Navigating the relationship between employees and managers requires effort from both sides, with managing up being a crucial skill for fostering a productive dynamic. Building rapport, trust, and effective communication strategies can enhance the work environment and improve outcomes for all involved. For instance, understanding how to set goals collaboratively with your manager can lead to a more harmonious and effective workplace. Key Information and Concepts: - “People don’t quit a job, they quit a boss” emphasizes the importance of managerial quality. - Managing up involves developing rapport, trust, and effective communication with management. - The relationship between a manager and their report is a two-way street, requiring effort from both parties. - Advice for employees focuses on concrete tactics for improving the manager-report relationship. - The guide seeks insights from experienced leaders on effective strategies for managing upwards.
This article is crucial for Engineering Leaders as it provides actionable strategies for managing up, addressing common leadership challenges such as building trust and effective communication with superiors. One actionable takeaway is to develop rapport with your manager by openly discussing goals and aligning on expectations, fostering a more productive working relationship.
There’s an oft-repeated phrase: “People don’t quit a job, they quit a boss.” Certainly if you want to go the manager route, it’s critical to become a trusted captain in order to retain a top crew. But foisting all the blame onto bad bosses when these pairings go awry is also an oversimplification — one that takes agency away from the employee.
Like any relationship, that of the manager and their report is a two-way street, and the task of navigating the often bumpy road along a startup’s course falls on both parties. There are those managers who you instantly click with, falling into an easy rhythm as though you’ve worked together for years. Others duos may seem like you’re trying to force two repelling magnets together. But more likely, your relationship with your boss falls somewhere in between these two extremes.
Whether you’re taking on your first direct report or you’re a seasoned leader looking to sharpen your skills, there’s plenty of advice to go around when it comes to managers. But when the focus shifts to those who are being managed, many of those concrete tactics and strategies get decidedly less detailed. While it’s universally understood that building a good relationship with your manager takes work — even if you take to each other like a duck to water — the prescription for how to do so often fails to pack a punch.
That’s in part because managing up is a rather amorphous category, encompassing everything from developing rapport and trust, decision-making, communication style, conflict management and goal-setting with higher-ups. To further sketch out the do’s and don’ts for managing up, we’ve spent the past few weeks reaching out to some of the sharpest folks we know for their take on this important question: