Manage Up To Accelerate Your Career

Build a strong working relationship with your manager to fast track your career.

Welcome!

Welcome to Developing Skills - Skills for Developers looking to develop their careers.

Tip of The Week: Manage Up To Accelerate Your Career.

Having a healthy, positive relationship with your boss makes your work life much easier — it’s also key to your job satisfaction and career advancement. But some managers don’t make it easy. Bad bosses exist and many managers are overextended, overwhelmed, or incompetent. However, even if your boss isn’t perfect, it’s in your best interest to make the relationship work.

So how do you do that?

By “managing up”. Managing up doesn’t mean sucking up. It means being the most effective you can be, creating value for your boss and your organisation. You do that by being competent, following through, communicating appropriately, and driving toward business goals. This, in turn, elevates your actual and perceived value in an organisation. Accelerating your career.

So how do you “manage up?” Here are 14 tips:

1. Get to know your manager - understand what is important to them and what their goals are. Align what you are doing with them.

2. Respect your manager’s time - learn when it’s best to engage with your manager and come prepared, craft an agenda and lead the discussion. Document action items and follow up.

3. Get to the point - make it easy for you manager to catch up on the context of the discussion and dive into the meat of it. Don’t ramble. Cut to the chase.

4. Show your working out - be prepared for questions you’re likely to be asked. When you make a proposal provide a summary of the rationale behind it.

5. Raise issues in advance - as soon as you are aware of an issue, raise it. When you do, succinctly describe the issue, why it matters, and what you suggest doing about it.

6. Bring solutions, not problems or complaints - complaining about something does nothing to resolve it, identifying a problem and offering a solution does.

7. Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF) - Start with the bottom line, that is the question, issue, or recommendation, then add the context afterwards, this allows your boss to stop you/stop reading as soon as they have enough context.

8. Keep your manager informed - much like a presentation tell then what you are going to do; do it; tell them that you are doing it; tell them that you did it; tell them how beneficial you doing it was. Over-communicate.

9. Don’t give your manager a reason to micromanage you - very few managers want to micromanage, they have their own work to do. If you’re feeling micromanaged it may be a sign that you’re not communicating enough. Start communicating more and ask them how they would like to be kept in the loop.

10. Don’t just ask questions, offer you point of view - even if you don’t know precisely what to do, proposing a way forward, offering your point of view on the next steps, helps create positive momentum.

11. Anticipate questions - think what questions you would have in their shoes and have the answers ready.

12. Be explicit in your ask - don’t just ask for their input, be specific about the type of input and the specific focus you want from them.

13. Be prepared to walk away - some managers are toxic, be prepared to walk away.

14. Accept that you will always be managing up - even if you’re the CEO you still have to manage up. The CEO reports to the board, the board report to the shareholders and so on.

Four Ways I May Be Able To Help You Level Up As A Software Engineer:

1. I write another FREE newsletter Coding Challenges that helps you become a better software engineer through coding challenges that build real applications.

2. I am available for 121 coaching and mentoring.

3. I’m launching a self-paced course: Become a Better Software Developer by Building Your Own Redis Server (Python Edition) The course will be live on November 17th 2023. Until then it’s available at the pre-launch price of $100, after which it will be $150.

4. I occasionally run a cohort based course: Coding Challenges Live: Redis Edition!