I began my corporate career as an individual contributor. After a series of leadership changes within the same company, I ended up working for an incredible leader who quickly promoted me multiple times within a very short time. Truth be told, I became a manager far more quickly than I probably should have. However, my leader had trust in me and knew that this was the right way to further my career growth and allow me to gain critical skills that I simply wouldn’t have if I remained a high-performing individual contributor. I needed to learn how to manage and how to lead.
Throughout my career, I have worked for some very bad leaders and some individuals who have no business managing people whatsoever. However, I’ve also worked for some of the best people I’ve ever met. Each of these presents their specific challenges and no two managers are the same.
Managing Up is a short book in the Harvard Business Review’s 20 Minute Manager series. The main point of the book is to establish two main ideas:
- The relationship you have with your manager is one of the most important relationships you will have in your job.
- You play a significant role in building and maintaining that relationship.
This book gave me a lot of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) reactions from time spent in a previous role. Let me explain. First of all, I was first introduced to this book as part of mandatory training that was given to our team while I was on a planned vacation. The training was never made up for me, but a copy of the book was provided. As a result, I never had a clear picture of what the team was told the “managing up” concept was all about. But every time my boss would refer to it, it was clear that this meant (to my boss) that my direct reports should be reporting issues “up” to me. That was it. That was the extent of my boss’s understanding and application of the concept.
While reading this book for admittedly the first time, I found two critical concepts that spoke to me about my prior poor managers, especially the one noted above. The first concept is that trust is everything. If you and your manager do not trust one another, the relationship with your manager will be rocky. In every single poor relationship I have had, I can think back to times when one of us did not trust the other, for various reasons. Sometimes it had nothing to do with the person or the quality of the work, but pressures coming from elsewhere that forced us to feel or react a certain way.
The second concept was having healthy disagreements. The book discusses ways to communicate with your manager effectively, and one of those buckets of communication is disagreeing with your manager. Disagreement can be a form of healthy conflict if handled correctly and if your relationship with your manager is good. Another manager I worked for refused to listen to dissenting opinions. If you disagreed, this manager would shut you down quickly and while maintaining a semblance of professionalism tell you that you should shut up and listen. Of course, this was one of the lack of trust relationships I mentioned before!
My takeaways from this book are that the concept itself is good. I should play a primary role in fostering a positive relationship with my manager. However, my past experience has taught me that this is a partnership. If your manager is not willing or capable of fostering a positive and professional relationship with you, it will be a poor working experience.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who are promoted too early or are not trained to be good people managers, so they lack the skills and emotional intelligence to be strong people leaders. My past experiences working for poor managers have always been a driving force for me as a manager. I don’t want my people to have the same bad experiences that I had. I want my people to know that I care about them and their careers. I want them to know I want to hear different opinions and to question decisions if they pull us away from being efficient or achieving our goals.
If you’re looking for an extremely fast read that has quick, thought-provoking concepts in it, then this is a good book for you. Try to consider how to apply what the book teaches to your situation, whether current or in the past. A lot of what I took from this book came from my reflections on past experiences and what could have been done differently. If you can achieve the same benefit, then I’d say this book is well worth it!
