Ten rules for managing up - Women's Agenda

Ten rules for managing up

The column that I wrote last week detailing a friend’s stay or leave dilemma made mention of the impact that skilfully managing up had on a person’s promotional prospects. That detail clearly exposed a nerve so raw that I was inundated with requests for clues as to how to manage up.

Not sure if it’s upbringing, gender stereotyping from a young age, or the sheer desire to do the best job possible in the time available, but women in general lag behind men in the managing up stakes. I’m no expert at this but I have observed some of the best in business during my 25 years as a manager. The top 10 behaviours (in no particular order) I have witnessed resonate with leaders and eventually the board are as follows:

  1. Be the bearer of good news, constantly. Feed through every small piece of positivity as it happens.
  2. Distance yourself from bad news. Clearly the negative result was the result of factors outside your control or the actions of a person who you will now sacrifice.
  3. Arrange a lunch with a group of industry leaders at a leading restaurant where one of your best friends is the celebrity chef. Invite your CEO and ask your chef friend to pile on the VIP treatment.
  4. Repeat the above at a golf day. Invite the celebrity chef for continuity. Your CEO is now starting to view you as a mover and shaker.
  5. Offer to do the CEO’s dirty work. No one likes to be the one to downsize a department so offer to do it for them.
  6. Find out your CEO’s favourite bottle of wine and drop one on his desk on a regular basis. Even better if you can link it back to a story about you and the celebrity chef.
  7. If the boss is going on holidays, do your best to get him an upgrade or at the very least a free bottle of French champagne. Then make sure he knows it was all you.
  8. Take sides. Listen to who the CEO is finding challenging and make sure it’s obvious that you do too.
  9. Deliver the CEO statistics that show where the competitors are weak. Never show him where they are strong. You don’t want to be associated with his negative moods, only his happy ones.
  10. Dress in a power suit, especially on Fridays if the rest of the office has an informal casual dress code for that day.

The problem with all of this is how do you find the time to focus on and complete that list when you have a full-time job delivering the company’s results? I have tried to keep my managing up strategy quite simple to ensure that I don’t ignore it but so that it also doesn’t consume my week. There are only three steps to my managing up plan. This is also how I have encouraged my management teams throughout my career to manage me.

  1. Regular reporting on the drivers that matter. In my business that’s revenue, cost, traffic, people/culture.
  2. Regular discussion about new ideas and thinking with regard to growth opportunities.
  3. I also work on the ‘no surprises’ principle with regard to the company’s risk and reputation. Good or bad, my manager should always know what’s around the corner and how I am trying to solve a challenging issue.

Unfortunately I have never known my manager’s favourite wine or restaurant and I prefer my meetings with industry leaders and clients to have a direct purpose. I am too time-poor to spend any more time on managing up than that.

Do you do more than this? Has it been effective in your rise to the top?

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