Done effectively, managing up is the art of working well with your manager.
It can lead to constructive dialogue, better understanding of how you contribute, and greater career and financial rewards. It can also save your job, make your day to day better, and help you avoid tricky HR situations.
It’s a key skill to have in your toolkit. According to a McKinsey study, your relationship with your manager accounts for a whopping 86% of your satisfaction with interpersonal relationships at work. According to Gallup, 50% of Americans have left a role to get away from a manager at some point in their career.
In this article we’re going to set out some concrete managing up options for you to implement. These will assist you to run your interactions with your manager well and benefit from doing so.
What does managing up actually mean?
“Managing up isn’t about trying to “fix” a bad manager or manipulating a manager into doing what you want. Rather, managing up is a soft skill centered around using the traits of a good manager to help you bring out the best in yourself as an employee. When done effectively, managing up makes you and your manager’s day-to-day job easier.” - “Guide to managing up: What it means and why it’s important” - CultureAmp
Managing up means
- Understanding your manager’s needs and motivations
- Using processes to eliminate surprises, grey zones, and to protect yourself
- Ensuring communication is effective
Managing up does not mean
- Rigidity: informing your manager but not taking their feedback into account
- Circumvention: going around or above your manager
- Sandbagging: hiding negative information
- Obfuscation: presenting information inaccurately
- Control: trying to change your manager’s behaviours or thinking
Managing up can
- Enable you to be the best employee you can be by making you be more precise and create more robust processes
- Increase communication effectiveness, and help you both increase trust in each other
- Give you confidence you have done all that you can to deliver at work
What can managing up not do?
Before we dive into how to upskill in managing up techniques, it’s important to be clear about what managing up cannot do for you.
Managing up might
- Improve your relationship with your manager
- Improve your manager as a manager
- Be a useful resource of materials and processes
Managing up cannot
- Make up for a deficiency in your performance
- Make up for a broken or difficult relationship with a manager who isn’t open
- Fix a bad manager: resolve inappropriate behaviour in the workplace or unethical actions
Understanding your manager’s needs and motivations
Needs based communication focusing on their goals
It is critical to remember that your manager has their own targets and ultimately their own manager. You should know what it takes to make them and your team successful.
Be fair and have empathy: It’s a relationship like any other relationship, and it’s key to remember that your manager is a human, with their own pressures, strengths and weaknesses.
Early on in the relationship, ask these questions:
- What do you need to deliver in this role to be successful? Both now and in the longer term?
- Who are your major stakeholders, and how do you like to manage relationships with them and their teams?
- How do you like your team to involve you in projects?
- What do I need to deliver in this role to be successful? How will you assess or measure this?
- Can you give me an example of someone who you managed who worked well with you and why?
By asking these questions, you’ll have a clearer idea of where to focus, and begin to be able to anticipate your manager’s needs. You’ll be able to prioritise your proposed actions or problem solutions in light of the broader picture.
Involvement level / delegation preferences
There’s a general truism that it’s a bad idea to surprise your manager. But what your manager can interpret as a surprise can vary wildly depending on the individual’s desire for involvement and whether they believe they have fully delegated something to you, or not.
Early on in your relationship with your manager (or any colleague) it’s a good idea to run an exercise based on the 7 Levels of Delegation framework in order to define the level of collaboration across various tasks between you and your manager. It also works well for other types of colleague.
Why do it:
- Understand their involvement level preferences as a manager
- Make sure nothing slips between the gaps
- Deepen your professional relationship with them
- Uncover the status quo on company to company grey areas like the boundaries of product<>engineering, and product<>marketing
If you often have tensions this is a great exercise to run with them to clear the air.
How to do it:
You can do this with one or more close colleagues (peers / manager / direct report).
Step 1: Each of you writes down what you understand your key responsibilities are. This should be perhaps 8-12 bullet points.
Step 2: You then grade your responsibilities on the following delegation scale:
7 Levels of Delegation: Hustle Badger Accountability Flashcard deck
Step 3: Share your working and talk through any responsibilities where you are not aligned.
Overall this exercise will take about 60 minutes total to complete: 30 mins to set up and write down responsibilities and 30 mins to discuss.
This might feel like a heavy load, so if your manager is not prepared to invest this time with you, simply discuss the above flashcard with them early on, using some example OKR goals to understand their involvement level.
Micromanager
Micromanagers feel accountable for everything, and have trust issues in delegating. Your goal with a micromanager is to build trust so that they feel confident in delegation.
Don’t:
- Try to argue against them having access to meetings, slack channels and documents
- Run parallel work streams and present outcomes in the so-called project meetings: both of these will create suspicion that you’re hiding things
- Move something forwards without them being aware: they will feel that they are losing control
- But equally well, don’t allow them to constantly micromanage you: ultimately they will see this as a deficiency your performance
Do:
- Set up a clear timeline for the project, including checkpoints where key decisions will be reviewed and signed off
- Agree what the key decisions are and assign a RACI or RAPID for them
- Create a shared channel and folder for all working documents, and share
- Sit down in advance, and agree the cadence for the project, and where they would like to input and sign off decisions
- Understand the reporting cadence they have with other stakeholders, and arrange your reports to land at the right time to facilitate that cadence
- Alert early to any project blockers or slippage: fix small things before they become big things
Hands off manager
While the risk of the micromanager is that you surprise them, the hands off manager wants the exact opposite: they devolve autonomy and leave you to get on with it. You hold the responsibility and you are accountable.
As with all situations where you are accountable, you need to clarify what success looks like, and you need a rock solid view of how your manager would like you to work. With these managers, setting robust OKRs or goals is key: as nine times out of ten they will judge you on whether you hit your targets.
A further risk with a hands off manager is that you don’t get the inputs you need to perform, resulting in blame when you take a wrong path or things don’t move forwards. You need to ensure you get the help you need by
- Clearly flagging when you need their input
- Making it as easy as possible for them to make a decision
- If no movement: clearly articulate the implications of their lack of input: in escalating but respectful terms.
Your place in your manager’s priorities
“One of the essential parts of managing up is understanding what actually are your manager’s most urgent priorities, and then adjusting accordingly. If you’re at the top of the stack, over-communicate. If you’re not the most pressing thing right now, you have to learn to drop back and do really great work. That way, when you do become the top of the stack, it’s for the right reasons — and not because everything is on fire.” - Matt Wallaert, First Review
It’s not uncommon for managers to have a large number of direct reports. That means you may not always be high up in your manager’s priorities. If you’re not a high priority, adjust your communication expectations accordingly: report less. If you’re critical, report more and check in more.
When you are working on a critical project make sure things get off to a good start by sitting with your manager and ascertaining up front:
- Where they want to sit on an accountability framework, such as 7 degrees of delegation, RACI, RAPID, or a Power / Interest matrix
- Where they think other people should sit as well
- How regularly they want to hear about the project
- What form comms should have, such as async or face to face
- Which project meetings they want to join
- Which checkpoints they specifically want to review and sign off on
- What the protocol should be should you hit road bumps
Understanding your manager’s traits
“You can learn how your leader processes inputs. For example, one of my bosses had a tendency to stop listening after my first sentence, because his mind would race to find solutions to what I was talking about. Once I observed this, I flipped the order of my words, which made a huge difference in our relationship. Instead of saying, ‘Here is the problem, and here’s what I propose we do,’ I would say, ‘Here is what I propose we do to solve this problem.’ My position sky-rocketed with this simple tactic.” - Julia Banks, First Review
Different people are different: what works with one manager may well not work with another. It’s important to factor in unique personality traits in terms of how you communicate with them.
You should
- Ask them how they like information presented
- Observe their reactions to behaviours - both yours and others in the team
- Trial different approaches until you find one which sticks
- Ask around: harvest the hive mind, and try things you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
“My best advice is to do some sleuthing. Ask your colleagues to individually share examples of things they've done to successfully meet your boss's needs in the past. You'll quickly see there are many common denominators – and these practices are the ones you'll want to consistently provide.” - Mark C. Crowley,“Expert Advice For Managing Up At Work From Great Leaders” - Lighthouse
What success looks like to your manager
Different managers perceive success differently. You need to understand your manager’s success north star, and optimise accordingly.
“What signal does your manager use to determine whether they can trust your work — is it peer validation? Metrics? Identify the mechanisms and tap into them. Getting that right will ease nearly every other aspect of your job.” - Jan Chong, First Review
You can uncover this by asking them
- If you were to go and investigate a project, what would you look at to figure out if it’s going well?
- Of all the things you’ve mentioned, which is the most important to you?
Examples:
- Speed of execution: this manager cares about how many tasks get done and how fast, they want to be sure people feel urgency. Show them a task log of things getting done.
- Data: this manager cares about metrics, and whether the task moves key numbers. You should assign success metrics early on and share frequently.
- Process: this manager wants to have everything neatly documented, in a place they can easily find it, in order to be sure it’s robust. Don’t skip documentation and checkpoints.
- Cross functional feedback: some managers rely on the perception of others to evaluate your performance. Warn your manager upfront about conflict areas and ask them to help. Open constructive dialogue about your goals, where they might be in tension with your colleague’s goals, and enlist them as an ally to resolve. Demonstrate empathy for your colleague’s circumstances.
