I was at a talk recently where one of the participants presented a brief story of her workplace around her relationship with her supervisor: 

The middle-manager caught a significant process oversight and notified her supervisor. She was told to wait for the next steps, but in the meantime she figured out a great fix, and solved the problem effectively saving time and money for the team. She was very proud of her work but then received an email from her ED saying that she should have waited. She was very surprised and a bit hurt because she felt that her great contribution to work was not seen or appreciated. She asked what she could have done differently not only in dealing with her emotions but also how to handle what happened with her ED. Her question boiled down to one main issue: ‘what are some ways to effectively manage up?’ 

Unless you own your own company, in which case you often have to answer to your stake-holders, at almost every level of leadership the managers have to deal with both their employees and with the people that they themselves report to. 

The tools of managing up are the same as the tools of leading people, applied to their appropriate audience and from the perspective of each person’s position. 

Here are some tips:

1. Know your boss’s interests. People come up with solutions to solve their problems. People’s solutions to their problems are their positions, interests are the reasons behind those positions. You have to learn what your boss wants, what are their most urgent priorities and why? Learning why something is important to your boss allows you to understand their interests and give you the power to work to address those deeper needs. For example, If you have a good reason to extend a project, but your boss feels pressure to finish it quickly, before making your case for this extension you need to know why the boss wants that. 

2. Draw out shared interests. For example, what about work is keeping your manager up at night? What about work is keeping you up at night? Can you find a common interest behind these? 

3. Know your BATNA. After uncovering your interests (both individual and shared interests), think about your BATNA: Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. List all the alternatives to the current situation/negotiation. Evaluate each of them and ask yourself: how much does each alternative cost/worth? Both emotionally and financially? 

4. Hone your communication skills. There are different ways of saying the same thing and depending on your audience the way you communicate them would be different. Do not forget your audience. Be open, curious, and compassionate in your communications.

5. Hold your assumptions as hypothesis. Acknowledge that your assumptions about your managers are assumptions that need to be checked-out during a conversation. 

6. Share the impact of something on you as soon as possible. Not only on issues of microaggressions which managers would/should want to hear as quickly as possible, but also on other issues such as a mistakes or process issues. Avoid surprises. 

7. Come up with proposals that address your shared interests. You want your solution to an issue to be durable and for durable solutions you need to think about common interests between you and your manager. Consider the why(s) behind your solutions and their solutions and see if there are ways to reach those why(s) in any other way. There are often creative ways to reach the why(s) when we allow ourselves to think outside the box and collaborate on solving a problem.

Managing up is not an event, it is a process.

Do not expect that someone will be able to fully grasp the complexities of an issue through one conversation alone. The more complex a situation is, the more conversation and time it might require.

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