Managing Up - Have You Got Your Manager to Work For You? (From L8 SWE at Microsoft)

Name: Managing Up - Have You Got Your Manager to Work For You? (From L8 SWE at Microsoft)
Uploaded: 2022-09-03T21:22:39.000Z
Duration: 12 min 47 s
Channel: Kun Chen

Kun ChenSeptember 3, 202212m

Topics8

Managing Up Introduction0:00 Understanding Your Manager's Job1:01 Building Trust First1:34 Understanding Your Manager's Goals and Priorities2:33 Communicating Your Personal Goals4:00 Using Escalation as a Tool7:02 Asking for Feedback Regularly10:01 Recognizing Your Manager11:31

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.

AI-Generated Notes

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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.

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Managing Up - Have You Got Your Manager to Work For You? (From L8 SWE at Microsoft)

Managing Up Introduction00:00

Understanding Your Manager's Job01:01

Building Trust First01:34

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