Managing upwards is the active and conscious effort to work effectively with your superiors (direct, dotted line and/or superiors' superior) for collective mutual success.
This is an essential part of a positive company culture, helping you foster a healthy work relationship with your superiors to perform work better aligned to your company's organisational objectives.
How can you manage upwards better?
Here are 3 key principles you can apply, using the 3 S's:
- Style of working
- Solutions
- Support
1. Style of working
Managing upwards effectively begins with understanding and familiarising with your superiors' style of working better.
This enables you to adapt and adjust accordingly to work better together with your superiors, reducing misunderstandings and mismanagement of expectations.
Examples include understanding your superiors' working preferences and habits, such as:
- Your superiors' preferred communication style
- Your superiors' preferred timings and scheduling
- Your superiors' preferred decision-making process
2. Solutions
When highlighting any work issues to your superiors, do present them together with potential solutions, with how you are currently working to address them. In other words, don't just bring up problems, but solutions too.
Some work issues may require your superiors to be involved and be part of the solution as well. Hence, maximise this opportunity to also work with and learn from your superiors in addressing them together.
In addition to reinforcing your superiors' trust and confidence towards you, this will also help you in enhancing your own strategic thinking and problem solving skills at work.
3. Support
The same way you need your superiors' support, your superiors also need your support to truly succeed with your shared collective goals at work.
Be proactive in anticipating your superiors' potential needs at work and seek clarification when needed. This enables you to identify additional opportunities to contribute and add value.
Practice empathy when working together with your superiors, learning to see things from their perspectives. With this, any work decisions and actions from them you once thought were 'unreasonable' may actually make sense upon reflection.
Concluding remarks
Managing upwards well is key to nurturing a successful working relationship with your superiors, contributing to a positive company culture at your workplace.
Your superiors will definitely appreciate your efforts to manage upwards effectively. Soon, you will too when your own juniors and subordinates do so as well.
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