Body of Knowledge · Glossary
Reaching around
A leader of managers overriding a manager's decisions with that manager's own engineers, fixing their team's problems directly, or letting their escalations become the leader's workload. It is the organisational form of taking delegated work back.
Where the standard develops it
- PL-1Delegation, ownership, and decision rightsMatching scope to capability, making authority explicit, not taking work back.
- PL-6Leading through leadersSelecting, developing, and holding accountable the managers who report to you.
Related terms
- Task-relevant maturity
- How much direction a person needs on a specific kind of work, set by their experience with that work and not by their general seniority.
- Decision rights
- The explicit statement of who may decide what, and at which level of authority.
- Delegation brief
- The written form of a delegation for anything larger than a day's work: outcome, constraints, authority level, who else is involved, and when the work is next reviewed together.
- Intent-based leadership
- Replacing "may I…" with "I intend to…".
- Judgment debrief
- The form a one-on-one with a manager takes.
- Key-person risk
- Critical capability, context or ownership concentrated in one person, so that the organisation is destabilised when they leave or are courted.
- Managerial leverage
- Grove's framing that a manager's output is the output of the organisation under them, and that activities differ in how much output they produce per hour spent.
- One-on-one
- The recurring, protected meeting between a manager and a report.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). Reaching around. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.reaching-around). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/reaching-around