The Importance of Managing Up
How often do you brag about your own accomplishments to your manager or skip? How often do you provide status updates on your projects? When a project or research generates an insight, learnings, metrics, etc. is that shared outside of your immediate team? In other words how often are you truly making a dedicated effort to manage up?
What is managing up?
To really understand why it’s important, you first need to understand what it really means to manage up. For most ICs I love this definition of managing up from Culture Amp:
— Understanding what your manager wants to achieve
— Developing a positive and productive relationship with your manager
— Learning and adapting to your manager's communication style and way of working
— Communicating your own preferred work and communication style
— Anticipating your manager's needs
The principle of managing up is understanding. By gaining an awareness of what their goals are and how your manager operates, you can nurture a healthy relationship that is beneficial to not only both of you but also the larger organization.
The key bit there at the end is a mutual understanding of goals and how best to support the way your manager operates. Things that sometimes can feel uncomfortable or unnecessary to communicate might be the type of information your manager, skip, or other leads are actually dying to understand.
Why is it important?
Look at the image below and think of every dot as a single person. Information needs to flow up and back down from the top to the bottom on a regular cadence to ensure an overall organization can operate as effectively as possible.
Complexity in information pathways
Perhaps you find yourself shaking your head at an All hands wondering why leadership doesn’t understand a particular piece of work or a data point your team solved for weeks ago. Often it comes down to the pathways and focus on each relative leaders goals along the way. OKRs and aligned goals become all that more important when you’re attempting to keep information flowing smoothly. Having just enough detail, along with horizontal awareness of other decisions, helps provide the necessary data for every one, on every level to make decisions day to day. For leadership that often means looking further out, but for an IC getting the right communications down from your manage free you to focus on the goals ahead.
Given the image above it’s easy to understand why every level of leadership will have less detailed understanding of what exactly is happening, with every project, with every member of the team. But, how do you actually solve for that?
Examples of managing up
As mentioned above, it’s important to understand the goals and strategy for the business, along with the direct goals your line manager is responsible for. By understanding their goals you can tailor your messaging, your updates, and your self-promotion to drive impact for both you and your lead.
One easy way to do this is to keep your manager up-to-date on the status of your projects, particularly when there might be delays and or improvements in the planned schedule. As designers this may also mean spending time beyond crit working through the action plan and how best you might approach delivering work.
Another way to manage up is to directly ask what they want to know and on what cadence? You may hear that project X is of particular importance because it’s tied to a highly visible workstream. They report on it weekly, so hearing from you on the same cadence will help them effectively share the right information at the right times.
Another sometimes less comfortable way to manage up, is to brag about yourself and your impact. What did you accomplish this week that you were proud of? What did your last experiment results say? Did you get good feedback from a peer? Share it! There is no shame in putting self-promotion on display. However, when self-promotion becomes a crutch, hiding actual gaps and issues in operations or execution, that is when it becomes unhelpful. Read a bit more about that in this thread from Shreyas Doshi.
Ask for help when you need it. Sometimes problems or projects can be challenging. It’s great to try to work through that first, or with support from peers, but don’t wait a long time for problems to linger before asking for help. A lot of management is providing the coaching, support, or connections necessary to unblock and uplevel your outcomes. If we don’t know about a problem, we can’t help you solve it.
Lastly, communicate what you need as directly as possible. Be crisp on what you would like to happen, what boundaries you may have, what you believe will set you up for success, and so on.
