely loyal and successful under his leadership, found themselves competing, not collaborating, when succession started to become a reality.

In the absence of clear processes, rivalries grew. Informal alliances formed, candidates were both praised and undermined in equal measure and resentments simmered. The CEO himself fed the confusion by sending mixed signals about who he favoured.

Coaching interventions revealed these dynamics within the team, but were also mirrored amongst the coaches – a parallel process- suggesting how powerful sibling rivalries can be.

Without an open conversation about succession and leadership expectations, the team remained locked in competitive silos. The company risked losing some of its most talented leaders, not because they lacked ability, but because they were unable to work through their sibling dynamics.

Holding vertical and lateral tensions together

While the paper focuses on lateral relations, it does not argue that hierarchy should disappear. Vertical structures still play vital roles: containing anxiety, setting direction, and ensuring accountability.

But leaning too heavily on hierarchy can suppress creativity and ownership. Similarly. leaning too much on laterality can lead to fragmentation, lawlessness, and regressive behaviours.

The challenge is to hold both dynamics together, creating organisations that can flex between vertical and lateral ways of working.

Towards more mature organisations

In closing, Huffington and Miller suggest that organisations need better models for lateral collaboration. We cannot simply assume that flatter structures will automatically lead to better outcomes.

Drawing on maternal models of fairness, recognising both sameness and difference, may help distribute leadership without fuelling destructive rivalry.

There is enormous creative potential in sibling relations: solidarity, mutual support, shared resilience. But these qualities emerge only if the underlying anxieties are contained and worked with thoughtfully.

Closing reflection

Reading this paper left me reflecting on how often lateral tensions are misread as personal flaws, rather than seen as normal and inevitable group dynamics. It offers a valuable lens for consulting practice, particularly in creating spaces where peers can acknowledge and work through rivalry and ambivalence and establish solidarity.

That said, while the sibling model is a powerful addition to our thinking, we shouldn’t forget other more structural factors which shape lateral relations, such as class, gender, race, sexuality amongst others. These forces also shape how rivalry and collaboration unfold, not just individual psychodynamics. Without this wider framing, there is a risk of over-psychologising group behaviours that might also have roots in material inequalities or systemic patterns.

Still, the paper’s core insight holds strong: collaboration is an achievement, not a given. Understanding sibling dynamics is an important key to unlocking collaboration in a more distributed and networked world.