My one sentence guide to managing up

What every boss wants from their reports

Here’s my one sentence guide to managing up: “Don’t let your manager care more about something than you do.”

That’s it. That’s the guide. Your priorities should reflect your manager’s priorities. This may seem obvious when you read it, but think about all of the times your boss kept bringing something up, you didn’t understand why, and you worked on whatever seemed most important to you instead. This used to happen to me a lot.

Thinking of managing up in these terms really helped me accept the idea of having a boss and more importantly, being someone’s boss. I always hated the idea of managing up, and I hated the idea that people who reported to me would need to manage up. My nightmare was that people would be successful reporting to me by managing up effectively rather than by actually creating value and doing a good job. Reframing managing up around authentic shared priorities helped me see the positive dynamics of this sort of relationship and focuses it on how we can merge our separate contexts into one shared context.

It’s really bad if, after you leave conversations with your boss, the question they ask themself is, “Are they really committed to my priorities?” At minimum, this state of affairs encourages what people think of as micromanagement. When you don’t believe someone shares your priorities, the temptation to remind them of exactly what those priorities are (frequently) is very high.

This extends not just to outcomes but also to process. If your boss wants a written design document for every sizable project, and you think they’re a waste of time, it’s going to be really important for you to engage with design documents. Your boss (if they’re decent) likely has a really good idea what you think of design documents, and they will strongly suspect that by default you’re going to put in a halfhearted effort at best on something they really value. If you can meet their standards for design documents, you’ll get even more credit than someone who actually loves design documents would for the same work.

I want to make it really clear that this doesn’t mean you should accept what your boss cares about uncritically or ignore your own judgement. Being able to influence your boss is a really important skill. Doing so requires your boss to believe that in the end, you will advance the priorities that they care about. It also requires you to understand not only what your boss cares about but why they care about it in the first place. Why is your boss so obsessed with launching that one marketing campaign? If it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be very impactful to you, it behooves you to figure out what’s motivating them and potentially present them with a superior alternative.

The inverse is also important: don’t care about things too much more than your manager does, particularly when doing so results in conflict. There’s a fine line between healthy advocacy and counterproductive persistence. If you care about something so much that it creates conflict with your peers (or with other people around the organization) and your manager doesn’t care enough about it to back you up in that conflict, it’s going to be a problem for you. If there’s a cause you want to advance, your first job is to ensure that your manager is on your side. Stubbornly pushing forward without the full support of your manager often has negative consequences, as I’ve learned myself more than once.

That’s basically it. Ask yourself right now, what’s really important to my boss? If the answer doesn’t quickly leap to mind, you’re not paying enough attention. If you don’t understand why they care about that stuff in the first place, you also have some homework to do. Whether or not you feel like you understand what your manager cares about, it never hurts to ask. People generally love talking about what’s important to them. And finally, if you feel you have to “fake it” because you can’t make yourself care about the same things your boss does at some fundamental level, it’s time to find another job.