How do I manage up?
How do I manage up?
How do I manage up?
Many student affairs professional come into their first positions and their careers eager (and anxious) to make their mark on the world. Oftentimes that includes taking on an entry level role in a variety of different functional areas of student affairs.
All student affairs roles will include a manger. Those managers supervise you, evaluate you, and provide you direction. This is what is required of them as managers. However, you also have the opportunity to “manage your managers” by “managing up.”
This article will address and define what the term “managing up” means. Specific reasons why student affairs professionals should manage up will be addressed as well as what skills are necessary for exercising this critical professional competency.
Managing up involves examining your relationship with your manager from multiple perspectives. Those perspectives include managing up as relationship management; problem solving; expectations management; exercises in communication; empathy; and career development. Lastly, tips for how to effectively manage up in your career will also be shared.
What is “Managing Up?
Managing up is part of our own career development process and is a critical skill to understand and practice throughout your student affairs journey. Managing up most closely relates to your direct supervisor or manager. Though, make no mistake: managing up does NOT involve “kissing up” or “sucking up” to your boss. Instead, managing up is about managing your professional relationship with your direct supervisor.
Many student affairs professionals are often confused with the concept of “managing up.” After all, shouldn’t managers manage their own subordinates and professionals staff? They are. However, managing up provides you as the student affairs professional benefits and rewards based on how you cultivate your relationship with your direct supervisor.
The essence of managing up is making the relationship that you share with your manger a fruitful one. This is based on making it easier for them to do their job. By reviewing, analyzing, and empathizing with their work and their responsibilities, you can position yourself to help your supervisor and the organization at large.
Yet, these results don’t happen overnight. All student affairs professionals will have to first understand - at a much deeper level – the role and the effect that their supervisor has and is perceived to have in the organization. By decoding the impact of their role and responsibilities, student affairs professionals can best capitalize on the relationship that they have with their manager.
Why should you manage up?
Managing up helps smooth the relationship between you and your supervisor. Likewise, managing up also helps you throughout your career development process. This is because the act of managing up establishes the basis and role of your own support in furthering the goals of your supervisor and the organization.
The best results of managing up come from a deep understanding of your supervisor’s role, goals, and expectations. By closely studying and anticipating their needs; student affairs professionals can prioritize their own work to proactively address any issues that may arise through interactions with their supervisors.
Managing up as an activity creates and maintains a mutually beneficial relationship between a supervisor and a subordinate that simultaneously aids the organization.
Therefore, managing up is something that should be done at the start of student affairs professionals careers and when they begin new roles. This is important because new student affairs professionals often fail to manage up actively and appropriately until it’s too late.
What skills are necessary to manage up effectively?
Managing up is not an easy to do. It requires various different skills from different areas. Unfortunately, these are not skills or areas that we touch upon in student affairs graduate programs.
However, there are skills that new professionals can test, try, and develop during assistantships and graduate internships. Managing up requires student affairs professionals be consummate communicators; delegators; time mangers; and individuals who can disagree diplomatically by problem solving.
Communicating, listening, and observing are particularly critical for managing up. Learning how to listen engage and identify different critical activities by your supervisor is necessary for taking next steps. That’s because in order to manage up effectively, student affairs professionals need to develop trust with their direct supervisor. This is done by clarifying expectations and sharing feedback with one another: two activities which can only be done effectively once an successful relationship is established.
However, establishing these first steps can be difficult. Particularly because managing up often requires that we adapt and change our approach to how we work with our direct supervisors. Sometimes we are given a heavier work load. In this case we need to be better at collaborating with our colleagues and peers. Other times we are called to think more critically about situations. These serve as opportunities for us to problem solve with many unknown variables.
Thus, learning how your organization, division, school, and institution function is paramount t0 learning how to manage up effectively. This is particularly true for higher education administration, student affairs, and other functional areas that are embedded within the structure of colleges and universities.
Managing up as relationship management
Managing up is mostly about managing relationships: specifically managing your relationship with your direct supervisor. Because of this, it’s important to have a good rapport with your current boss in order to develop this relationship.
As you progress and gain more experience in the field, you’ll develop more applicable skills and abilities. These new found competencies will eventually help you establish and development your own relationship with your subordinates and peers at other institutions.
Peer management is especially important for working with your supervisor in an office with multiple direct reports. This is because you may have competing priorities with your other coworkers in addition to the priorities in focus with your manager. You can mitigate these competing priorities by outlining what your strongest skills are and how you can best put them to use to help accomplish the mission of your office.
Likewise, by making sure that you serve your manager well, you’ll end up making your life comparatively easier. This is done by using your best talents to serve your organization. By accomplishing this you are no longer required to work in ways that make it difficult for you to utilize your best skills. By managing up you better understand what your supervisor needs and how you can provide it to them.
Managing up as relationship management is about curating, supporting, and honoring the relationships that you have and form with other professionals: especially your direct supervisor. Establishing where expectations, strengths, and work styles are helps you become the most effective student affairs professional you can be.
Managing up as proactive problem solving
Part of managing the relationship with your supervisor and others is being a good problem solver. Specifically, you want to become a proactive problem solver. This can take on many shapes and forms. Before doing this, you must first understand the kind of relationship that you have with your boss. Start by knowing what your bosses’ expectations are. Doing so can help manage what looks like a small error from a large systemic failure.
An excellent student affairs professional will be able to actively manage their own roles as well as their relationship with their supervisor in order to anticipate any problems or issues that may arise now or in the future. Some of this comes from gaining experience in the field and functional area. The rest of it comes from your overall work and career development. Of course, you won’t be able to anticipate every single problem or challenge that may arise. But your background, knowledge, skills, and abilities will help inform you of what may happen in the future.
The better you become at anticipating – and solving – these problems before you arise; the better at managing up you will become. However, there will also be times when problems do appear for you and your supervisor that will be necessary for you to address them. How exactly should you go about that? How do you handle disagreements between you and your supervisor?
Knowing the right away to bring problems to the attention of your supervisor is part of learning how to manage up effectively. Sometimes this could be during a formal one-on-one. Other times it could be a passing conversation in the hallway. Your boss might even want to consider you sharing challenges out loud during a staff meeting. However, you won’t know how to handle these specific situations without an active and honest conversation with your supervisor first.
Managing up as expectations management
Deciding on preferences, philosophies, and applications of what you’ll do and when you’ll do it is part of managing expectations with your supervisor. Knowing how to deal with important things is about determining who can expect what and when.
Most of this can be done by having an honest conversation about your supervisor’s primary concerns and considerations. Specifically asking what they are working on; what is the most pressing issue; and what can be done within your power.
Determining what these goals are; objectives; and how “success” is defined all helps you manage expectations for yourself; your boss; and your colleagues and the office at large.
Successfully accomplishing this should be followed by your input and acknowledgement of different activities and responsibilities that your supervisor might be taking on. Knowing this, you can actively pursue the lead on different projects. Just saying “I can do that” to different challenges that your supervisor might encounter helps to manage expectations between you and them.
Likewise, new student affairs professionals could also benefit by reciprocating transparency with their supervisor by honestly sharing what they are doing and what they need in order to be successful. This is the traditional role that a manager fulfills.
Managing up is about working effectively and efficiently
With a proper relationship established you’ll begin to see the benefits of how managing up helps both the student affairs professional as well as their supervisor work effectively and efficiently in their roles. Note that this doesn’t mean working “harder.” Rather, working effectively means that all professionals’ skills are being capitalized on to their fullest extent with no waste created.
Likewise, managing up is about working better with your colleagues as well as your manager. This also includes taking things off their plates if you have capacity and are in a better position to help achieve the office’s mission. In addition, you can also ask for help with other issues that come up that you may not be 100% equipped to handle.
Working effectively and efficiently is all about tasking available professionals to use the best of their abilities to achieve the common goal. This starts with the supervisor and supervisee relationship and expands from there.
Managing up as an exercise in communication
Managing up is a management process. That means that student affairs professionals will need to also learn how to be great communicators. Managing up is therefore a communications process that is specifically focused on your supervisor. You can manage communications by being very deliberate about what you want to do and what you want to accomplish. This should be done separately from a regular 1on1 conversation. Rather, this conversation should be structured as a professional development dialogue focused on how you and your supervisor can better communicate with one another.
It’s best after this initial conversation to establish boundaries and expectations for how and when you’ll communicate with your supervisor on a regular basis. That could include via email, messaging, phone or via video web conferencing. Doing this means that you’re actively examining your relationship from your supervisor’s perspective and basing your actions on what they prefer and works best for them.
Once you’ve established these boundaries you’ll have a better sense of when you should bring new issues to your manager and when you should spend some time reviewing what you’ve already done. Creating this communications cadence is a solid first step towards managing your relationship with your supervisor.
Managing up as an experiment in empathy
As a process of communication you’ll also have to examine your relationship with your supervisor as an empathetic one. This often revolves around determining the preferences and priorities of your manager. By knowing (and by extension) empathizing with their priorities, you’ll become better informed on how to work with them to achieve common goals.
This is often a misstep for most student affairs professionals because they already assume what their manager needs, wants, and prioritizes based on their interactions with them. However, without being truly empathetic we can only make guesses on what they know and prefer. It requires a true empathetic review and discussion with your manager in order to discover what they need and prioritize: both from a professional and a personal perspective.
Taking an empathic approach has the added benefit of creating and establishing a cadence and dynamic with your manager. This is because you may not always be able to get clear insight from your supervisor. Rather, you have to make educated guesses and conclusions based on their priorities and that of your office in order to move forward with professional responsibilities and agendas.
Thus, the more that you know about your boss and how they approach, address, and resolve challenges, the more you can help as a professional working for them. A common understanding also has the added benefit of synergizing your working styles, strengths, and weaknesses in order to act more effectively as a unit.
Managing up as career development
Managing up is an effective activity to emphasize in all professional situations. That’s because managing up also helps you become a more effective student affairs professional. Likewise, it also helps you develop and explore different aspects of your career and development.
This means that managing up becomes an additional skill, competency, and ability in your developmental tool kit. Like other skills, it requires that you practice regularly in order to stay relevant and engaged. That’s because managing up requires your regular navigation of professionals relationships.
Your influence over others has some additional benefits of creating other allies and advocates at your college, university, or organization. In turn, these other professionals serve as great contacts for your current and future career prospects as individuals who are familiar with your mode and quality of work.
Tips on how to effectively manage up
Managing up requires students affairs professionals to effect and implement multiple different skills, abilities, and experiences into making the most of their relationship with their manager. In addition, professionals should focus on the following areas in their approach.
Focus on bringing solutions and not problems to your manager. While you may encounter different challenges in your role; think about possible ways they can be solved prior to informing your supervisor. After following this pattern you’ll be able to determine how your supervisor would address the same or similar problems in the future.
Remember to think about the individual goals and motivations of both your supervisor and your office whenever making decisions in your role. Thinking and acting the way your supervisor would provides you with the structure to act with more autonomy and flexibility in the future.
Furthermore, also look at the different relationships that your supervisor has with other colleagues, administrators, and student affairs professionals. How does your supervisor manage their relationship with their manager? How do they interact with other peers and colleagues? Emulating their style for the better helps you capitalize on their network. In turn, this provides you a structure for growing and developing your own competencies.
You and your supervisor probably don’t think and act like the same person. That is okay. Most people are different. However, what you should focus on is how you can mitigate some of the differences in you working styles. Specifically how it relates to communication preferences; time management; or project workflow. By addressing these issues early in your relationship you set yourself up for better managing their expectations in the future.
Of course setting expectations and meeting expectations of your supervisor are two different things. Find time to regularly communicate and share your expectations with your manager (and vice versa). Doing so ensures that you two understand your positions on important and critical issues.
Lastly, make sure that you take initiative and anticipate where your supervisor would like you to take action and when. Doing so ensures that their workload is reduced while simultaneously fulfilling their expectations and responsibilities of their own role. Establishing a relationship where this is done regularly and repeatedly goes far in assuaging the concerns that managers have about their direct reports’ competencies and autonomy.
Takeaways
This article addressed the concept of “managing up.” It included reasons why student affairs professionals should manage up as well as what skills are necessary for developing an effective relationship with your supervisor. Managing up requires that you address this activity as a form of relationship management; expectations management; effective work styles; communication; and empathy. Managing up can have significant positive results for you career development. Therefore tips were shared on how to effectively manage up with your supervisor.
I hope that you found this article useful! If you need some additional help on your student affairs job search, then check out the eBook The Student Affairs Job Search: A Comprehensive Guide available here.
Happy searching,
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Cite this Article
Eng, D. (2021, March 15). How do I manage up? Retrieved MONTH DATE, YEAR, from https://www.jobhakr.com/blog-1/2021/3/15/how-do-i-manage-up
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