HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across (HBR Guide Series)

Harvard Business Review

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781422187609
• eBook ISBN: 9781422187616
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

ARE YOUR WORKING RELATIONSHIPS WORKING AGAINST YOU?

To achieve your goals and get ahead, you need to rally people behind you and your ideas. But how do you do that when you lack formal authority? Or when you have a boss who gets in your way? Or when you're juggling others' needs at the expense of your own?

By managing up, down, and across the organization. Your success depends on it, whether you're a young professional or an experienced leader.

The HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across will help you:

• Advance your agenda—and your career—with smarter networking
• Build relationships that bring targets and deadlines within reach
• Persuade decision makers to champion your initiatives
• Collaborate more effectively with colleagues
• Deal with new, challenging, or incompetent bosses
• Navigate office politics

Section 1

Managing Up

Neglecting to manage up may cost you promotions or chances to put your great ideas into action. But understanding what makes your boss and his cohort tick and embracing their priorities will open doors for you.

This isn’t kissing up or manipulation. You’re not trying to inflate egos. You’re helping the people you work for succeed, which in turn helps you succeed.

This section of the guide is about creating win-win relationships with higher-ups. You’ll learn how to present problems and opportunities to them, give them feedback, connect with your boss’s boss without doing an end run, and deal with a variety of difficult managers—from the micromanager to the conflict-averse.

Managing
Your Boss

by Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback

Managing up is important because your boss plays a pivotal role in your success—or your failure. You can leverage your boss’s influence in the organization on your behalf in several ways—for example, by obtaining valuable information, winning needed resources, and securing important support for your personal development and career. When you face difficult trade-offs and must make decisions that create both beneficial and painful consequences for others, your boss’s advice, insight, knowledge of the organization, and access to higher management can be invaluable. As your organization shifts and changes shape in an uncertain market, a good relationship here becomes a necessity for navigating through the turmoil. The penalties of a poor relationship are many: less influence, little information or advice, fewer resources, and limited personal development and career support. Worst case, you can find yourself isolated, ignored, pushed out—your journey stalled, your career derailed.

Why Is It Often an Uneasy Relationship?

This relationship can be problematic for two reasons. First, a boss plays conflicting roles: supporter and evaluator, which can create confusion. Second, people often bring their past experience with authority into the relationship, which can create unnecessary complications.

This is an area where being a star as an individual contributor may not have prepared you for management. As an exceptional performer, you probably had minimal interaction with your boss. If so, you most likely didn’t develop the skills of managing up that you need.

Do you see your boss as coach and developer or as evaluator and judge?

You’re caught in a difficult dilemma, one that can feel personally threatening. The boss is not only a potential source of great help, in both your job and your career, but also the one who evaluates your performance. To get help from her as a developer, particularly with your personal development, you must reveal your shortcomings. But if you do, she in her role as evaluator may interpret your weaknesses as serious faults. Many managers handle this dilemma by striving to appear capable and in control even when they’re not. They see their boss more as threat than ally and lose the potential benefits of her help.

Are you confused by your boss’s dual role? Do you tend to see your boss as primarily a judge? Does that attitude seem safer to you? That’s understandable, but it’s not always the most helpful point of view.

What can you do? Don’t presume your boss is always one or the other, judge or coach. Instead, think of his dual roles as extremes between which he moves back and forth depending on the situation. At first, in small ways that aren’t risky, test his willingness to provide support. That way, you can see when, where, and how he’s likely to focus on development rather than evaluation. Learn his feelings about what’s important in management—such as careful planning, decisiveness, building consensus— and make sure you develop and display those qualities.

Do you see past bosses in your current boss?

How do you feel about your current boss? How do you respond to authority in general and to those who have it? If most of your bosses have frustrated you and fallen short of your expectations, you and they may be victims of the emotional baggage you carry forward from past experience. Reflect on your own history and the feelings it’s created in you. That history may lead you to perceive your current boss not as who she is but as an amalgam of past authority figures, with all the positive and negative feelings that flow from that past. Unless you’re aware of these feelings, you’ll be at their mercy.

WHAT YOUR BOSS EXPECTS OF YOU

You and your boss agree on your annual, individual performance targets that support larger organizational goals. But what about her undocumented expectations? What should you be doing beyond your formal job description that will make you indispensable to your boss and your organization as a whole?

• Collaborate. Overcome differences between you and others so you work together effectively—even if you don’t like each other.
• Lead initiatives. Don’t be reluctant to associate yourself with unproven ideas, especially those that cross functional or unit boundaries. Raise your hand, and you’ll climb the ladder faster than those who don’t.
• Develop your own people. Take as active an interest in your employees’ development as you do in your own—if not more. Go out of your way to criticize and praise your people when they need it. And during performance reviews, supply people with specific, candid, and useful feedback.
• Stay current. Regularly read and watch the news. What happens in the world affects what happens with your team, your marketplace, and your competition. Also know what’s going on with your customers—how they’re changing, how their competition is changing, and how technology and world events are affecting their strategies. Your customer relationships are key assets: Bring them to the table.
• Drive your own growth. Seek perpetual education and development—not necessarily by going to school but by finding exposure to new people and ideas. Seek feedback from your boss, and accept demanding assignments.
• Be a player for all seasons. Demonstrate positive behaviors even during hard times. You’ll sustain your ability to motivate and inspire your own people no matter what’s going on around you.

Adapted from “What Your Leader Expects of You” (product #R0704C) by Larry Bossidy, Harvard Business Review, April, 2007

On the other hand, you may respond to authority with overdependence, rather than resistance. Extreme deference and automatic, unquestioning compliance don’t work well either. Those who react this way never disagree or push back, even when they’re right or it’s in their best interest.

Both antagonism to authority and too much deference will keep you from seeing your boss clearly and realistically and prevent you from securing the work and personal benefits available from a good relationship.

What Should Your Relationship with Your Boss Be?

Do you realize that your relationship is actually one of mutual dependence? Your boss depends on you and needs your commitment and support to succeed. Just as you may wrestle with your reliance on your people, he probably struggles with his dependence on you and his other direct reports.

Think of the relationship as a partnership in which the partners depend on each other to succeed and are able to influence each other in ways that improve the performance of each. It’s not a relationship of equals, certainly, but it’s not entirely one-way either. You usually do have some room to negotiate and create the relationship that works for both of you.

Take Stock of Your Current Relationship

Is your current relationship a partnership? Are you and your boss able to have a normal, constructive discussion about work? If not, why not?

Don’t assume you can make significant differences in how your boss thinks or operates. Most likely, the best you can do is nudge her in directions that work better for you. That’s certainly worth doing. But you’re unlikely to create large changes.

With that in mind, use the following questions to assess and improve your relationship. They focus on actions you can take.

Are you meeting expectations?

By far, the key factor in a good relationship is your ability to perform as expected.

Results. Performance targets create the foundation for your ongoing relationship. Unless you and your group produce the results expected, you’re unlikely to enjoy much of a partnership. And it’s not just the results you attain but how you attain them. If you hit your numbers but your boss hears complaints all day about how you railroad other groups, he probably won’t consider you someone who “meets expectations.”

Information. But results aren’t the only expectation. Do you keep your boss informed? Reach explicit agreement about how often and in what way you will report progress. Develop a sense of what your boss wants to know. Some prefer to know a great deal; others, much less. In general, no boss likes to be surprised or seem ignorant of something she should know. If you must err, do it on the side of overinforming. Many bosses actually want more information than they say, so discover the right balance through experience. Find out as well how your boss wants information delivered: written reports via e-mail, in person if that’s possible, or by video call.

Support and loyalty. Your goal is to make the relationship work for both of you, and that requires some degree of support and loyalty. Just as you want your boss to care about you, and your people want you to care about them, your boss wants your care and concern, too.

Be generous and assume the best intentions, even when you disagree. Express disagreement as your opinion offered in support of your boss’s success. Some people bridle at the word loyalty. We don’t mean blind loyalty, but loyal people earn the right to question and disagree on occasion. Those who speak up only when they disagree will usually enjoy less influence than those who have demonstrated prior support. So on those occasions when you do honestly agree with your boss, say so clearly and explicitly.

You cannot succeed in this relationship at the expense of your boss; you will rise or fall together. Your task is to make both of you effective. Help your boss build on her strengths, and overcome or bypass her limitations.

Does your boss trust you?

The foundation of all network relationships is trust, and the relationship with your boss is no different. Can he count on you to do the right thing? If you feel micromanaged, the reason may be that you’ve neglected to establish real trust. The essence of building trust is to negotiate what you both mean by “do the right thing.”

Do you both see the current situation the same way? Make sure you share a common understanding of the challenges your group faces and what needs to be done. If you see the need for fundamental change and your boss wants to stay the course, you must reso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Harvard Business Review Guides
• Title Page
• Copyright
• What You'll Learn
• Contents
• Section 1: Managing Up
• Section 2: Managing Across
• Index