Managing up is often seen as something done by individual engineers. But as an engineering leader, you are the face of your team’s work, and it’s your responsibility to manage up and make sure it’s visible at the organizational level.
You can’t assume that your manager has the visibility into your team or your team’s work, and to shape the direction, you need to be able to shift their point of view. Mastering the skill of managing up and influencing can be challenging to navigate. In this module, we’ll help you work out how to get the message out.
Module 5 Takeaways and Homework
You’ve learned that:
- Managing up requires courage, trust, and shared understanding.
- Intentional work to build a more trusting and curious relationship with your manager benefits you, your team, and your manager.
- The foundation of managing up is acknowledging that you are in a relationship with your manager.
- Strategies for being on both sides of that relationship, to both understand your manager’s core needs and how to align their needs, their work, and their goals with your own.
You’ve discussed:
- Some of the changes your organization would need to undergo to create an environment where managers could act on upward feedback and upward management more effectively.
- As leaders and for the leaders above you, what changes you need to make for you and your teams to deliver their best work.
You should be able to identify your own BICEPS to:
- Identify what you need to accomplish to succeed
- Understand what your manager cares about to align their goals with your own
- Give your reports the space to align their needs with your own.
Homework:
In this module, we learned how identifying what drives you as well as understanding your manager’s perspective is essential to find common ground with them on what you both need. This exercise will help you lay the groundwork for an effective relationship with your manager, thinking about the things that drive you, and what your manager cares about most.
Using Paloma Medina’s BICEPS framework for core needs:
Belonging
Improvement/Progress
Choice
Equality/Fairness
Predictability
Significance
Start by ranking these core needs by what you are motivated by.
Once you’ve done that, pick three folks in your organization that you try to influence and repeat the exercise – rank the BICEPS core needs according to what you think matters most to them.
Then, for each of them – pick the top three BICEPS you identified and write a sentence on what you can do to meet this need.
Resources
Downloads:
Sessions
Switch up how you manage up
Every senior leader you interact with will bring their own experience, set of biases, communication styles – and fundamentally, different personalities to a conversation. Lara Hogan explains how to adapt your tactics to different management techniques.
Unravelling the misconceptions of managing up
Senior Director of Engineering at Github Neha Batra unravels the misconceptions of managing up at LeadDev Together.