Managing Up successfully

Managing Up involves being aware of key guidelines for professional conduct and communication. The end objective is to have a satisfactory and successful relationship with your direct supervisor. The end reward include a successful performance appraisal, being trusted with important projects, and the satisfaction of knowing your efforts are appreciated.

Managing-up.com offers online personalized consulting and coaching for the interpersonal workplace challenge you are facing right now. We help solve that problem you are facing managing up and managing your manager or managing laterally either with a project team member or a coworker. Don't spend your time reading up general information since you could end up applying general advice that is inappropriate for your circumstance and find yourself in a poorer position than where you started.

Solving interpersonal management challenges online

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Our specialty

• We specialise in entry level and mid career challenges.
• All our responses are personalized and you pay for our individualized time and attention.
• We don’t visit you. We are online only.

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• We handle your complete case via email. We will not publish your case on the Internet. And as such we are unique. Other advice services require you to publish your case so that others can learn from it. Please read our privacy page for more details and to understand the limitations of email.

Five Tips on Managing Up

• Some of you come to me for advice when the relationship with your manager is unsalvagable. The question I get asked is can I have a sit down meeting and tell the manager I have changed and want to give it a second shot with a clean slate. You are welcome to try this with your manager to see what happens. However I don't counsel people on doing this. If the relationship is unsalvagable then your manager's mind is made up and you could make things worse. You are better off looking for a side ways move in your company, learning from your mistakes, and getting a fresh start. If your relationship is poor with your manager but not unsalvagable then there are specific things you can do to make a come back with them.
• Be positive. If you are someone who sees the glass as half empty. Go home at night and figure out a way of viewing each circumstance in a positive light. You will by magic, within the next week be asked for your opinion and you will be able to state a positive opinion. This is called leadership. You will inspire your boss and they will look on you more favourably.
• Try to say yes when your boss asks you to do something. Unless it is unethical or truly outside of your job description. Nothing irks a boss more than people that say no to requests. If you are too busy then say so, if taking on the task will jeopardize your other projects then let that be your answer. Just try to avoid saying no without a good reason.
• Don't be smarter than your boss. If your boss assesses a situation which is fraught with uncertainty and prescribes a game plan. Then go with that game plan. Even if you know the game plan will fail. Do not debate it there and then. Try to come up with a plan to implement the game plan. Talk to people. When it becomes painful obvious that the plan won't work in the light of new information that your boss did not have access to then go back and get him or her to change her mind. "Boss, I really liked your idea but in talking to Cindy from accounting it won't fly for the following three reasons".
• Lastly do good work. A lot of your sins will be forgiven if you produce good work. If you are in the hole with your boss some of the badness can be undone by simply doing good work on your next assignment. No amount of managing up techniques are a substitute for doing good work.
• For more ideas on managing up please see my case study.