The Dark Side of “Managing Up”

Hi everyone, Sarah and Theresa here. We wanted to bring you in, invite you into conversations we’ve been having about our favorite, not favorite word, Theresa.

Sarah, what comes up for you? When you hear me say Managing up?

I think that it’s a fallacy. No, it’s not. And so what we want to do is just examine and also share with you what we observe, how this gets misused from a standpoint of who’s being asked to manage up and what situations are they being asked to manage up. So Theresa, when we think about best case scenario, this idea of when it works really, really well, how have you seen managing up Outlook most effective?

So the technical definition as I’ve read about managing up is that team members are proactive, that they have a sense of agency over their work, that they’re not sitting back and waiting to receive something. They’re stepping into those moments, that they’re keeping their leader really in touch with the progress and the obstacles on a project. And all of that is fine. All that’s perfectly great.

And giving feedback and being able to share challenges and being able to disagree and write all of those things like safety, can I contribute? Can I challenge? Can I give my manager feedback? Beautiful. Managing up,

Which is funny because I don’t know that I would define that as managing up, but that’s the whole story for another day. I don’t know that that’s the category I would put those qualities in, but anyway, but Sarah, shine a light for our dear friends. What have we seen behind the curtain of managing up?

So more often than not, and when we say this, we mean we see this probably on a weekly basis, if not certainly multiple times a month, is that when people are in a situation where they are working for somebody they feel unsafe with, they’re working for somebody who is aggressive, toxic, or more common. And I say this with love, they work for somebody who’s not competent in the field. And that is hard, I think, for folks to hear, to go, Ooh, is that me? There’s a lot of people promoted because of the wrong skills, and they’re promoted not necessarily because of their skills for that matter. And so what happens often is when we see folks who are in a situation working for somebody who’s not effective, let’s just lump it into that, that they are to manage up in order to make that manager more effective, to make that relationship more effective.

(03:06)
So best case scenario, and when I say best case, I don’t mean least harmful, is you’re managing up so you can bring that manager along. Worst case scenario, you’re managing up or being asked to manage up so you can do damage control. And I don’t know what the research is on this. So we’re just speaking from anecdotal experience. Often it’s asking women to do this emotional labor of either training managers, male managers in particular, to bring them along or to do damage control. And so that’s just something that’s been pretty sticky for us is like when are we asking somebody to manage up? What is the situation? What authority do they actually have in that relationship? Because sometimes I’m thinking of a few scenarios where we’re asking somebody to manage up when they’re on the receiving end of harm. And really it needs to be somebody with higher authority, whether it’s hr, whether it’s their boss to actually manage the situation. What did I miss? Yeah. Or what would you add?

No, I mean, two other things coming up for me. Just a distinction for everyone listening. We don’t mean bringing someone up to speed who’s new to the company. We don’t mean assisting with just some of the basics of what it is to learn a new company or a new department. We’re talking about folks who, let’s be honest, often we’re probably the right person to fill that role, that were not promoted into that role. Now being expected to train, and I’ll use a loving example from our house, if I were promoted to being an engineering manager, that would be a problem because I don’t know anything about engineering at all. And that’s a fundamental clash, and you can’t expect someone to be trained in the field on the job by someone else. But so to that extent, and I do want to emphasize, we see this often with folks who sometimes if the company knows this leader is harmful, and then someone has to manage up to make that person less hurtful to others, more palatable to the rest of the group, they’re spending an incredible amount of energy managing up, which really just is damage control in so many situations.

Yeah, I, and let’s also name that often what we see is that it’s individuals who are usually a part of the non-dominant group, whether that’s from a racial perspective, a gender perspective, an age perspective. And again, it’s worth repeating. There are times when somebody needs to be caught up to speak.

(05:57)
That’s not what we’re talking about. But when it’s a situation where you have people who could do the job and you’re not bringing somebody up to speed, you’re fundamentally trying to train them on the basics of the job. And so now we’re asking people who are already doing an incredible amount of work to do even more work or more emotional labor and mental labor, while likely getting paid less than the person that they’re supporting. And so again, this idea of being able to have a collaborative relationship with your supervisor, important and necessary for everyone to think about the role they play in creating psychological safety critical. But we need to be careful when we are putting the onus of responsibility and work. Because the other thing that I’m just going to say real honestly, is that the reality is then if that person, that team member speaks up and speaks out about feeling injustice or unfair or frustrated because their leader isn’t as effective as they could be, it almost always is going to impact ’em more negative. The risk is higher for that person to speak up.

I think that’s a great point to end on, because what we see, the way we see this play out is that someone is managing up trying to use power and influence and authority over someone who ultimately evaluates them, right? It’s a terrible dynamic to be engaged in. Absolutely.

Terrible. Yeah. So we want to hear from you, and you can put it in, if you’re watching this on YouTube, you can put it in the YouTube chats or the comments. We’d look at those. If you’re watching this from our newsletter, send us an email or reach out to us on social media. How has this been true in your world? Or even maybe do you have a different perspective or something else that we should be thinking about? Get in touch with us. We want to hear from you. So let’s continue this conversation and we’ll see you all again soon. Bye everyone.

Bye