Thinkydoers Ep 02: The downsides of “managing up”
Show notes:
This is the first in a two-part series about why we work with clients to uncover and unlearn the behavior of "managing up," and replace it with a culture of self-management. It IS necessary to carefully and intentionally manage our relationships at work (up, down, and across), but the way managing up is coached in many organizations centers leaders instead of the work itself. The practice is inefficient, inequitable, and often emphasizes spin over substance.
And many people who rely on managing up to move up the ladder in their organizations find that "what got you here won't get you there" when they land in a role where you can't "manage up" your way to critical outcomes.
Next week, we'll share the second part of this series about how we replace "managing up" and other political and power-based ways of leading and organizing organizations and teams with more equitable, efficient and outcome-driving self-management practices.
Key Points From This Episode:
What you can expect from the two-part series on managing up (part one of which is today’s episode).
A simple explanation of the concept of managing up.
Why managing up doesn’t actually work in practice.
What managing up does to our operations when people in leadership positions have management skill gaps.
How managing up emphasizes spin over substance and centers leaders, not the work.
How managing up cultivates inequity within organizations.
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Tweetables:
“At its simplest, managing up is managing your manager or leader. That concept is helpful if it's coached and used to recognize that when we work in relationships with other people, we have to manage those working relationships.” — @saralobkovich [0:03:40]
“Managing up is inefficient, and it increases the cognitive burden on the team.” — @saralobkovich [0:11:03]
“Managing up centers the leader, not the work.” — @saralobkovich [0:14:53]
“My bias against managing up is as strong as it is, in part, because of how often that coaching was paired with the overt or covert message that a person has to comply with a specific standard of ‘professionalism’ for their work to be noticed.” — @saralobkovich [0:19:54]
Full Transcript:
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:04] SL: Welcome to the Thinkydoers podcast. Thinkydoers are those of us drawn to deep work, where thinking is working, but we don't stop there. We're compelled to move the work from insight to idea, through the messy middle, to find courage and confidence to put our thoughts into action.
I'm Sara Lobkovich and I'm a Thinkydoer. I'm here to help others find more satisfaction, less frustration, less friction, and more flow in our work. My mission is to help change makers like you transform our workplaces and world. So let's get started.
[EPISODE]
[00:00:46] SL: All right, friends. Welcome to Thinkydoers podcast. Today, I'm going to share with you the first in a two-part series. Today's topic is about why here at Red Currant Collective, we no longer, I mean, we never did, but we don't teach or support the concept of “managing up.” In the second episode, which will come right after this one, we talk about what we replace managing up with, that we replace managing up with a framework for self-management, that applies equally to every person in an organization, becomes a much more consistent way of operating with better information, better alignment, clear expectations, and far less mind reading and bad behavior.
We're going to dive in on the first topic today. I'm embarrassed to say, I went seriously down the rabbit hole for this one. The podcast episode doesn't include it, but I did a bunch of research on the origins of managing up. I got to tell you, this is a concept that has lived its useful life, I think, given where it started and where we are now. Someday, I'll write that blog post with all that research, but let's save you a bunch of time and we'll just dive in on kind of practical observations for why it's time to retire managing up, in favor of more equitable and consistent ways of self-managing.
First episode, we’ll focus on that first part. What is managing up and why is it important that we find new ways to lead and manage and self-manage? Then in the second episode, we'll dive into what the alternative is that we see. This one's going to be a bit spicy. I know there will be strong feelings. I've already heard from folks defending the concept of managing up, but give it a listen, give it a chance. So start with the first, move on to the second, and I'd love to hear your thoughts once you're through at all.
If you work in an environment with any kind of structure, you have probably heard the term managing up, but those two simple words can mean many different things. In today's episode, we're going to unpack the way this management concept is used and misused in companies, and how a different approach can support flexible, resilient, effective behavior throughout an organization. So, thanks for joining us today here on Thinkydoers and let's dive in.
First, we're going to start with a conversation about what managing up is, and I gesture to make air quotes when I use that phrase. At its simplest, managing up is managing your manager or leader. That concept is helpful, if it's coached and used to recognize that when we work in relationships with other people, we have to manage those working relationships. Managing up also recognizes that middle management has multiple constituencies. They must manage the expectations, progress and needs, both down in the organization and up, so for both their teams and their leadership.
That phrase is also used to describe the necessity of mindfully managing your relationship communications, collaboration and cooperation with your leader or leaders. But to borrow a turn of phrase from Harry Levinson, “Somewhere between the concept of [managing up] and its implementation, something has gone seriously wrong.” In way too many organizations, managing up is coached and taught to compensate for poor leadership and management. “In too many cases,” this is a quote from Beverly D. Flaxington in an article in Psychology Today, and she says, “In too many cases, we end up spending much of our time working on managing up. Often times the boss is difficult: The boss is a bully, or a poor communicator. Sometimes the boss is disorganized and blames their employee for any ensuing problems as a result.”
So, too often, managing up is coached and taught in environments where staff are struggling to understand how to succeed with their leadership, and the staff is not always the issue. The result is that people adapt their natural ways of working to better meet the needs of their leaders. This can be successful when the leader is able to communicate expectations clearly, and operates consistently and with a high degree of coherence, but managing up becomes a frustrating game of mind reading with leaders who have management skill gaps of their own, and who aren't able to clearly communicate expectations and operate with consistency and coherence.
Leaders with these gaps have teams that might be struggling, and the rest of the organization may struggle to reach equilibrium as a result. It's rarely the leader whose behavior is scrutinized in these situations. More often, the rest of the organization is obliged to mold itself around the leader to compensate for their gaps and find ways to operate despite them. In the best case, members of the team find ways to scaffold the leader’s gaps through communication, implementing practices to fill those gaps, and influencing the leader to represent the organization to other stakeholders effectively with clear communication.
In this scenario, the overall system benefits from the extra effort the team puts into compensating for their leaders' gaps, and sometimes leaders learn through their team doing so. That's not an inherently bad outcome, but notice that the team is taking time away from focusing on their work to perform extra labor to fill in their leader’s gaps. At worst, some people find ways to manipulate and bend their communication, relationship, and their own working style and presentation to influence and win with that leader.
This generally doesn't benefit the organization as a whole. What I typically see in that scenario are ambitious folks assuming this behavior to increase their power in the organizational dynamic. Those folks might be great at internal politics, they might be skilled in multiple forms of conflict communication, often without being conscious of it, exhibiting the behavior of competitive conflict avoidance or accommodation, but often not collaborative conflict skills to influence a given conversation or situation.
If we think of that as a political style of managing up, the politician style of managing up, that doesn't contribute to the health of the organization. In fact, it may create new organizational health issues by reinforcing the power dynamics and creating in and out groups rather than improving alignment and communication within the organization. Of course, sometimes even great leaders have gaps. We all have gaps, but I've seen this political managing up style really backfire. Leaders may appreciate hearing, “I've got you boss”, in the beginning, but often this style, really its manipulation. This style of managing up leads to the mid-level manager, mind reading the leader instead of listening to understand them. Being reactive to their moods and whims rather than holding a steady hand on the team's rudder, and then coaching that behavior down to their teams.
As a management consultant, I've seen this pattern in any number of client organizations, and over the course of my career, I personally worked within several workplace cultures where politically based managing up was coached and seen as necessary to avoid landing in the out crowd. Human behavior and the way groups behave, the push and pull of forces in our relationships, that's my jam, and I'm a trained mediator with specialized training and conflict communication and resolution.
Looking back, I know that those environments weren't healthy for me and for a lot of my colleagues. Fortunately, I got better at seeing them coming and avoiding landing in those cultures myself. I also got better at recognizing when I had landed in one and then getting myself out. In my experience, managing up is rarely coached in an environment with smoothly operating leadership. When leadership and management is competent, coherent and consistent, and leaders are capable of communicating clear expectations, ensuring that the budget of goals and resources balance, and recognizing and rewarding their teams wins and learnings, that political style of managing up becomes unnecessary. In fact, it often becomes unwelcome.
At Red Currant Collective, we call this more effective style, self-management. We'll dive into what we mean by that, what's important about it, and why we coach it as we work with transforming organizations in just a minute, but first, since that less effective interpretation of managing up is so widely coached in many business cultures today, we'll take a moment to share the pitfalls we see with that approach.
Let's talk about some of the downsides of managing up. For one, managing up is inefficient and it increases the cognitive burden on the team. When I look back at my own workplace experiences, I wish I'd realized earlier and quantified how much time I spent on political managing up, versus on the work itself. The managing up tax is real. Your ratio may be different, but I'd estimate that on average, 30% of my cognition, and 60% of my feelings about my work were occupied by trying to make sense of the environment, and the leader dynamic when I was in that type of political organization.
In some settings, it was even higher than that. In all of those political managing up environments, I was coached to present my work on strategy and innovation in ways that would be less intimidating to senior leadership. I was encouraged to craft and present my work in ways that manipulated leadership into reaching that insight that I was driving at, or idea themselves.
Now, I won't lie, being able to do that is a bit of a superpower. I use that same skill set judiciously, as a consultant and coach to help clients achieve their own objectives and agenda. But it also required me to first do the work, then prepare the work into presentation form. Step three, look at the work and then mind read. How and where could this be intimidating to my leaders? What breadcrumbs do I need to lay for them to reach the insight I'm driving at? Which then I have to remove the insight from the deck or write in a less good way, so that they can get to it on their own. What point or points do I need to intentionally get wrong to spark a leader to hopefully choose the right direction that we would have been on already, if I just completed or presented my completed work in the first place?
Then I'd step into my work presentation meetings, feeling like an actor, not an expert. Having to remember my lines and adapt to what happened in the room as it happened, but from a place of performance, not really rooted in walking into their room and presenting my work as myself. All of that extra overhead seems like a very inefficient way to get to the destination of great work. I also just started to sweat, just thinking about it. Those memories trigger the same feelings for me as thinking about my day as practicing law, where I had suits, no matter how many times I laundered them, they still smelled like fear.
That says like, this was not me doing my best work. The other side effect of all that extra overhead has to do with credit and rewards. In some of those organizations the measures of success were highly subjective, power based, and rooted in political performance, not objectively based on the work. I found myself delivering my best work, including that extra overhead to get my best work received and appreciated, but the rewards still seemed just beyond my fingertips. Then I'd find myself coached again, on working on my executive presence and managing up.
Managing up centers the leader, not the work, that one speaks for itself. When the work is our focus the entire team can look at the issues, opportunities, and challenges, and then work together on them directly with our shared energy and focus spent on co-creating the strongest possible output. When the leader is at the center, the team's attention is split between the work and understanding and servicing the leader’s needs, and sometimes trying to understand inconsistent or incomplete information and/or direction. So another issue we run into is that managing up emphasizes spin over substance and too often, managing up is coached in environments where there's a high value placed on talking about innovation, transformation, and change, but while unspoken, there may be little appetite for the challenges and difficulties of implementation with substance.
In those environments, there's also usually a culture and heavy reliance on the performance of confidence, where the CEO or most senior leader’s job is literally to maintain the confidence of investors or shareholders or the board. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a bit, but in that case, the organization self-organizes, either intentionally or subconsciously around preserving the CEO or senior leader’s confidence. “Come to me with solutions, not problems,” is a leadership-ism that does have some merit, but also tends to be heard more often in these preserving of the performance of confidence, kind of, power led organizations.
Early on when I'm working with new leaders, they often confide that they're struggling with teams hiding bad news from them. For example, in nearly every CEO intake meeting I have, the leader expresses frustration that their organization status reports on progress and leading indicators tend to be in the green all quarter or all year. Then the organization's missing the mark on revenue or some other critical measure at year end.
Clearly, in those situations, teams were busy making sure that their progress reports looked good, often, at the direction of their leadership, sometimes on their own, but not making sure that they were actually doing better on what was most important. Their focus was on the performance of confidence, rather than the actual confidence that comes when we set and achieve objective leading indicators of success. So if the leadership knows that the leading indicators are not in the green, thanks to objective measurement, or early warning flags from people who aren't afraid to raise bad news, because they feel safe and supported to do so, then the organization can get curious. Assess those risks or issues and craft a plan to reduce risks or work through those blocks.
Managing up is also inequitable. Coaching people to manage up and expecting people to conform their behavior to their leader’s often unspoken, sometimes contradictory, at worst, incoherent expectations is at best inequitable, and at worst discriminatory. People whose styles resemble the leaders may not need to manage up. They may naturally behave and communicate more like their leader, which gives them an advantage both in the ease of falling into favor with their leader and in reducing the overhead that they spend adapting their work and communication to their leader’s preferences.
People that leaders just like better are also in a privileged position as the leader may soften objective expectations or otherwise play favorites. Managing up is one of the ways people gained their leader’s favor. Access to success there is not equally available to everyone. My bias against managing up is as strong as it is in part, because of how often coaching was paired with the overt or covert message that a person has to comply with a specific standard of “professionalism” for their work to be noticed.
I internalized some of those messages myself until I started leading young, ambitious, talented, diverse teams, and began receiving feedback and direction to coach my team members on increasing their “professionalism”, building their managing up toolkit when I didn't see that as valid feedback for these super talented and highly skilled young professionals I was working with. Too many business cultures expect people to conform to a professional standard that's white, wealthy, male, or complicit in upholding the patriarchy, and ambitious, but not if you're non-white or female, in which case, you have to find a balance of being confident enough to uphold the organization's performance of confidence, but also demonstrate that you know and accept your place in the system.
In its classic kind of application, managing up reinforces these inequities. Last, managing up has a ceiling. When talent does succeed in managing themselves up into the C-suite, they are in for a rude awakening. When you reach the level of leadership, where you're ultimately responsible for results, you have two options. Number one, to perpetuate that performance of confidence and power-based approach to leadership. Or number two, to rapidly build a toolkit for actually achieving the substance of the results you're responsible for.
Increasingly, especially with the pressures of the great resignation, and that uncertainty in the global economy, that door number two, rapidly building a toolkit for actually achieving the substance of the results you're responsible for, comes strongly into favor. When I started my business with its focus on replacing performative, privileged, power-based approaches to leading and doing business with more equitable, objective, fact-based intellectually humble ways of working, I assumed my clientele would be female leaders rejecting patriarchal ways of doing business. The biggest surprise in my business plan has been that fully 60% of my clients are smart results focused men who have experienced the cognitive dissonance and risks of the performance of confidence style of leadership, found it to not be a fit for them, and they want to replace it with improved communication and clarity, better information, increased alignment, better cooperation and collaboration, and a workforce culture that is accountable and works with ownership, and then benefits from working that way.
Some of them may have managed up into the C-suite and found that what got them here won't get them there. Even having rejected the notion of managing up myself, I felt a strong sense of, “Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore”, when I stepped into my first L2 leadership position, where my responsibility and authority were almost fully delegated to me, and I had no direct supervision since my specialty sat outside of the CEO’s daily interest in focus. It's not an easy job.
Managing up breaks when we hit the level of an organization where we can't hide from the results, where we can't point the finger elsewhere, and where ultimately, a board or the market may give a CEO runway, but that runway is finite. There's a quote in a recent Axio survey that 2022 is shaping up to be one of the hardest years ever to run a company, with 72% of CEOs worrying their jobs aren't going to survive the challenges ahead. The scrutiny of senior leadership and performance is very real. The runway CEOs may have to find their footing in their role is shorter, but the good news is, there is a better way.
All right, so that has pretty much exhausted my tirade against managing up. You'll find in our next episode, episode three, will be a fast follow to this one. In episode three, we dive in on why we think it's important to replace managing up with self-management here at Red Currant Collective. That's going to lay the foundation for future episodes where we dive deeper into each of those self-management elements and principles that we talked about, but it gives you a good kind of overview of if we move away from managing up, then where do we go from here? So, I hope you find it valuable and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Give it a listen and my contact info is at the end.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:25:45] SL: If there's anything you have questions about, you can find me @saralobkovich pretty much everywhere. That's a mouthful, I know. It's S-A-R-A, and then the last name L-O-B-K-O-V-I-C-H. I know it's a mouthful, but it's worth it — being a Lobkovich is pretty cool. So my email address is a bit easier. You can find me at sara@thinkydoers.com .
I'd also be thrilled to have you as an email subscriber for infrequent, more formal, just business messages. You can subscribe at redcurrantco.com. I've got a more personal list that takes side trails into topics around wellbeing, mental, and emotional health and my motorcycle life, and other serendipity at saralobkovich.com.
You'll find the show notes for today's episode at thinkydoers.com. You'll find the fast follow to this, talking about self-management coming out within the next few days. So tune in next time and I'd love to hear your questions in the meantime.
[END]
