Managing up is ignored. Individual contributor work is most important, but management is necessary. As much as we wished Holacracy to work, it doesn’t. Ignoring the mentor, mentee relationships and ignoring competitive cross-department dynamics, there are three major types of management:
- Managing down (those who report to you)
- Managing your peers and how to interact with and cooperate with them
- Managing up
We All Manage Up
Executive teams need to manage up to investors, investors need to manage up to their LPs, and LPs need to manage up to their constituents, or at least to their friends and family, justifying their investments. Managing up is a constant—it never ends. We’re all managing up.
Most people are awful at managing up. Managing up can feel political, but humans are hypersocial animals, and we’re all political. There is no way an organization can work without staff effectively managing up. Management cannot fix problems they don’t know exist, and management can’t reward work they don’t know happened.
Bureaucracy
A good friend of mine worked at Cisco out of college. He grinded 80+ hours/week to prove himself at his first job. During his first performance review, his managers scored him three out of 5. Only his direct manager noticed his work and rated him five out of five. He knew he was contributing more and working harder than anyone else on his team, so he asked his manager why he didn’t get a higher ranking.
His manager said he was working in the silos. His work went unnoticed. None of the other managers know the problems he’s solving or what he’s doing all day. “Surface the issues, and you won’t have to grind so hard.” My friend then worked 50 hours/week and Cc’d all his managers on everything he did. He was promoted during his next performance review and was the youngest person to be promoted in his cohort.
How to Manage Up
The above example is one way to manage up as an entry-level person in a massive bureaucracy. It would be incredibly obnoxious for someone at a startup to message their manager on every task they do. However, no matter the size of the company, you need to manage up.
If something is wrong, you have options. Simply complaining is never correct– take action. Unfortunately, most of the workforce has no idea how to manage up. They lack empathy for the job of management and don’t think about things on a system level.
Learning how to manage up is a key skill in both work and life. To manage up, you must surface problems, propose solutions, and give recommendations.
Surface Problems
Explain the problem in detail. Go into why it’s a problem and how it became a problem. Use the Five Why’s technique to get to the source of it.
Five Why’s sound simple, but there can be multiple branches when asking why. Explore those branches and keep asking why. Define and write out the problem before trying to solve it.
Propose Solutions
Give at least three solutions that you think will solve the problem. Say what resources and processes are necessary for each solution. Be explicit about the cost and benefits of each solution. List the pros and cons.
When managing up, if you provide the solution management uses, you’ll earn huge brownie points. Your reputation and influence will grow in the organization. It shows that you’re a clear, persuasive thinker. At the same time, you may propose a solution management uses that goes badly. If you hadn’t previously written out how it could have gone wrong, you’d lose influence in the organization.
Give Recommendations
After you critique and steelman every proposed solution, recommend what you think is the best course of action and why.
Not following this process creates needless work for management. It makes the person bringing up the problem look junior and inconsiderate for not taking the time to solve it themselves. Often, the employee may not have full context or the frameworks or experience necessary to solve the problem, but they should still propose solutions and give recommendations.
Even if you’re not confident in your recommendations, it’s deliberate practice. The only way to improve is to measure and adjust based on your learnings.
Seniority
Bringing up a problem and only one solution is something children do, not adults in a workplace.
How senior someone’s title is means they take more work off management’s plate. If someone is a head or lead, their whole job should take work off their manager’s plate.
Problems should be brought up following the process above. This is until the employee is senior enough to be trusted to solve bigger and bigger problems independently.