Managing Up: 7 Best Practices for Guiding the Boss
Aspiring leaders find right balance between how and what to say
Managers don’t only manage down. They also manage up, and learning how to do it well is a critical career skill.
Managing down is what managers do with staff that are direct reports. Managing up is what managers do to their own bosses.
Effective middle and senior managers ideally want to make sure that their bosses make good decisions based on accurate, timely and high-quality information. They should want solid relationships based on mutual understanding, compatible views and respectful disagreements.
“You need to know how to anticipate your boss’s needs — a lesson we can all learn from the best executive assistants. You need to understand what makes your boss tick (and what ticks her off) if you want to get buy-in for your ideas. Problems will inevitably come up, but knowing the right way to bring a problem to your boss can help you navigate sticky situations,” says Dana Rousmaniere in Harvard Business Review.
Employees often assume that their behavior and performance on the job requires a supervisor to provide all of the guidance. In this narrow view, leadership always comes from the boss.
