Melody Wilding on Managing Up: Getting What You Need from Your Boss

Understanding Managing Up

• 💡 Managing up is often misunderstood due to outdated perceptions of being a "suck-up"; however, it's a skill set for personal career benefit, making work life easier and less stressful.
• 🧠 It's not about massaging perceptions but flexing your approach to ensure your message resonates, enabling you to have tough conversations and push back tactfully.
• ⚠️ A failure to manage up can lead to extreme consequences, such as losing your role, highlighting the importance of aligning with your manager and building allies beyond them.

Proactive Conversations for Success

• 🎯 Explicit conversations about how you work together are fundamental but rarely happen, with only about 10% of professionals initiating them.
• 💬 Initiating these discussions, such as a styles conversation, can lead to managers being overjoyed, as it helps them understand how to best communicate with you and get the most out of your performance.
• ✅ Present these conversations by framing them around mutual benefit, like improving workflow or ensuring you can deliver your best performance.

Establishing Boundaries and Pushback Power

• ⚖️ Setting boundaries at work requires more thought than a simple "no"; it involves assessing your pushback power, influenced by factors like authority, tenure, performance, and relationship strength with your boss.
• 🤝 For those with medium to lower pushback power, the tradeoff approach is effective, presenting binary options to your manager to help them prioritize tasks.
• 🚀 Increasing pushback power involves enhancing your value through ownership of projects and problems, demonstrating initiative and problem-solving skills.

Taking Ownership and Increasing Visibility

• 🧩 The ownership conversation focuses on identifying and capitalizing on opportunities to add value, solve pain points, or address neglected needs within the organization.
• 🌟 Examples of ownership in action include buttoning up a merger deal to gain exposure and build relationships, or innovating new initiatives like mental health days by creating buy-in and proposing small, manageable steps.
• 📈 Visibility is crucial and can be built into day-to-day work by restructuring one-on-ones to focus on outcomes and strategic thinking, not just status updates.

Advancing Your Career and Compensation

• 🚀 Advancement is more than just promotions; it can involve expanding scope, leading teams, or taking on stretch projects, especially in emerging fields like AI.
• ⏳ Start conversations about advancement 3-6 months in advance to avoid the performance review paradox and ensure your goals are considered before decisions are made.
• 💰 When discussing money, focus on the future ROI and potential value you can bring with increased compensation, framing it as a fair trade rather than solely on past hard work.

Key Takeaways and Resources

• 💡 Micro-yeses can be used to gain buy-in before delivering feedback or difficult messages, making the conversation smoother.
• 📚 Recommended books include "Difficult Conversations" and "Thanks for the Feedback" by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen.
• 🔑 A key nugget to remember is that "You teach people how to treat you."