Managing Up

Managing Up

What do they mean by “managing up?” I hear some of you asking. By now I imagine that the reader has sorted out the concepts of management and leadership, and has grasped the idea that it isn’t enough to figure out the best use of your people and then issue orders; one must also convince the employees to do what you want them to do. But what about those people who are not required to take your orders, even in the most nominal sense? How is it possible to manage those above you in the hierarchy?

First of all, let’s go back to those definitions. Management is the science of getting necessary work done using other people. The key word here is “necessary.” It would always be nice to convince your boss to make someone else do your work, and give you more time to read Dear Abby (or whatever you read during the day), but it isn’t really necessary – until the work you are being assigned is beyond the resources you have available. For example, if you have a project that will require 400 person-hours to complete, and a crew of four (plus yourself), you will need two 40-hour weeks to complete it. If the project is due sooner than that, you will have to get additional person-hours from somewhere, either by drawing additional workers from some other part of the organization or by authorizing the necessary amount of overtime.

Unfortunately, either of these options will probably require you to get permission from your boss. If your department (or workgroup, or division, etc.) has no additional personnel to draw on, you may need to get your boss to arrange for support from another unit, and if your department has no overtime budget, you may need to get your boss to obtain funding (or authorization) from higher management. In either case, your boss should have the ability to draw the resources from elsewhere in the organization. Making use of your superiors’ resources and/or abilities in order to accomplish necessary tasks is the classic definition of managing up.

A much more difficult problem occurs when, having determined what we need the next level of management to do, we try to get them to do it. How does one “lead” someone at a higher level of the organization – someone who, in fact, is supposed to be leading you? Assuming that you have not been blessed with either an unusually competent superior (who will support you out of trust, loyalty, and your long history of being right all the time) or an extraordinary gift for leadership (which will convince your boss that you HAVE a long history of being right all the time, even when you don’t), you are going to be left with the unenviable task of convincing someone of a higher rank that they are best served by doing what you want them to do.

Keep that in mind as you frame your approach. Your failure, or that of your unit, will not serve your superior’s best interests, while your stunning success will. Ordering mandatory overtime will lower morale and damage your unit’s long-term success, while bringing in extra people to help out or offering generous overtime pay will raise morale and contribute to your long-term success – and when you succeed, the manager responsible for you succeeds as well.

Of course, the ideal solution would be to develop a strategy where by providing you the resources you need, your superior is able to achieve his or her own goals, and thus both of you benefit. If you can arrange all of your attempts to manage up in such a fashion, you may even be able to get your boss to do what you want him or her to do even when you don’t have a resource problem to solve…

But that’s a story for another day.