Managing..up?

Someone recently asked me on LinkedIn if I would write a letter about “how to manage up”. I’ve been pondering what to write about it all week.

One way to approach this topic is to think about the politics: how to figure out what your manager wants, and to tell them what they want to hear. This is a reasonable strategy for corporate survival and promotion, I suppose, but it doesn’t really get you very far in terms of trust and building effective teams. And good managers are very good at sussing out when someone is doing this - even though it might seem like it helps you advance in your career, it can label you as someone who doesn’t have their own opinions or add much value beyond sycophancy. Good managers want to know what you think, not what they think.

There’s another way to think about this problem though, that’s more constructive. In general, you should always be thinking about and trying to solve the problems of the level above you. This not only helps the entire team be more effective, but it also helps you grow in your career - trying to understand how your boss views the situation is good training for moving into that role eventually. And good managers recognize when this is happening and usually encourage it.

Finally, if that’s done well enough, you can start to anticipate needs and structure your work product accordingly. For example, early in career, most folks will produce very long, detailed reports or emails in response to a question - usually with an idea that they are showing off how competent and smart they are. But the reality is that your manager (like everyone else) is busy - so taking the extra time and effort to distill something down into a much more easily consumable piece is really valuable to them. The best kind of direct report is the one you can trust to filter out all the details that don’t matter, and present to you just the parts you need to understand, why you need to understand them, and what they think the right thing to do is. It’s hard to do well, and it does take longer, but again, it’s practice for being at that next level yourself.

Manage up not by playing politics and saying “yes” but by working to understand the perspective of your manager and helping with their workflow and problems.