Managing Up — Stories and Guidelines for Working with Senior Leaders
You could rephrase 'managing up' as how to work with important people so that they want to work with you more, not less. This is a key skill for career growth for obvious reasons.
Welcome everyone to the Scarlet Ink newsletter! I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
Every so often, I start with story time. Because everyone likes story time.
My manager Lester swung into my office, and immediately slid the door closed without saying anything. He didn’t usually do that. I swiveled in my chair away from my computer, and looked at him.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Did you tell the Connectivity team we couldn’t get their work done by the end of the month?” Lester asked. He sounded frustrated.
“Ah yes, I did.” I said. “I explained to them that we were busy on that Jeff escalation, we had two different Steam goals we were working on, and their work wasn’t high enough priority. Their manager said they understood?”
Lester shook his head. “Well, their manager may have understood, but they escalated up to Jody, complaining that we were going to make them miss their goals.” Lester said.
Jody was the VP of the Connectivity team, and the boss of my boss as well. Jody is the collective place where our chains of command meet.
Lester continued. “Jody called me into her office, and asked me what was going on with their team. I said that everything was on track. Jody corrected me, which made me look like I had no idea what was going on in my group.”
Ah, yes, I could see how that would seem bad.
“Ah, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize this would escalate.” I said, belatedly apologizing.
“This is a managing up lesson, Dave,” Lester said, “Don’t ever let your manager be surprised by their boss. It makes them look bad, and you don’t earn points with your manager if you make them look bad.”
And as lessons go, I never forgot that one.
For some people, the phrase ‘managing up’ is synonymous with kissing up. It doesn’t need to be that way.
Managers are human. Most aren’t bad people. And unless you create your own company, you’re likely to have a boss for the rest of your working life. This means that learning to work with and for people is a valuable skill.
When you’re working with senior folk, and for your management chain, you employ certain behaviors and skills in how you deal with them. Depending on your behaviors and skills, you may build trust, or destroy it. You may annoy them, or make them grateful for your presence.
This article is intended to help you focus on the important relationships with those senior employees in our lives.
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1. Always excel at the basics. Be reliable.
This one is simple, but key. Consider the basics an entry pass to asking for anything from a senior employee, or your management chain. You are not allowed to discuss promotions, career growth, extra long vacations, your big idea, job changes, exciting projects, or any other favor until you are confident that you’re delivering on the basics of your job. In particular, being reliable.
What specifically do I mean?
Almost always, if you say you’re going to do something, do it.
Here’s a very common mistake. People fall into the trap of saying “Yes” to everything from their manager.
“Dave, can you write a quick report on this list of things?” Sure!
“Dave, can you add this extra project to get done this Friday?” Yup!
“Dave, can you start attending this new meeting series?” Of course!
If you say yes to everything, it feels good at the moment. People like to hear yes.
And then you get overwhelmed. And things start to slip.
Consider these two scenarios.
Scenario A
“Can you do these 5 things?”
“No, I can only do 3 of those things.”
Does those 3 things.
Scenario B
“Can you do these 5 things?”
“Yes!”
Does 4 things.
In which scenario did you earn trust? The tricky thing is that many employees get excited by Scenario B. They love to say Yes, and then they’re still excited that they did 4 of the 5 things. “I got so much done!”
Except that’s failure. That last task didn’t get done. Now your leadership can’t trust you when you say yes. This means that you can’t take on your organization’s most important tasks.
As a manager, I’d greatly prefer Scenario A. Clear expectations, and reliable delivery. And for those 2 things you couldn’t do, I likely found someone else to do them.
The first rule of managing up, is to say ‘Yes’ cautiously (conservatively), and then energetically deliver on your commitments. Be absolutely reliable. The exact speed of your delivery matters significantly less.
2. Own problems and opportunities, not tasks.
Lower level employees in particular see their work as a series of tasks. Leaders see their work as a list of problems, and opportunities.
If a junior engineer says, “I’ll get that change code reviewed,” I immediately picture that they’re going to review the code, and then stop. Someone else (perhaps me) will need to follow up with the change, ensuring that it gets into the next release, launched, tested, etc.
If that engineer says instead, “I’ll ensure that this code gets launched as soon as possible.” I know that they’re going to own the issue. This means that something is completely off my plate. If they’re reliable (see point #1), I will consider this item complete, unless something comes up.
The main requirement here is to think carefully about what “DONE” means.
The document isn’t done when it’s written. It’s done when it’s been reviewed, presented to those who need presenting, notes taken, updates made, and it has been re-filed, reviewed, or whatever else needs to happen.
The code isn’t done when it’s written. It needs to be tested, deployed, verified, and the inevitable bugs patched.
I’ve repeatedly had to explain to employees that being done with your work means that there is absolutely nothing left anyone could possibly do with it. If you treat your work that way, you’ll earn trust.