Activities Involved in Managing Upwards

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is managing upwards?

Let’s begin by considering what the aim of managing upwards is. Essentially, it’s about building the best possible relationship with your manager, with the intention of making both your work lives easier. 

How to manage upwards

At its core, managing upwards involves three key activities: 

•      Managing yourself effectively
•      Thinking of your manager as your customer
•      Being trustworthy, honest, and reliable at all times

Managing yourself effectively

Generally, what your manager most needs from you is that you do your job well and meet your objectives. By meeting your objectives, you help your manager meet his or hers and this, in turn, makes your manager look good. To meet or even exceed expectations means learning to manage yourself so that you can deliver the goods.

Being able to manage your workload is vital. So you need to agree with your manager about what you can do. Knowing how to prioritize tasks is a valuable skill. It’s natural for any leader to want to do a good job and be seen as a valued team member or a competent leader. However, don’t fall into the trap of taking on too much. Companies are always under pressure to do more with limited resources. The temptation to say yes to everything and instantly regret it is common. The danger is that you will miss deadlines and not deliver what is expected of you. By trying to do too much, you end up not doing enough. And this can negatively affect your reputation and your standing in your boss’s eyes! 

Thinking of your manager as your customer

An unusual but effective way to build your working relationship is to think of your manager as a customer of your service, rather than as a commander. If you imagine yourself as being a trader who sells your skills and productivity to the company, then your manager is your prime client. Keeping your manager, the company’s representative, happy with your service is your way to meet your service contract. 

You will notice that your feelings about what you are tasked to do are different, from this point of view, than those of an employee being given orders. Managing your client to clarify requirements and agree deliverables is a much more agreeable and evenly balanced relationship than that of boss and subordinate.

Being trustworthy, honest, and reliable

Can your manager trust you? The issue of trust goes beyond just being trusted to get the job done. Being honest and trustworthy means showing confidence in your colleagues. You need to be seen as someone to be relied upon – someone who will “have their back” and support your colleagues when challenges arise. 

Think of yourself as an ally to your manager, ready to cooperate and fill in when things need doing. It is common in any working environment for issues or tasks to appear that are not formally part of anyone’s job. Being willing to share in such tasks, or to fill in when colleagues are incapacitated or overloaded, makes your manager’s job easier. You show that, in a spirit of cooperation, you are prepared to take up the slack.

Managing upwards in action

Consider this example. A marketing company produces print leaflets and brochures for many clients. The company is very successful, and, as a result, there are often large queues at its office. One day, Paul, the managing director, casually remarked to Sarah, the office manager, that he was becoming concerned at how long customers were having to wait when they came to collect printing jobs. 

Sarah realized that she had become so overworked worrying about the tiny details of running the office team effectively that she’d lost sight of whether the team was actually delivering value to its customers. As a result, she started to delegate some tasks to her more experienced team members. This enabled her to turn her attention to operational matters.

She thought about what Paul said. She realized that as well as satisfying her customers, she had to satisfy her manager. After all, he was her customer too. And he was disappointed because the office was not being run efficiently.

Sarah worked with her team to come up with ideas for ensuring quicker turnaround times for customers. She also consulted some of the customers, doing a small, informal survey among them. She assured the team that her aim was to make the processes more efficient for everyone, the team members and the customers. 

Over time, Paul noticed that the queues were moving faster. He complimented Sarah on her efficiency. She explained to him the steps she’d taken to implement his feedback. He was surprised that she’d gone to so much trouble over what he considered to be just a casual remark. Sarah replied that she considered her boss as if he were a customer wishing for better service. So she decided to take steps to work out how she might deliver that. Paul was very impressed by her initiative.