The Joy of Being Managed Up

I don’t think you need to be at that meeting, unless you want to. I can just let you know if anything interesting happens.

I have an idea to run by you about how we can get that project done quicker and easier—I scheduled 20 minutes on your calendar for tomorrow morning.

I’m ready to distribute the attached report for internal comment. I’ll circulate it Monday morning unless I hear differently from you.

I’m struggling to get on the same page with P. Would you be willing to check in with his supervisor to see if you can figure out what’s going on?

Would you like me to take that off your plate?

These are some of the sweet sounds of being managed by your team.  Among other things, being well-managed by your team means that your time is treated as valuable; meetings are shorter, rarer and more efficient; and you’re actually able to spend less time managing others and more time on your own work. You aren’t doing someone else’s job for them. 

So why the baggage?

Managing up and top down management rest upon totally different approaches to power. Managing up relies on influence and relationships and not on formal power defined by hierarchy and job descriptions. Top down management is highly structured, making it easy for staff members to know where they stand and how they’re expected to behave. Informal power flows in all directions, irrespective of the org. chart, without limits. Informal power, including managing up, oblivious to our sense of order. 

This is not a bad thing. Informal power, including managing up, is ubiquitous in all organizations—and wherever else humans interact. The question is whether managing up—along with other expressions of informal power—will be embraced and leveraged for the benefit of the organization and its work. When this happens, managing up complements and strengthens top-down management by supporting alignment, communication and increasing the capacity of supervisees to work independently. 

Some resistance to the idea of managing up can be blamed on the words themselves, both since managing is often mistakenly confused with controlling and because the expression is overly expansive. It’s not the totality of the supervisor’s job that’s being managed up” but rather just those aspects that are relevant to the supervisee’s ability to perform successfully—the supervisor’s advice, feedback, approval and engagement. By managing up, a supervisee takes on more responsibility for their own work. Managing up doesn’t conflict with top-down management; it enhances the quality and ease of oversight so the supervisor can also be more successful.

Barriers to Effective Managing Up.

Lack of clarity. Boundaries between appropriate managing up and manipulative or self-serving behavior can be highly subjective making it very difficult to know when lines are being crossed. Approaches that work well with one supervisor may backfire with another. Both the costs and benefits of managing up can fluctuate wildly, making it difficult, in the absence of open communication, for supervisees to know how best to proceed. 

We don’t talk about it. Negative connotation about managing up make it difficult for supervisees to raise the issue. Many supervisors are either oblivious, unsure what to say or assume that supervisees will manage up on their own initiative. But without explicit communication, supervisees have to resort to mindreading to manage their supervisors. Sometimes that works . . .

Supervisors. Sometimes the difficulty is less about the mindreading and more about the mind being read. Supervisors don’t always know what they want, whether in terms of process or results. They can be unpredictable in terms of preferences and often hold relevant information that they neglect to share. Yes, I’m talking about you (and myself).

Help them help you. Supervisors strengthen their teams and their own performance when they train supervisees about how to manage up most effectively. To get started:

Ask them to do it. This is as simple as it sounds. Tell supervises that you expect them to manage you in order to be successful. To get the most out of you, they’ll keep track of their deadlines, keep you apprised of status changes, alert you to risks and problems, and involve you whenever they need to. As with other aspects of managing, this won’t ensure that it actually happens. But saying the words out loud normalizes the subject and enables future engagement. 

Self-awareness. If you don’t know what you want, it will be exceedingly difficult for your team to manage you effectively. Be clear about your strengths and weaknesses, expectations, work style, and preferences so that you can share these with your supervisees. 

Accountability. If a supervisor is a moving target—changing moods, expectations, priorities, etc.—supervisees will rarely hit the bullseye, and they may learn to just stop trying. When trying to understand a supervisee’s struggles in managing up, look first at yourself. 

Provide constructive feedback. Managing effectively in any direction is a process of alignment as both parties come to learn what the other needs to be successful. Learning to manage up is an iterative process. A supervisee can’t be expected to know what to do in the future without a clear sense of what worked and what didn’t in the past.

Don’t solve their problems for them. Many supervisors find it difficult to resist offering solutions when presented with problems. Managing up should not be about supervisees getting their supervisors to do their jobs for them. Supervisors can engage most effectively by critiquing proposals, approving solutions, offering advice and solving problems that exceed the scope of the supervisee’s responsibilities. Solving a supervisee’s problem for them may move it off their plate, but it’s not helping them—or you—in the long run.

Don’t forget who’s the boss. Managing up is an essential element of a high functioning team. Appropriate managing up enables the supervisee to operate to their full potential while simultaneously permitting the supervisor to exercise a suitable level of oversight. It should not be used by supervisees to circumvent or undermine that oversight or by supervisors to off-load accountability. 

Managing up is part of every organizational culture. The only question is whether it will be embraced, nurtured and—well—managed. The potential benefits of doing so in efficiency, effectiveness, job satisfaction and greater impact cannot be overstated.