Managing Upwards

Upwards?

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While you may typically think of the management part of being a manager as the relationship between yourself and those who report to you, it’s equally important to think about how to handle the relationship with your own manager. It’s critical to your happiness in the workplace, your career growth, and ultimately your success, as your manager will be judging your performance. By putting a concerted effort into getting the best out of the relationship with your own manager, you can be happier, more impactful, and go further in your career.

As you begin to report higher up the org chart, you’ll naturally be dealing with people who are extremely busy — especially true if you are reporting to the CTO or CEO. Although you may report to someone who actively spends a scheduled portion of their week thinking about your own career growth, with the increased messiness and ambiguity at the upper echelon of organizations, active attention from your manager will become increasingly unlikely. Instead, you should take your relationship with your manager into your own hands. Set the agenda yourself and seek your manager’s advice, not the other way around.

Contracting Again

Let’s start with first principles: perform the contracting exercise. We went into the contracting exercise in detail in a previous article, so start there if you haven’t encountered it. If you are beginning a relationship with a new manager, then don’t wait for them to do this exercise with you; ask them to do it. Additionally, don’t worry if you have already worked for this manager for a while; the contracting exercise is a great refresher.

During the contracting exercise, you can confirm how best to report on progress, get support (in both directions), and discuss how your personalities may support or collide with each other. By identifying these points up front, you can prevent many real conflicts by establishing a deeper understanding of how both of you operate.

How Much Communication?

Ask how much your manager needs to know and when.

Ask them to envision the following situations and how they would like to receive the information.

By which means, and how often, would they like to be informed of:

• Weekly and daily progress on projects for which you are accountable.
• Critically urgent situations. For example, the entire app is down or someone wants to leave.
• Your staff’s performance, good or bad.
• Administrative events (for example, your own illness or need to work from home).

Your manager may not need to know about some situations. I’ve reported to managers who like a constant flow of communication and those who prefer only to hear when something urgent happens, operating in the knowledge that all is under control unless notified otherwise.

The medium of communication is important too. Your manager may like face-to-face conversations, 1 to 1s, or email digests. If you are reporting to the CTO or another board member, their time may be scarce, and regular face-to-face catch-ups may be dramatically more effective than email or Slack. Or, the inverse could be true. Who knows without asking? Get clear instructions for communication preferences up front.

What Makes Your Manager Perform Well?

Ask how your manager’s performance is measured. Are they accountable for particular projects, or particular KPIs? How often are these checked and by whom? Are they accountable for a team or a division or an entire department of the business? Get clear on how your success in your own job feeds into their success.

This conversation is also an opportunity to explore how you can grow in your role. Are there other facets of your manager’s job that could, with time, be delegated to you so that you can continue to level up? Typical items your manager could delegate include hiring, departmental processes, steering meetings, and budgets. This discussion can produce a truly win-win situation: you can expand your own responsibility and impact on the business and your manager can have more time to focus on other, more enjoyable aspects of their role.

At some level, everyone is judged by delivering some project or initiative on time. A CTO will be judged by the output of the Engineering department. A team leader will be judged by the output of their team. However, are there other factors your manager is being measured against that you could indirectly contribute to? There may be a push to grow the department by 20 percent by the end of the year. There may be a concerted effort to save money on hosting costs. There may be diversity goals in hiring for the company as a whole. See if you can contribute to these goals as part of your own role.

What Is Good Performance?

To get a better idea of how they judge performance, ask your manager to identify the characteristics of a current top performer in the company. You can begin to understand the traits that they value in their organization.

Do they prefer staff who just get things done without needing steer, or do they prefer to be involved in decisions beforehand so they can oversee? Do they value those that communicate frequently about their work, or is no news good news?

As a manager, tapping into their vision for their organization can promote good discussion about how you too can contribute to fulfilling that vision.

The Visibility of Your Work

Since your manager will be delivering your performance reviews, ask them about their thought process when writing it. Do they primarily measure your performance on the frequency and quality of projects that you are delivering, or is that just part of a greater picture? For example, do they consider coaching and mentoring, the happiness of your team, and your success in hiring and retaining staff? By discovering this framework now, you can use it to frame activities in your role and the activities of your staff.

Asking how your manager measures this progress is also key. Does your manager look at a mixture of shipped projects plus a subjective measure based on their view of your role in the organization? Or would they like you to keep track of your goals concretely so they can review them regularly as the year goes on?

In Summary

Managing upwards is not discussed as widely as managing your own direct reports. However, understanding this relationship is critical to your success. Many individuals in an organization see the relationship as entirely one way. Expecting your manager to always create the best environment for success so you can be a passive participant is not the best way to handle this relationship. A strong manager/employee relationship requires effort from both parties continually.

Fundamental misunderstandings can arise on both sides that can manifest in conflict, or even worse, in a bad performance review. Just as you manage your own direct reports, it is your responsibility to work on the relationship with your own manager so that you can both ultimately succeed. Ask!

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Further Reading

Also by James Stanier:

Become An Effective Software Engineering Manager on Medium: