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.
Helping Your Manager Succeed
At its core, managing up is about developing a positive and productive relationship with your manager. I didn’t realize this until I’d had the opportunity to work with several highly successful managers of managers. These directors expected the managers who reported to them to be proactive in making that professional relationship effective. They helped me realize that one of the best ways to do this as an employee is to support your manager in succeeding at their job. This requires understanding your manager’s job and what you can help them achieve.
Part of being an effective partner for your manager is to understand:
- What does their manager expect from them?
- What do their peers expect from them?
- What do their direct reports (including you) expect from them?
- What information do they need to meet those expectations?
- What does their position give them access to?
- What decisions are they empowered to make?
- What constraints do they have to operate within?
Fundamentally, you need to know what your manager is accountable for and what success looks like from their perspective. Knowing these things allows you to anticipate your manager’s needs. It becomes easier to radiate the information they want when you’re clear on the results they care about and what they need to know. This is another thing that the directors I’ve worked with have placed a premium on in their direct reports. When you are partnering well with your manager, they never need to ask you for a piece of critical data; you’ve already made it available to them whenever they need it.
Bringing Your Perspective
Managing up and helping your manager succeed aren’t the same as doing whatever your manager asks. It’s also not expecting your manager to make all the decisions. Partnering involves bringing your perspective and the things that you’re seeing. Sometimes, it involves taking action on your own initiative. When you understand what your manager is trying to accomplish, you gain a new lens on the things around you. Most of the time, you’re closer to where the work happens and have a better sense of what’s happening than your manager. As such, you are positioned to point out problems and opportunities they may not be aware of. In many ways, you act as an early warning system for your boss and more senior levels of management in your organization.
Of course, you need to share your perspective with your manager in a way that’s useful to both of you. Key to this is understanding your manager’s communication style and way of working – and helping them to understand yours. Rather than adopt their style, you need to communicate your preferences and then work together to decide how each of you will adapt to the other.
There are any number of questions you might discuss with your manager to ensure you can effectively share your perspective with them. Here are a few to consider:
- When we disagree, how should I tell you that?
- How would you like me to point out issues I notice and think you don’t?
- How should I inform you about things that aren’t a problem yet but might turn into one?
- When I need help, how would you like me to ask you for it?
- When I notice an opportunity or have an idea for something that will move us toward our goals, how do you want me to pitch it to you?
- When it doesn’t seem like I’m getting the support I need from you, how would you like me to bring it up?
- How will you let me know when you are interested in my thoughts on a topic and when you aren’t?
If you don’t have a conversation about how you want to share these things – and instead, you just start telling your manager what you think – there’s a good chance your perspective won’t get heard. You want to say things the other person doesn’t want to hear in ways that they thank you for it.
Committing to Mutual Support
Partnership: A relationship in which we are jointly committed to the success of whatever endeavor, process, or project we are engaged in.” – Barry Oshry
The reality of most managerial relationships is that they aren’t partnerships. Some start with a sense of joint commitment and lose it over time, while others never have it. The key to staying in partnership with your manager is embracing the mutual nature of your success or failure. You’re not helping them to succeed simply because you’re a good person. You try to understand their job and bring your perspective because you know their success or failure is not entirely separate from yours. You likely can’t succeed if they don’t. Likewise, whether or not they realize it, your manager can’t succeed without you and your efforts.
It’s easy to fall out of partnership by letting your manager take sole responsibility for your work together. After all, they have more information and positional authority (and likely get paid more). Why shouldn’t they be on the hook? When you do this – when you abdicate responsibility for the larger effort – you inadvertently give away your own agency and power. It can be satisfying to say, “I did my job,” and blame your manager for a project’s failure. Partnership asks you to acknowledge the part you played in that failure. That’s not always pleasant or easy. At the same time, if you want to see yourself as part of a shared success, you must give up the understandable desire to blame your manager when things go wrong.
When you both commit to the larger success that each of you has a part in, it opens the door to discussing how each of you can support each other. When your manager knows that you are working toward what makes them successful, they’re much more likely to help you when needed. Asking (and anticipating) what you can do to support them demonstrates that their success matters to you, creating a reinforcing loop. So, while “managing up” used to sound one-sided to me, I’ve realized it’s about joint commitment, mutual support, and partnership.
