Managing up

What we’ll learn today

What is Managing Up?

Managing up is hugely underrated, and I would take a very strong guess that 90%+ of people leaders spend the majority of their time managing their team and not managing leader. 

Given your role of managing your team, you play a huge role in surfacing challenges, problems, good stuff and everything else to your leader. Given the layers and structure of the organisation, your leader is not on the frontlines with you seeing what you see. They lack the insight, the context and the story. This only gets worse with the next layer up and so on, things become even murkier. 

And when murky exists, that’s where further problems and challenges arise. From a strategy and change management perspective, rolling things out which have a huge fundamental shift to the workflow of the team but are determined to be miner at a higher level based on the insights they have from the top. People become overlooked for promotions because the good work they’re doing is not been seeing or recognised. Staffing is reduced because forecasting analysts are basing everything off a number without the nuance of various teams and evolving resposnitiities, this leads to further team impact with the team taking on more and then not being compensated. Naturally this erodes trust over time and people leave, employee surveys go down and Glassdoor takes a further hammering. It becomes bleak and a vicious cycle. 

Your leader needs to be your number 1 relationship within the organisation. They play a huge role in your job satisfaction in terms of agency, autonomy and buy-in. If you don’t learn quickly how they operate and what good looks like for them, you are going to be repeatedly falling short and stressed.

3 things that stand out

Most of us just tell our leader what we’re working on or where we need their help. The impactful leaders are asking questions to understand what their boss is being measured on, and then frame everything through that lens. Ask yourself the question, what does good look like for your boss? If you really don’t know, ask them in your next 1 to 1, 

“I’ve been thinking about my impact, and I was curious on your goals or objectives this year for the team, from my understanding, the biggest focus this year is on driving up our customer satisfaction % from 80-85%, is there anything else I should be doubling down on or that your’re focused on and I could help drive from my side?”

I am sure you’re the same, and it’s even more painful further up the chain. If your boss hears of a bad escalation or sensitive situation from above that theyre not aware of. That usually looks bad on them because their house doesn’t appear to be in order. On the other hand, if the same situation comes up and they can respond immediately because you’ve previously briefed them, you look amazing and so will yoru boss. Nice job.

What does this look like?

It’s mostly common sense, but things like. This employee is at 7 days absence this year, and it’s only Feb. Hearing about this at 5-7 days is better than them hearing about it at 20 days from HR or staffing analyst. If a employee is rude to a customer, and you’re dealing with the fall out, same, brief your leader. This happened, here are the steps I am planning to take and this is the expected resolution timeline. You don’t need to tell your leader everything in real time, you can leave the less important items for your 1 to 1. By leading this way, you’ll build further trust with your leader and that will unlock more autonomy and space for you to lead more effectively.

You might think that your boss just wants you to do what they say, and that may well be true in some places. But, that’s not protecting your team or the customer experience, or potentially leading your boss to making big error because you didn’t highlight the error of their ways.

One challenge I’ve had is historically one of our mid level teams didn’t have a working schedule to follow for working customer support cases. There wasn’t really a need for it, but our boss decided in partnership with staffing analysts that this is would make sense. This was really poorly received by the team and we ended rolling it back. Now, there is a lot of change management which could have happened to make it land a lot of better, but the whole thing didn’t go well. On reflection, I didn’t push back hard enough and accepted the approach. And it’s not about saying no, it’s about disgareeing in the right way. 

Here is a good example of what you could say, sliding in your own example.

Opening, establish you're aligned, not opposed 

"I want to make sure we get the best outcome here, and I'm supportive of the direction. Before we commit to rolling this out I'd like to share some on-the-ground context that I think is worth factoring in,  because I want this to land well, not just go out."

The push back, business case challenge

“My question is whether the business value we're expecting to get from scheduling at T2 level is proportionate to the disruption it will create. T2 analysts are our most invested, highest-performing individual contributors, they're not at a stage where output variance is the problem we're solving for. So I want to make sure we're clear on what specific behaviour or outcome this change is designed to fix, because if we can't name it precisely, the team will ask that question and we won't have a good answer.

The impact, make it real 

"The risk I want to flag is trust erosion. This group responds well to autonomy,  it's part of what keeps them engaged and performing. Introducing schedules without a clear rationale they can get behind will likely read as a signal that we don't trust them. That's hard to walk back. I've seen that dynamic before and the cost in morale and retention is always higher than whatever we were trying to solve for.

"I'm not saying don't do it. I'm saying let's make sure the business reason is strong enough to justify the disruption, and if it is, let's think about how we bring the team along so it lands as a decision made with them in mind, not something done to them. I'd rather get this right than fast." 

Wording it this way keeps you firmly on the right side of the line,  you're not blocking the decision, you're pressure-testing it. That's what good leaders do, and it's hard to argue against. 

Hopefully that’s of value to you, if you want further support and 1 to 1 conversation. Respond to this email or book time here.