Managing Up - Have You Got Your Manager to Work For You? (From L8 SWE at Microsoft)
In a Nutshell
Managing up means actively helping your manager succeed so they can better support your goals. Build trust first, understand their priorities by asking what keeps them up at night, then clearly communicate your own ranking of impact, learning, promotion, and work-life balance. Use efficient escalations with context and specific asks, request regular feedback with the 1-5 scale trick, and give specific recognition when your manager helps you.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Are you working for your manager, or is your manager working for you? If your answer is the former, you are missing out big time. Kun is a partner level engineer at Microsoft. In this video, Kun walks through what managing up means, and viewers will gain a massive advantage in their career success over people who don't know about these tips.
When Kun first heard about the phrase managing up over a decade ago when just starting a career, Kun thought of it as some corporate bullshit and completely under-estimated its importance. It's only after being a manager for a few years that Kun saw with Kun's eyes the day and night difference between people who were doing this, intentionally or unintentionally, versus people who weren't.
Before everything else, you need to understand what your manager's job is. Kun shared a lot about this in one of Kun's previous videos. Long story short, your manager's job is to maximize the team's success, including yours. And they need your help to do that job well.
Managing up is all about providing your manager with necessary resources so that they can help you effectively. It's to help your manager help you, if that makes sense.
The first tip is that you should first build some trust with your manager if you haven't yet. Kun talked about how to build trust and the concept of trust batteries in a previous video. The key is to not jump straight into managing up before you have a trusting relationship with your manager, because without a strong trust, it's hard to communicate expectations and feedback to each other effectively. And it goes both ways - a good manager will typically try to build some trust with you before they start to expect a more productive relationship.
The easiest way to build trust is to simply do what you say you'll do. Help your manager with something small. Complete a few tasks on time. Ask your manager to do something simple for you. These little positive interactions all help increase the trust level between you two, which sets up a strong foundation for your collaboration moving forward.
Once you think you have enough trust built with your manager, the second tip you can act on is to understand your manager's goals and priorities. In most cases, this can be easily done by looking at your team's commitments, goals, or OKRs. Make sure you not only understand what they are, but also why they are set up that way. If you are not sure about it, you can always ask your manager in your 1:1s or team meetings. Most managers would appreciate their reports asking about the team's success because the manager's success is directly tied to it.
Once you have enough context about what success means to your manager, you should then further understand what are some of the key problems that the team needs to solve in order to get there. One question Kun often found to be effective is to ask your manager what keeps them up at night. From that conversation, you will get a deeper and more up-to-date understanding of the current priorities that your manager cares about. And that enables you to identify opportunities to help. It sometimes also helps you refine the approach you take for your work items or projects, because you can then think about how to make sure the outcome of your work would help solve some of those problems.
And once you understand what your manager cares about, the next tip that's really important is to communicate your personal goals to your manager, so that your manager also knows what's important for you. Before you do that, you need to first make sure you understand what's important for yourself, which is not necessarily easy. Knowing about yourself can take time and effort too.
A framework that Kun has found to be useful is to ask yourself how you would rank the importance of the following dimensions - Impact, Learning, Promotion, and work life balance. Each of these dimensions can have some implications to the others, but largely speaking they represent different values.
Impact is about producing as much outcome as possible. If you optimize for impact, you would typically choose to work on a domain you're already familiar with, with skills you already have. That's where you will be highly productive and deliver a lot of progress. Impact is highly correlated with your performance rating and how much bonus you receive, so it becomes a lot of people's default choice, but that's often unintentional, and not always the best strategy.
Learning is about expanding your skill set so that you can become more versatile and can work on a broader set of domains in the future. For example, you have been a web developer and want to also learn about mobile app development. Or if you have done a lot of work on distributed systems and want to explore the frontend world. Learning doesn't always pay off right away, but being smart about when to focus on learning versus impact, or at least be deliberate about it, can be very beneficial.
Promotion is another factor to consider. It's about changing the way you operate to be able to operate at the next level. This is tied to the value you generate for the company, the responsibility you take on and your salary as a result. Moving towards higher levels typically means more autonomy, but also stronger accountability as well. If that's your cup of tea, you would need to be intentional about it and this in particular would definitely need your manager's support.
Work life balance can be important as well, especially when you are going through important life events. Some people also choose to optimize for it as a long term goal.
So looking at these 4 dimensions, you can ask yourself how you would rank their importance to you. And you need to do this regularly because your motivations and priorities can change all the time. Knowing what's important to you is what then allows you to communicate your goal with your manager clearly, without which your manager wouldn't know how to help.
The 4th tip is one that many people don't know about, which is that you need to learn to use escalation as a tool efficiently. When you have a problem that's blocking you from making progress and you don't know how to solve it, you need to reach out to the right people to help - and this can sometimes be your manager. Exactly what problems should go to your manager versus others depends on the situation and the personality of your manager as well.
Generally speaking, if you have a technical problem that you don't know the answer to, you should do some research yourself and reach out to your peers or tech lead for help if you can't figure it out by yourself within a reasonable amount of time. For people problems, such as collaboration and conflicts, your manager is typically your best bet. When you have such problems, you need to be transparent about the fact that you are blocked and need some help. Some people worry about this creating a perception that they are not competent, but the reality is that what matters most is the outcome. If you stay stuck and don't make any meaningful progress for days or weeks, that's when your competency will be seriously questioned. So don't try to keep these problems to yourself.
When you escalate problems to your manager, you should know that most managers are very busy with a lot of things going on. So you need to be very efficient about your escalation, otherwise your manager may not have enough time to help resolve it and unblock you. Generally speaking, you should summarize the context of the problem in a concise way, and collect the most relevant facts to help your manager catch up on what has happened so far. Then you clearly state what the problem is and what's the impact of not being able to solve it, followed by what specific help you need or what decisions need to be made.
You should avoid simply asking "hey manager, I have this problem here. What should I do?" Instead, a good example would be something like "hey manager, we have been building this product feature X and our original plan is to release it next month. However one of our dependencies just announced a delay of 3 weeks on their end, which adds a delay to our timeline as well. I did a bit of homework and identified an alternative option. So we can either keep the current plan and accept a delay of schedule, or move onto this different system that's available now but would cost a thousand dollars more every month until we replace it. Can I get your guidance on which option our team should pursue?" Through these contextualized and specific asks, you are more likely to get the problems resolved soon and allow you and the team to keep making progress.
Tip number five is to ask your manager for feedback regularly. It's one of your manager's core responsibilities to give you feedback and help you improve. You should ask for both positive and constructive feedback, so that you know what you should keep versus stop doing. If you are working closely with a few peers, you can ask your manager to collect feedback from those peers as well. That can often uncover opportunities for you to improve that others may not feel comfortable telling you directly.
If you haven't had much luck getting useful feedback from your manager, one trick that will guarantee success is to say the following magic words - "with everything considered, how do you think I'm doing on the scale of 1 to 5". Most of the time, you are going to get an answer that's between 2 and 4. And then you can follow up and ask "what can I do differently that would make it a 5"? What this trick does is that it forces your manager to identify the specific area that you can improve on. Getting this regular assessment is super useful because you can act on them immediately, and guess what - whether you ask or not, your manager will eventually have to think about this when it's time for performance reviews, and all these areas for improvements would reflect in your review without you having a chance to address them. So, just try the magic words. They never disappoint.
The one last tip Kun would like to share is a very simple one - recognize your manager when they help you. It's common decency to appreciate others when they do something for you, and it creates a positive loop that motivates your manager to work for you more. The trick here is to be specific. Instead of just saying "thanks", you should call out the specific action and outcome that you thought was helpful. For example - "Thank you manager for writing down such a clear growth plan for me. This gives me a lot of clarity for what I should focus on." And this applies whenever you show appreciation for anyone. Giving the specifics really connects the dots together and helps them internalize the impact of their effort, which is what creates positive reinforcement.
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