For a long time, “managing up” rubbed me the wrong way. The way that people frequently used the phrase brought to mind judgment, manipulation, and deception. It seemed rooted in a belief that your manager didn’t understand how work got done. Just as I thought “stakeholder management” involved carefully controlling your messaging to always make yourself look good, I believed that managing up was fundamentally unethical.
I was wrong. Managing up is about partnership.
Saying someone is a manager tells you little about what they do or where they spend their time. Different companies lay out these duties differently; managers within the same company (or department) sometimes have vastly different jobs. As a manager, having mismatched expectations about your role – particularly with your boss and peers – can have unfortunate results.
“One of the people I manage is underperforming. I need to give them feedback about how they aren’t meeting expectations.”
I hear this often from managers, and I get curious whenever I do. The instinct behind it is good: Managers need to address underperformance. In my experience, however, giving performance feedback about unmet expectations is unlikely to help if you haven’t done your homework first. One of my teachers says, “80% of employee problems are due to manager neglect.” Whether you are a manager or not, when someone isn’t meeting your expectations, start by looking at what you’re doing – and what you’re not.
Conflict is a challenging topic for many people to navigate. It’s a natural part of working together in groups, yet in the midst of it, it can feel terribly dysfunctional. There’s no shortage of ideas about how to work through it, and there are lots of tools available. The choice of what tool to use when can feel overwhelming. How do you know where to get started? One of my to-go methods for engaging with conflict is the Waterline Model.
Many managers struggle to give effective feedback. They spend hours carefully crafting their message only to have it fail to land. What they neglect to notice is that feedback is at least as much about the relationship as it is about the message. One of the keys to a strong working relationship – one that enables difficult conversations – is a sense of shared purpose.
I’ve presented a number of sessions on building antifragile relationships and teams. This post is a summary of the information from the sessions for anyone who attended (or anyone who is interested) as well links to related articles.
The Responsibility Process™ is a practice (some may argue it’s more or less than a practice) that helps us move towards more self-mastery. Being able to facilitate ourselves is all about emotional intelligence – our ability to recognize and react appropriately in the moment to our emotions.
I’ve been training, talking, coaching, and writing recently on the topic of commitment and realized that anytime that comes up, it reminds me of the old (seems old – but not really that old!) discussion on commitment or forecast. I still find there are many questions on this topic. It certainly has not been put to bed. The approach I like to take is to step back and ask “what is the real problem?” Is a word stopping you from succeeding or is something else causing the problem? What am I talking about? — I’m talking about when the Scrum Guide was updated to change commit to forecast.
Have you been in a situation where no one would bring up the problem that everyone knew was “in the room?” I’d guess that everyone has been there. So often, we don’t bring up the “elephant in the room.” For anyone who has not heard of this, the elephant in the room is a saying for the real or obvious truth that is not being addressed. Given an elephant in a room would be hard to miss, when people ignore it, they are typically pretending it is not there.
