Managing Up and Laterally - National Democratic Training Committee

Managing Up and Laterally

By Johnaé Strong
45 min
Management & Leadership

What You’ll Learn

  • Identify effective strategies for managing up to your candidate and laterally within your team
  • Utilize shared leadership to maximize your team’s capacity
  • Apply an equity lens to your management and leadership approach

Why This is Important

It’s easy to think of management as a top-down process between “boss” and “subordinates,” but this is only part of the picture. How you engage with people across from and above you on the org chart is just as central to your team’s success as how you manage direct reports and volunteers. In this course, you’ll learn strategies for managing your candidate and other stakeholders in ways that set them, you, and your campaign, up for success.

Related Trainings

  • Time Management for Winning CampaignsIn this course, you’ll learn how to balance the competing demands of campaign life, using SMARTIE goals and action planning to guide your efforts.
  • Creating a Positive Team Culture — Learn how to set inclusive norms on your team, and how to support each other in building a culture of equity, accountability, and consistently high standards

Johnaé Strong

Trainer

An educator and organizer with over 10 years of experience, Johnaé joined the NDTC team in 2019 to further her goal of securing a true democracy for folks on the margins. A former candidate herself, Johnaé brings a lens for authenticity and equity to her work to support nontraditional candidates in breaking up the “old boys’ club”. Johnaé holds a BA and MAT from the University of Chicago in International Studies and Urban Education. Strong is a founding member and leader of BYP100, a political organization for Black people 18 to 35 working for liberation for all Black people.

In 2020, Strong received a Voqal Fellowship for her project Razing to Restore, an online organizing training platform connecting emerging social actors to political education, organizing, and restorative practices, through on-demand learning modules developed by national organizers and healers.

When she isn’t building tools for democracy, Johnaé can be found making music, losing dance battles to her two children, Akeim and Jari, or in her hometown of Cleveland.