This 1 skill gets you fired or promoted
How to get ahead of 90% of your peers: Managing Up.
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Imagine this.
You have a great idea for your department. It’s something that you’ve been thinking about for some time. Researching, probably some level of planning. The catch is the idea is a bit larger than your ability to decide to go and do. You need approval from your manager on this one. You have a good relationship with your manager, so this shouldn’t be an issue.
Certainly, they’ll see how great your idea is and approve it, right?
The meeting, of course, does not go as planned.
Well… they just don’t get it.
So what do you do here? Do you continue your effort and begin a campaign to convince your manager of your idea, or do you toss your plans in the waste basket and move on?
(BTW, you don’t need to imagine, it’s actually a reality for most 👀)
The skill that gets you fired or promoted.
“It’s all well and good for me to become a better leader, but I’m working for a boss who just doesn’t get it. How can I manage the situation so that I can still perform to the best of my ability despite their interference?”
— Anonymous Senior Leader
I get an unbelievable number of questions every month about how to manage upwards more effectively. These questions come from seniors and leaders, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by that.
I want to talk about this in very clear terms in a way that I’m missing from most books and articles. “Managing up,” or more importantly, being reliable, is not just one of many skills that you need to get right. It is THE one.
It’s a tablestake that can be the sole reason why you fail or succeed in your career. It’s not sexy, but it's vital. And so many people across all levels still get it wrong and land in serious trouble.
Every manager is talking about this when they say, “Hiring good people is hard.” It’s hard to find those that are reliable.
Some of us get in trouble more often than not because we like saying “on it, boss” a little too fast. We want an advance on this recognition and pay the bill later.
I’ve seen some really amazing upward management in my time. But I could never stomach the people around me who used upwards management as their sole means of ingratiating themselves with the boss.
The dynamic we should be trying to create is to manage upwards, to enhance performance, not just to feather our own nest.
Let’s map this out… 🔽
What is really “managing up”?
When you hear the phrase “managing up”, what kind of ideas come to mind? Maybe you think about being a good partner or sticking up for yourself. Maybe you think more along the lines of owning your career trajectory or even making your opportunities. The truth is that these are all parts of what can sometimes be a pretty complex concept.
Simply put, managing up is managing your relationship with your manager. Managing up is moving from a passive approach to your career direction and trajectory to an active one. This requires energy, effort, and focus, and is rarely straightforward.
Why is managing up important?
The main reason is that other than you, your manager is the one typically positioned to have the most impact on how your current professional experience ends up.
Working on your relationship with your manager doesn’t have to be a full-time job. An additional benefit is that many of the things you can do to help strengthen your working relationship with your boss are things that will make you better at your job in general.
Just like other aspects of progression in our careers, getting better at managing up is moving from the tactical to the strategic. Being intentional about your actions will help you get the results that you’re looking for. So what are some of the key skills and practices that will help you do a better job of managing up?
It’s about timing, not fault.
I've witnessed situations where individuals have faced termination due to this issue, and they were understandably confused by the outcome. The key issue is not necessarily a failure to deliver, but rather the lack of proactive problem-solving when faced with challenges. Even if the situation is not your fault, taking ownership of the timing can make a significant difference.
In my experience, I value reliability and transparency in a VP, PM, engineer, or designer over someone who consistently delivers exceptional work but requires constant reminders about impending deadlines.
Reliability beats quality in this regard.
How to manage the trouble funnel
Full credits to Leah Tharin for this strategy below:
I always thought about "Managing up” like a funnel. It’s a skill to manage a funnel where you start with promises, and at the end of that funnel, there is a really bad outcome: you’re in serious trouble.
In other words, you need to reduce the chance of anything going through to the end. The best of us can’t avoid some stuff going through in the individual stages at times.
But we can manage every step individually to reduce the chance of the ultimate bad outcome to close to zero. This is an almost daily struggle for someone who is not naturally well-organized like me.
There are expectations, fail safes, and when everything fails - how you handle a crisis:
The # of promises you commit to: Expectations you don’t wake can’t be disappointed. The solution is not to never promise anything but to be more selective about your promises.
Things are expected of us in any job we have; whether we have these expectations towards ourselves or from our manager, we tend to promise too much. Instead of temporarily pleasing people with a good promise, ask yourself whether it’s necessary. Nailing three promises is better than nailing five and missing one that shouldn’t have gone wrong.The # of important promises: It matters obviously also whether something is important. Be wary that what looks unimportant in your backlog might carry a different importance to the person you promised it to. It may take me three hours to prepare a financial report and three hours to finish a presentation. One of those might be more important than the others. If unsure, ask.