Be Successful With Your Manager: Aligning and Managing Upstream for Success
- Aug 20, 2021
- 5 min read
Written by: Dr. Raman K. Attri, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Every employee has a fundamental urge to progress in the job – in terms of a better position, increased pay, greater recognition, etc. Unless you are self-employed, your manager is one of the most important people in your professional life, or at least at the workplace. Thus, it pays off well if you learn how to work with your manager effectively and be able to ‘manage’ them efficiently.
At the individual level, there are two aspects to working effectively with your manager.
First, aligning with your manager.
Second, managing your manager.
1. Aligning Your Manager
The success of an organization as a whole and the individual success of employees depends on how well employees are able to align with their managers.
Three tips that can help you to align well with your manager’s work style:
Invest in building better relationships
The key part of the alignment is a successful relationship with your immediate manager. Such a relationship results in satisfaction at work, chances of growth and increased pay, peace of mind, and general happiness. Conversely, a poor relationship with your manager can inhibit a person’s chances of success at work and will most likely lead to frustration and stress, which in turn affects other areas of life as well. Thus, as an employee, you need to learn the skill of building a fruitful and congenial relationship with your managers. Some ways to master this are to learn skills like self-situational leadership or work with profiling tools like DISC. More corporations are starting to develop their direct reports by imparting them the skills to work effectively with their managers. Leverage those coaching opportunities skillfully.
Put yourself in the shoes of a manager
You need to put yourself in the shoes of the manager and think from his perspective. Try to see the challenges, expectations, and work environment from a manager’s angle to develop a healthy manager-subordinate relationship.
Understand your manager’s ideal value system
It is apparent now that a manager’s value system defines his management and leadership styles. As an employee, you need to sense how understanding the value system of a manager could help to build a successful relationship. Keep observing how the manager’s work choices are influenced by his or her value systems.
Develop a personal connection with culturally different managers
Maintaining a good relationship with a manager coming from a different culture might be one of the most challenging areas to handle. It would be best if you started observing how your managers run the team and the situations where cultural orientations might be coming up. There is nothing wrong with it. Having a good personal connection could do wonders for you.
It will allow you to understand how cultural upbringing might be influencing the decisions taken by your manager. Part of this might be associated with the organizational culture too. In some organizations, managers are highly indoctrinated to adopt the particular organization’s culture that, at times, you may fail to notice the hints of their own cultural subtleties. The personal connection may do wonders for you. Depending upon where your manager’s origin, some may talk about your family life, kids and express concerns over the well-being of your family. That is an excellent way to build a personal connection.
2. Managing Your Manager
Most organizations focus on teaching skills required to work effectively with the manager through behavior profiling, self-leadership, relationship building, conflict resolution skills, among others. However, not all organizations support the concept of upstream management, which is managing your manager and their managers. A –part of working effectively with the manager includes gaining skills that are needed to manage the managers. Here are two approaches that can help you manage your manager.
Consider your manager as a stakeholder
I have worked in a matrix environment with multiple managers. I learned one thing very clearly. Managing your manager is like managing your stakeholders for any project. After all, your manager is like a stakeholder to some extent, though he may come across to you as the most important one. Once you start dealing with your manager as a party in the project, instead of someone controlling your paycheck, you could use the same set of techniques, processes, and templates that you typically use for managing your stakeholders like stakeholder analysis, expectation setting, and stakeholder communication. It would help if you learned to drive a complex mesh of stakeholders impartially.
Focus on the quality of upstream communication
If you look at the psychology of the workplace and organizational structure, you could assess what your manager really wants from you and why. The answer is simple – they want you to keep them posted, show that you are in complete control of things, and alert them where things are not going well. Understand that you are not the only one under pressure; they have managers too. They have to broadcast similar communication upstream, showing that they are in full control too. If you consider it in an objective manner, you will find that managing your manager boils down to exhibiting effective upstream communication. Effective upstream communication needs to be timely, precise, concise, and, more often, at a high level. Learn to communicate that way.
In the end, your manager is human, after all. If you take the relationship and emotional approach where it’s needed, you will go a long way, building memories at your workplace. Be aware that working effectively with your manager and managing your manager is just a matter of viewpoint rather than a matter of skills or techniques. Though skills and techniques help you in many ways, you should keep in mind that management is all about viewpoints, philosophy, and the belief system, all integrated together.
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Dr. Raman K. Attri, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Dr. Raman K Attri is a performance scientist and the world’s leading authority on the science of speed in professional learning and performance. Undeterred by his permanent disability since childhood, he transformed his inability to walk into his niche expertise to teach others how to walk faster in their professional world. Equipped with over two decades of vast research and corporate experience, he guides leaders and professionals on proven strategies to shorten the time to proficiency of the workforce. A prolific author of 20 multi-genre books on business, leadership, training, learning, and performance, he writes about human excellence. As a learning strategist, he innovates state-of-the-art training methodologies to speed up the learning of complex skills at a Fortune 500 technology corporation. As a global training leader, he manages a Hall of the Fame training organization, named one of the top 10 in the world. A highly passionate about accelerated learning since childhood, he earned two doctorates in learning, over 100 international educational credentials, and some of the world’s highest certifications. Among his most recent projects, he has founded the XpertX portal to inspire people to learn the art and science of speed in all walks of their life. As a professional speaker, he speaks at leading international conferences around the globe and shares his research-based insights, and continues to be an inspiring personality.
