Managing up - A critical skill for career growth
Things aren't as out of your control as they might seem
One of my first managers unexpectedly asked me one day if I’d like to take a walk.
“Sure,” I hesitantly said, not entirely sure what was going to take place.
We made a few loops around our small building in a suburban business park as he began to share what was on his mind.
“I think that you’re a better fit for the Enterprise team,” he said, catching me off guard. “And I want to help you get there,” he continued. I was pleasantly surprised - this was essentially a promotion.
I appreciated that he was looking out for me and that he was willing to do what he could to help me take the next step in my young career, even though he’d have to go through the hiring and training process for the person who would fill my position.
Grateful for his thoughtfulness and direction, I began to take the steps that would eventually result in my move to the Enterprise team and a different manager.
In my naivete, I began to believe that this was the way that most managers operated. My ignorant bliss didn’t last too long, though. I discovered that while they had the best of intentions, many managers are too busy, stressed, overworked, overloaded, and, most of all, untrained when it comes to understanding how to make progress in their careers, let alone help their direct reports succeed in this area as well.
These experiences taught me that managing up is a critical skill for everyone to learn, especially those who have goals to advance (get promoted or move to a higher position at another company) in their career.
What is “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? These five things have helped me in a variety of situations.
Over Communicate (on a schedule)
One of the most important but challenging aspects of being a manager is understanding how your teammates are spending their time. Unless you’re a fanatical micromanager with nothing else, today’s remote-first workplaces make this nearly impossible.
As an employee, you can provide a significant service to your manager by packaging up your daily or weekly progress and serving up the important bits to your boss in an email or chat message.
Yes, the data probably exists somewhere in a project management tool and yes, you’ve discussed projects in your 1:1 and team meetings, but even the most dedicated manager will have forgotten some (or honestly, most) of what was discussed as soon as the meeting ended.
Following a simple consistent format and schedule is something that your boss will appreciate probably more than they know how to express.
Here are a couple that have worked for me (I usually send Friday afternoon or Monday morning, depending on my manager’s preferences):
Format 1:
Completed this week
Coming next week
Blocked tasks or areas that need (manager)’s attention
Format 2:
Major project 1 updates
Major project 2 updates
Major project 3 updates
Minor work updates
Questions/1:1 discussion items
I know that it seems simple and trivial, but if you’re looking for one small thing you can start doing this week that will help you manage up, these weekly updates are a great place to start.
Know the data
Understanding performance at a team and company level will help you "Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been," as hockey great Wayne Gretzky says.
Keeping close tabs on the data will help you anticipate potential requests that may come through, better inform any recommendations or requests you might make to your boss about projects you’d like to tackle, and above all, give you more accurate inputs to use for prioritization.
All of the Ops leaders who have “made it”, career-wise, that I’ve interviewed for this newsletter have cited knowing the data as a key must-have for anyone interested in making significant progress in their career.
Being able to story tell by connecting the dots between projects you’ve led or participated in and improvements in metrics is also an important and powerful way to illustrate the impact you can have for future employers.
Be human
Your relationship with your manager can’t just be done with a “check the box” level of effort.
You don’t have to be best friends with your manager (and it’s highly unlikely that they’ll try and become best friends with you - no one wants to have to fire their best friend), but a strong manager-employee relationship can lead to opportunities that might otherwise not have existed.
This is a struggle I have - I’m a fairly private person and usually have more than enough “work stuff” to discuss with my managers to bring up other items that might help them get to know me better. This is made easier by the fact that in most remote environments, the only “you” people get to know is the part of you that shows up in Zoom meetings.
I’m not going to list off all of the different things you can do to push past the formalness of only engaging in “work talk” with your manager, I’m just going to tell you that in my own experience, it has been worth it.
Deciding beforehand and being intentional about what you share can help. Focusing on where you’d like to go in your career (work-related), and then why (non-work-related) can also be a way to start to open that door as well.
Being slightly vulnerable and sharing something personal about yourself can be a strong invitation to your manager to share a bit more about themselves as well.
Bring up solutions, not just problems
This might be easier for Ops folks than in other roles because many of us can’t stand knowing that something is broken without trying to fix it
Be clear and direct when discussing your career goals
Does your manager know what your career goals are? Do they really know? Do you want to be a VP of Marketing Operations in 5 years, or start your own agency? Do you have a killer idea for a new tool that you want to build?
Some of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had as a manager have been helping someone on my team get closer to achieving their specific goals. If you have a creative manager, there are a lot of things that can be done to help you get closer to reaching that end goal.
Some of the things that I’ve seen in the past have included:
Planning a move to a new team/role
Reimbursement for courses/training
Shadowing someone in a role you’re interested in
Changing day-to-day responsibilities
Arrangements for conversations/interviews with connections
And the list goes on and on. The more tuned in your manager is to what you want to do in the future, the easier it is for them to know how to help.
Provide feedback
This is one you’ll have to feel out for yourself. Despite the saying going “feedback is a gift”, some people may want to return your gift as soon as they receive it.
If you get the sense that your manager is open to feedback, especially related to how they can help you, then giving some direction is typically welcome input. I’ve certainly been in situations where I thought I had a good idea about how to help someone make the career progress they were looking for, but after discussing with them we went in an entirely different direction.
When you’re given the opening, take it. Be intentional about the direction of your career, and be intentional about the feedback you give your boss.
Follow the “Magic Loop”
You may have heard of some of the concepts in the “Magic Loop” framework before. Developed by a prolific former Amazon VP, this framework is a simple way to not only improve your relationship with your boss but accelerate your progress on your career path as well.
The steps are pretty simple:
Do your current job very well
Ask your boss what you can do to help
Do what they ask
Suggest ideas/projects that align with your goals
Repeat
Let’s break each of those steps down a bit:
Do your current job very well
This requires you to have a solid understanding of two things:
What your job responsibilities are
What “great” looks like for your role
Don’t spend a bunch of time and energy working hard on something only to find out later that it wasn’t a key deliverable for someone in your position. Make sure that you have clear definitions for both of these items and that they are agreed upon by both you and your manager.
If you’re like many Ops teams and under-resourced and overworked, make sure that you have clear priorities and are supported by your manager, then make sure that you’re delivering on those priorities.
Ask your boss what you can do to help
I think what’s implied here is that you’ve gotten good enough at your current job that you have enough free or discretionary time to pick up some additional responsibilities. Asking your boss for more to do when you’re already having trouble keeping up with your workload is a recipe for disaster.
Some of the first things you can do may be other tasks that fall into your area of responsibility that you deprioritized initially.
Early adopters of AI and automation tools may have a leg up here as they find ways to offload a lot of the manual busywork that takes up so much time. It may also be advantageous to find areas where you have strengths that your manager might not - if you’re more technical or more experienced at a certain task, that may be easier to take on.
Do what they ask
This is pretty self-explanatory, but certainly worth remembering. The key here is that at this point you’re making deposits in the manager-employee relationship account.
The task or project that you’re asked to help with at this point may seem menial or trivial, or be in an area or focus that you’re not particularly interested in. The goal here is to demonstrate that you can help, you’re willing to help, and you’ll follow through on your offer.
Suggest ideas/projects that align with your goals
This is where the magic starts to happen. Now that you’ve demonstrated how much you’re able to help, you can make a small withdrawal from the manager-employee relationship account and ask for a project that is aligned with your career goals.
Maybe you’d like more leadership opportunities, so you volunteer to head up a cross-functional project that is off track or behind schedule. Maybe you’d like to become more technical, so you volunteer to review and update an old integration - the choice is yours. I’d recommend doing your research beforehand and having a couple of backup ideas in case the first one or two don’t work out.
This is just a summary of the overall framework. I’d highly recommend reading more about this idea to fully understand how powerful it can be in helping you achieve your career goals. I’ve linked to a couple of great posts in the resources section below.
What if I don’t have a “storybook” manager?
Not all managers are as thoughtful or as open to helping their employees progress as the manager who took me for a walk one day. Many can be the exact opposite, and this can make managing up even more of a challenge.
Managing up may still be possible in most of these cases, but there are some additional things you can try to help things go more smoothly:
Try to understand your manager’s perspective - are they acting the way they do because they feel overwhelmed, underappreciated, or unheard? Even if you disagree with some of the things they do, can you at least understand why they might do them?
Set clear expectations - be clear about what your manager’s expectations are and write them down in a shared doc, if possible. Revisit them often and ask your manager for feedback.
Focus on small wins - Maybe your manager has a habit of critiquing your work. Can you nail one tiny project so well that there isn’t anything for them to say? String a few of those together and you’ll start building a foundation of trust.
Offer support - one of the easiest things you can do for your boss is to listen. Again, you might not agree with everything they’re saying or doing but listening will give you insight into why they feel and act like they do
Seek external support - leverage mentors, co-workers, and if ultimately necessary, HR/People Ops resources to ensure that your experience with a poor manager doesn’t become a major roadblock in your career
Prepare for the future - whether or not the saying that “people don’t leave jobs, they leave managers” is always true, it is certainly mostly true. There are enough great jobs with awesome managers out there to be stuck in a less-than-ideal position for longer than you need to be. If it’s clear that your manager isn’t going anywhere and isn’t going to change, then it’s time to look for a new role
Wrap Up
Remember that unless you’re reporting to the CEO, your boss is probably doing some managing up themselves. As a people manager, they’ve probably got some variation of the following questions in their heads:
Does this person have the right amount of work?
How can I balance providing growth opportunities with ensuring high-quality work gets done on time?
Am I managing up correctly?
Am I managing down correctly?
Are we positioned for success?
What is coming next week/month/quarter?
Do I have the right people in the right roles?
Your manager has a LOT going on - at the risk of going too cliche, help them help you.
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. It’s an activity that the more you put into it, the more you get out of it.
Resources:
There have been some excellent articles recently on the topic of managing up - I’d highly recommend reviewing each of them, as they have different approaches and recommendations and one may be more appealing to you than another.
Links: