How to Manage Up as an Engineer or a Manager

Focusing on this can 📈 drastically improve your work experience!

Intro

Being able to successfully manage up is one of these things that doesn’t seem to be too important at first glance, but let me tell you, it can make your day-to-day work so much better, more productive and also easier.

And not just for you, it can make the experience a lot better for the whole team or department! Let’s define what managing up even is and what isn’t!

What managing up is and what isn’t

Managing up can be misinterpreted in various of different ways. Let’s make it clear what it is and what isn’t.

What managing up is:

✅ Efficiently communicating and collaborating with your manager.

✅ Proactively finding out the problems that your manager is facing and putting in the effort in trying to resolve them.

✅ Being transparent, giving feedback and asking for help when you need it.

What managing up isn’t:

❌ Trying to change your manager.

❌ Going above your manager to try to achieve your goals.

❌ Keeping all of your problems to yourself to not put pressure on your manager.

Successfully managing up can make your work experience so much better.

When managing up correctly your work experience and growth in general can be so much better. And not just for you, think about your colleagues or the whole team. it can improve the experience for everyone!

I really saw the difference when I put a lot of effort into this. The change was immense for me. I’ve been able to build so much better relationships and got a lot better results at the end.

Through many mistakes and wins in my 10+ years of experience in the industry, I am happy to share my 5-step framework that works for me best.

But before we get to that, let me first share the mistakes that I made throughout my career.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes of not managing up correctly in the past

Looking back at some of the mistakes that I did, it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable 🫣 But I’ll share with you the mistakes anyway, hoping that this may prevent some of you from making them yourself!

I can find myself in all of the 3 main points of “what managing up isn’t” that we defined above. I made the mistake on all 3 of them. Let’s get into them next.

Mistake #1 The email

As a new manager, I thought that I could make so many changes for the better and I was very passionate about them - I wanted to make the changes, even when they weren’t in my control.

We talked with my manager a couple of times about these changes, but nothing happened. After some time, I felt unheard and I thought the best action would be to involve other people that these changes affect.

I have sent an email explaining the issues to these people and potential solutions we could implement. I have also included the manager of my manager in there as well.

This email didn’t do too well with my manager, he wasn’t too happy with me going above his head.

Lesson learned: Looking back now, I can see that my manager could do more to make sure I was heard, but I shouldn’t have gone above my manager to try to achieve my goals. Doing this, just negatively affects the working relationship, which is really the #1 important thing. You can control what you can control, not all of the changes can be made instantly. Patience is the key here.

Mistake #2 The working style

My current manager has decided to move on and I’ve gotten a new manager, who has been hired recently. His working style was different than my previous manager’s.

My previous manager always included me in different decisions and made sure I knew about them, but the new manager’s style was different.

He was onboarding and getting used to all the systems across the company and after some time he made some decisions, which I didn’t know about. That wasn’t something I was used to and I thought that I could adjust his style to be similar to that I was used to, but it didn’t work so well.

Lesson learned: It’s on both sides to find a good way to collaborate well, but I shouldn’t want to change my manager’s style, instead it’s a lot better to be helpful, find out their issues and problems, try to resolve them and focus on what you can control.

Mistake #3 The lone wolf

As an engineer, I always thought that sharing my problems or issues with the manager was the last thing I should do. I was always focusing on trying to solve everything myself.

What I did was, I used my 1:1 meetings not to help me and my career growth. I used the 1:1 meetings to give a status update.

I was missing out on so many different learning opportunities, which I could use the 1:1 meeting for. I could talk about career goals, work through plans for the promotion or ask for specific coaching and feedback situations.

Lesson learned: Keeping all the problems to yourself just causes stress, it slows down your progress and it doesn’t keep your manager in the loop. It’s a lot better to use 1:1 meetings to help you be successful in your role and with your overall career growth. You can read more here: How to have great 1:1 meetings with your manager (paid article).

The 5-step framework that will help you to manage up successfully