Managing upward: three skills to teach you how to collaborate effectively with superiors and bosses

[Yuan Chuang Conference Preview] 1024 Programmers’ Day (two days before), meet at the Open Source China office, let’s talk about AI! >>>

While working at a startup, a colleague suddenly gained a strong sense of trust and support from one of the founders. The two often chatted animatedly in the corridor, which was very noticeable in a small company. Colleagues get together to drink and chat after get off work. Whenever his name is mentioned, everyone will roll their eyes and complain that this relationship has given the company many bad ideas.

"Why?" I asked. "Can't the co-founder see these changes?"
After a few beers, a fellow programmer responded: "He's really good at managing up!"

In the following years, I have always associated "managing up" with "sycophancy", "workplace politics" and "bad ideas".

Yes, I was wrong.

Big mistake.

Managing up—defined here as “knowing how to successfully interact and communicate with superiors”—helps move companies and organizations forward. It can also help you grow professionally without using shady tactics like flattery or manipulation.

Let’s share three tips for upward management that you can take action immediately and see results. They will benefit you, your superiors, and your team.

First, attention and energy are the scarcest resources.

Managers think they are strapped for time, but in fact, their scarcest resources are attention and energy .

There are a large number of ongoing events at any time, and no manager can take care of them all; many people-related events will occur at the same time, and it is difficult for most managers to deeply participate in and deal with them all. And as the scope of managers' power expands, this feeling will become stronger and stronger.

For example, in my organization, I currently manage 12 products and nearly 700 members, while my supervisor manages twice as many products and people. I usually know everything that’s going to happen during the year: goals, strategic plans, progress metrics, key roadblocks, and even monthly/quarterly progress for each product, but I’m limited in what I can (or should) be more deeply involved in. . This was even more true for my superiors.

Logically, then, the key to achieving results as a manager is to choose those areas that attract the most attention and energy . There are many ways to do this, but one important tool in a manager’s toolbox is regular one-on-one communication with direct reports .

This is where managing up plays a key role, helping to direct managers’ attention and energy to the things that will be most beneficial. How to do this?

01 Do a good job in filtering, organizing and structuring information

The first step is to filter information before the meeting. Many one-on-one meetings are filled with disjointed updates, complaints about tough issues, and ideas that pop into your head. Better yet, take a step back and think like a pedant about how to present information to busy superiors within the limited attention and space they have.

What matters currently deserve the most attention and energy from managers?
What things can be put on hold?
What can be ignored even though it is important at the moment?
What updates or references need further discussion in the future?

Adequate information filtering can effectively guide managers to focus on the most important things, and will also bring benefits to your own growth and development. My superior and I have one-on-one communication for about 30 minutes every 2-3 weeks. Over the course of a few weeks, I collect the topics that come to mind during teamwork and filter and prioritize them before the meeting to ensure that we focus on what “should be discussed” and not Not a lot of "discussable" stuff.

In addition to carefully preparing meeting content, excellent information organization and structuring is also crucial. In a complex, fast-changing environment, every topic you choose is rich in depth and content, and it may take hours to fully understand it. And time is very precious, so upward management requires you to think like writing an article,

Which three bullet points can convey most of the content and advance your communication with your superiors?
In what order should information be presented so that it is easy to understand?
What are 1-2 key issues that require input from superiors?

From my experience, most people give little or no thought to the organization and structuring of information—which leads to less effective conversations and less effective leadership. For me, although the meeting is only 30 minutes, I may spend more than 90 minutes organizing and recording key points of information to make the best use of my time.

02 High-quality questions are more important than solutions

Have you heard this statement?

Don't give your superiors a problem unless you have a solution.

Like all "words of wisdom," this statement was widely disseminated and then gradually misunderstood and misinterpreted in every detail. Einstein once said—perhaps apocryphally—that if I were given an hour to save the earth, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and 1 minute solving it. Whether Einstein said it or not, we can all practice it in managing up.

In fact, it is far more important to ask managers high-quality, clear questions than to sync them with irrelevant updates about problems you have solved/have the ability to solve.

Tough questions turn managers into chiefs of staff. And because most managers communicate with everyone who reports directly to them, hearing similar issues from different sources can highlight their importance and get the manager's attention. In addition, high-quality questions allow managers to leverage their experience, pattern-matching abilities, and emotional distance to help identify potential solutions to the problem.

When filtering, organizing, and structuring information, be sure to work with well-defined questions to make both managers and yourself more effective. The list of issues must be filtered, sorted, and organized; with the help of managers, we must also identify the areas of issues that “should be discussed.”

03 Be a bridge between managers and teams

How to maintain communication with the entire organization while providing guidance or feedback is a constant challenge for all managers . The larger the organization, the greater the challenge.

When managing a team of 5 people, you can communicate with each member in detail to make sure everyone understands your expectations and monitor progress regularly;

When managing 25 people, you can still communicate one-on-one, but you have to leave detailed expectation setting and follow-up to managers;

What if it is a team of 700 or even thousands of people? You can't talk to everyone one-on-one, or even make sure everyone reads your notifications and messages.

Good upward management builds bridges between managers and teams.

How do you translate the information you get from managers into content that is most easily understood by your team/colleagues and deliver it to everyone?
When a task requested by your superiors is not going well, how do you collect and synthesize the feedback that managers need on behalf of your team?
How do you use direct contact with your superiors to defuse the tension between colleagues and superiors when managers make unpopular but correct decisions?

Bad upward management manifests itself in blindly fighting for the last ditch for managers - a classic pitfall is "the boss said so, so we must do it . " In addition, it is also wrong to transmit information without filtering and synchronize the voices of all managers without any processing like a porter. Likewise, not sharing information but keeping it known to yourself due to paternalism or a desire for power is also a wrong model for upward management.

How is upward management like a bridge done? Rather than relying on top-down directives, managers know that you will help them achieve their goals in the right way—with the right context, with the right differentiation for the target audience, with the right follow-up— and provide them with feedback based on progress and issues.

#LigaAI Summary

While all managers have unique work habits and collaboration preferences, the three tips for managing up are universal to some extent.

Value-based information filtering, organization and structuring
Provide high-quality problem descriptions
Be a bridge between managers and teams

Finally, I hope you can make unremitting efforts and make continuous progress in the never-ending tasks and work to better manage your work, your team, and your superiors.

(The original author is Saumil Mehta, and the content has been translated and organized by LigaAI.)

LigaAI @OSCHINA will share more useful content such as programmer growth, technical management advancement, R&D management practice, etc. Welcome to follow us.

Click me to register now to use the new generation of intelligent R&D collaboration.