5 Tips for Managing Up To Leadership
As we grapple with this new state of uncertainty in our personal lives, many of us are also facing the pressure of amplified job responsibilities as we push to keep our projects moving and our businesses afloat. Engaging with work projects can be a challenge, especially when our team members and managers are as overworked and stressed as we are.
In high-stress periods, managing up with leadership and at times our peers can be an effective way to ease our own work burdens and streamline tasks. While the phrase itself is often problematically framed to place the burden of work on direct reports, managing up has the potential to be an incredibly useful tool for self-advocacy and building trust between colleagues.
Here are 5 tips and tricks you can use to start managing up effectively:
CONTEXTUALIZE YOUR IDEAS AND SUGGESTIONS.
Often our managers and team members have much less visibility into our individual projects than we realize. Anytime you share a new idea, be sure to put forward both the idea and the thought process around it. Showing how you arrived at that conclusion will better facilitate buy-in from stakeholders and in the process may demonstrate a discrete skill or unique perspective that you have. E.g. We should try this thing because X, as I noticed Y and it makes me think of Z.
2. FRAME YOUR ASKS CLEARLY.
It’s easy to ping stakeholders with new information without considering how we want them to respond. Do we want them to review and edit? Do we want thought partnership? Is it an FYI? Taking a moment to clarify needs, provide associated timelines, and indicate urgency by adding a simple [For review] or [FYI] to a subject line, will lead to more helpful conversations overall and will prevent bottlenecks.
3. REVISE THE PROCESS AS YOU GO.
As you and your project lead figure out how best to work together on a project, assessing your mutual communication needs consistently and honestly, will ensure you are always in sync and will prevent time-consuming misunderstanding. A few questions to ask - How would you prefer to set up check-ins? every week? Ad hoc? How does your manager prefer to communicate, over slack, phone, email? Within what hours are they more likely to respond?
4. ANTICIPATE NEEDS.
Once you have a better understanding of how your project lead likes to be kept in the loop and the kinds of issues they prioritize, you can start getting ahead of asks by anticipating the next step. For example, perhaps you’ve hit a sudden roadblock in a project. Instead of going to your project lead with an open-ended ‘what do we do?’ it would be much more helpful to arrive at your next meeting with three options that they can respond to. Now you’ve impressed them and streamlined the solution.
5. OVERCOMMUNICATE. OVERCOMMUNICATE. OVERCOMMUNICATE.
When it comes to team projects, our managers may have limited bandwidth to anticipate our questions or concerns. For that reason, it may be better to over-communicate when discussing project goals and deliverables, especially in a project’s initial stages. What is your updated thinking on a particular approach? How are you orienting towards a deadline given your workload this week? Such communication establishes transparency early on, aligns expectations, and makes it easier to track progress.