Managing Up

My problem with the phrase “Managing Up” involves a hard-earned historical observation regarding its weaponization. The helpful version of this practice is a clear understanding between you and your manager that there are uncommon, intriguing, or worrying developments that you — without hesitation — share with your manager.

Isn’t that their responsibility, as well? It is. Also, wouldn’t you expect them to have significantly more of these observations because their observational blast radius is larger? They do. Do we call this “Managing Down”? Gross. No, we call this bi-directional effective communication, which is a mouthful. This is also only half of a correct strategy.

“Managing Up” is problematic because it often describes a subset of humans who perform this task, believing, “I am artisanally selecting the most important bits of information to share upwardly because my judgment is incredibly sound.”

This is not what they are doing. What they are doing is manipulating perception. They have a specific selfish narrative they want their manager to build, so they carefully select a subset of the truth and market it as the complete picture. They believe their manager is so busy and soup tasting that their interpreted version of the story will become canonical.

Bad news, truth tweakers. A competent leader will source their facts. They will share that partial story with a trusted other not because they don’t trust you but because a story must defend itself, stand up to scrutiny, and prove its worth. They don’t do this because they don’t believe you; they do this because it’s perfectly reasonable communication hygiene. When they discover you’ve delivered half the story, they will quietly ask themselves, “Why half? Are they trying to save me time, or are they trying to lead me astray?” One occurrence of this behavior is no big deal. A small error. Two occurances? Is this a pattern? Probably not. Wait, three? Ok, why are they deliberately choosing to tell me a dubious version of the truth?

Managing up. If you were drawing a word cloud of dubious management-related phrases, chances are, “Managing Up” would be proximate to “Kissing Ass.” To me, “Managing Up” has that “your boss’s job is more important than yours” feel, which pisses me off.

Your boss isn’t more important than you; it’s different. You are responsible for yourself and the professional well-being of your team of seven engineers and your product. Your boss is responsible for her job, you, your six peers, their 57 respective employees, and the four products. That’s 72 humans and five products if you’re keeping count.

As you move “up” the organization chart, the amount of responsibility that weighs on a manager increases significantly, and, yes, this does mean they often make more money than you, but that is often because they have more years of experience. This experience allegedly means they can complete a more diverse set of work at vaster scale because they are you in 5-10 years, but — I remain steadfast — it’s different work.

But each of you has equal responsibility for sharing information.

Essential Information

Okay, thanks for letting me vent. With that out of the way, let’s get practical.

The amount of aggregated information you need to do your job increases as a function of the magnitude of your responsibility. This means you must become adept at finding, confirming, understanding, and passing it along in the correct direction.

That’s what you’re looking for — information that has passed through the bright minds of your team, where they’ve coalesced the vast amount of information they see into informative, crisp narratives. One challenge is they know you have six other leaders doing precisely the same thing, so they need to prioritize and choose which narratives to share.

What’s important to share? I’m glad you asked. There are three areas where the information requires constant vigilance:

Projects — the things you build, the large tasks you complete, and the significant work involving many humans.

People — all the humans around you in every direction helping you complete the projects.

Politics — the connective communication that binds all the humans together — easily manipulated for good and evil.

In this piece, I will explain the projects, people, and political developments you always want to share — no matter what. While I will strive to make this complete, there is one type of development you must always report:

Unexpected developments. A situation appears in front of you, a non-threatening one but unexpected. Strange. Something is up, but you can’t discern the backstory story or the intent. It is unfamiliar. Tell your manager. Now. Just a brief note. A heads up. It’s probably nothing — it usually is — but there is a chance your manager’s context plus your suspicions equals additional clarity.

I want to start by acknowledging a fundamental professional tension. Your managers want you to believe you can do your job without them (which everyone wants, by the way), but when you fail to keep them informed about important developments within the team, it looks like you don’t know how to do your job (which no one wants, by the way). Confusingly put, neither you nor your manager is doing your job correctly when you’re sharing too much or too little information.

Here are the areas:

People

A significant unexpected change for a key individual on the team. Life situation, odd conversation that doesn’t add up, or, again, a perception that something is up.

Major successes. It needs to be communicated even if it was supposed to happen like this for them. Exceeding expectations is worth noting. Every time.

For humans on your team, with an agreed-upon growth plan you’ve shared with your manager, you report minor successes against this plan. Failures, too.

Anytime ever that anyone ever thinks about saying the words or phrases “Human Resources,” “People Team,” or “Legal.” Even if they claim to be joking, the fact they are thinking of these teams is a fact that must be shared.

Projects

A significant positive or negative development on a critical project. Not the resolution but the observance of the development at first sight. This is even more critical when your manager has a professional stake in the project’s outcome.

Projected-related gossip from external high-trust parties. Might be gossip. Might be an early warning system. Could be political. Keep reading.

Achieved milestones. Missed milestones. Contributing factors and recommended fixes are appreciated for those missed milestones, but waiting until these are perfectly defined is often a tactic motivated by not wanting to share bad news. The sooner I hear bad news, the more I can help.

Impending doom. Just the hint of it. A slight smell in the air.

Politics

Interesting developments on external teams where we have a project dependency.

Gossip, rumors, and lies about the project. Yes, much of this information is false, but the fact these rumors are wandering the hallways is news. Folks are spreading this misinformation for a reason that is worth discovering. True story: there are humans out there who insert lies into the organizational bloodstream to see the reaction. They call this pressure testing, and these humans are jerks.

Just. Plain. Weird. Yeah, it’s a catch-all. Yeah, it’s the hardest to define, but sometimes people say the darndest, strangest things, and rather than scratching your head and staring at the ceiling, tell someone else this weirdness and see what happens.

Do all this consistently with your manager and team; again, you’re working with half the information.

Managing Sideways

My actual problem isn’t with “Managing Up” or “Managing Down”; if you do this well, you’re still only working with half the necessary information. You and your manager collectively represent half the information required to do your job. HALF.

Look to your right. Look to your left. That’s the other half, and you’re probably ignoring much of it. It took me a couple of decades to properly value horizontal relationships and their context. Why? Because everyone kept asking me if I was “Managing Up”. [facepalm] My manager told me what to do; they set my compensation, so I managed the relationship because they managed me.

People, projects, and politics. Your relationship with your manager represents half the information you need, half the context. It doesn’t mean you can’t do your job, but it’s not a stretch that you are missing critical developments because of the absence of this context.

If you don’t believe me, it’s because the lesson hasn’t been hammered into you by the path of senior leadership, where you become increasingly distant from the measurable familiarity of hands-on work and become adept at building a sense of satisfaction and productively finding, confirming, understanding, and passing along critical information.

And you are not doing this alone.