Managing up is not doing your boss's job for them
Frank & Eddy Quarterly, Q4 2024
A version of this article originally appeared in the LeadDev Originals Newsletter on November 7th.
A few years ago I ran a series of workshops in my organization. After the first few sessions, my manager told me he thought I should change the way I ran the next ones. My first reaction: “Oh no, he doesn’t like this. I’m doing a bad job,” along with “Arrgghh, I’m going to have to work tonight to change all this for tomorrow,” and also a bit of “Why is he micromanaging me?” I had a choice to make. I could tell him “yes” but lose continuity and ability to aggregate results from the workshops. I could tell him “no” and risk confrontation and discomfort. Or, I could manage up: align my needs and his needs.
We typically frame “managing up” in two ways: influencing in order to get what you and your team need, and enabling your manager to do their job well. Though it’s a familiar complaint, you managing up is not you doing your manager’s job for them.
Back in September, we asked 70 senior engineering leaders attending LeadingEng New York to tell us their biggest issues. Managing up was the highest-voted topic. Since it’s a recurring theme in our work we weren’t surprised. In fact, we’ll tell you a secret: as you progress in your career, getting good at managing up is one of the most important skills you can acquire.
Why it’s important
Mostly for self-preservation! Managers, even those with the best intentions, are often completely in the dark about how their actions affect their direct reports and the teams below them. And though you would guess that the burden of the success of this relationship should be the manager, time and time again we hear their directs unnecessarily shouldering this – quietly navigating stress and anxiety, burnout, and considering changing jobs. You can choose to change jobs, but you’re likely to encounter the same need to manage up, in some way or another, wherever you go.
It’s tricky, for a few reasons. There are different personality styles and complicated power dynamics to navigate. There is also the potential for conflict whenever there are mismatched expectations. Additionally, there could be cultural reasons at play – in collectivist cultures, going with the flow is more socially acceptable than standing out. Dealing with any of these factors takes effort and our brains are wired to try to preserve energy.
But this short term pain from an uncomfortable confrontation is not worth the long-term cost – to your personal health and the success of you and your team – that you’re likely to encounter by avoiding it. A big part of your job as a manager is to represent you and your teams’ needs so that they’re successful, and managing up becomes a necessary tool. By staying silent, you risk not doing your job. Be sure you’re making an explicit decision if you avoid managing up, not just letting these hurdles get the best of you.
Identifying your manager
In our survey, the types of complaints about report-manager relationships took on various tones:
The micro-manager
“My superior has trust issues and is micromanaging my team, bypassing me.”
“My superior is dictating how I should manage my projects by enforcing strict roadmaps, which is putting additional strain on the technical teams who are already reporting being overloaded. He believes this is the best way to get things done, but I disagree.”
The absent manager
“My CPTO is more CPO than CTO and so broad engineering decisions are often delegated and there is no clear owner for those.”
“My manager and I have a good relationship, but all my suggestions seem to land in a black box.”
The unrealistic manager
“I’m caught between two different perceptions: upper management thinks teams are not working hard enough, but teams feel burned out.”
“How do I manage unreal business expectations?”
The “I don’t know what they want” manager
“My manager and I don’t communicate well, and I find myself always slightly misaligned with what they want. I’d say that 80% of my job is figuring out what they want.”
“I don’t want to overload my manager with context but I do want them to have enough when I need their quick decision on inevitable fires.”
The unskilled manager
“I’m navigating toxic executive leadership and lack of leadership backbone.”
“My VPs don’t understand the products they are responsible for.”
“My senior director does not know how to manage people and this is creating a serious thread of issues in the team.”
As it turns out, regardless of which of these managers you are dealing with, the steps forward are the same:
Evaluate your level of trust
Know what’s important to your manager
Be clear about what you need to be successful
Be clear about your team’s needs
1: Evaluate your level of trust
As leadership coaches, we often ask clients, “Have you told them that?” and the answer is usually “no” because of a perceived or real lack of trust. We love this trust equation as a way to uncover where trust might be lacking in your relationship, and how to improve it.
Think about your own credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation. Think about theirs. What’s possible to improve here? It might feel like nothing (in which case, it might be time to make a change) but really challenge yourself. Ask yourself: What will help me trust my manager more, and what will help them trust me more? Am I sure they don’t trust me?
2: Know what’s important to your manager
If you’ve got a baseline level of trust, start to get a better understanding of what your manager is dealing with. We hear repeatedly how much lonelier it gets the higher up in management you go. There is more expected of you and the ways to solve problems are less clear. Your manager is an imperfect human with skills and fears and weaknesses just like you.
Some of our favorite questions to ask are: “What’s keeping you up at night?” or “What are you most focused on right now?”
Exploring this can be beneficial for two reasons:
It helps you understand how your and your team’s needs interact with theirs, which can help you influence more effectively;
They probably don’t get asked this a lot. Opening these lines of communication can help with both intimacy and credibility (all part of the trust equation).
3: Be clear about what you need to be successful
It can be hard to feel confident telling someone else what you need, especially if they’re not asking. You can start by empathizing: “I know it can be hard to know how your direct reports prefer to be managed, I’d love to share with you what works best for me if you’d be open to it.” Or suggest doing something like User Manuals together, or in your team. Steer towards a conversation about what you both expect, with the aim of being able to do better work together.
4: Be clear about your team’s needs
You know your team in detail and should advocate for what they need in order to achieve the goals of the organization. Your manager needs to align and prioritize with their peers and the organization. Part of your job is bridging this gap. If you don’t find a way to make sure your manager has the right information, they will either act on their personal expertise and knowledge alone or they won’t act at all. Determine what they need to know about your team – or better yet, ask them! Gather the data you have, including team sentiment, what tradeoffs are being made, and how various decisions will affect the team’s ability to deliver.
Final thoughts
So after all that, what might it look like in practice?
Well, after thinking (worrying!) about it I met with my manager the next day. I knew that my approach to the workshops were enabling a foundation of trust and conversation, and I suspected my manager was impatient to get straight to changes that needed to be made. Because I knew I had a baseline of trust, I opened by telling him that I had felt micro-managed but that I didn’t think he meant to do that. And I explained what I wanted from the approach and what we risked by changing it. Then I asked what he was worried about with my approach. In the end, we reached a compromise. I kept my overall approach, but took a stronger advisory stance with my facilitation that improved the outcomes. Win, win!
All of this takes a bit of bravery, but that’s part of being an effective leader. If you choose not to have these managing up conversations, make sure you are doing so intentionally and with good reason. Don’t just let your brain shortcut you into unintentionally shouldering frustration or an emotional burden all on your own.
What’s excited us this q
🐋 To be frank, when we wrote this in early November we found it hard to get excited. We needed to retreat from the chaos of politics, and to find our own safe eddies.
👩🏫 Our Leadership Learning Labs have been getting some rave reviews. We’ve been working on a “manager-of-managers” lab that we’ll debut next year.
👩🎓 We’re again partnering to offer coaching scholarships for engineering leaders who identify as being from a group underrepresented in technology and who are not able to afford coaching yet. If you or someone you know would like to apply, follow us to see when applications open.
What’s pushed our thinking this q
👯♀️ Friends. We hung out, hiked, brainstormed, and gained new perspectives to fuel us into next year.
✍️ If “writing is thinking clearly,” and AI is doing the writing, what will happen to our ability to think clearly? From Paul Graham.