Managing Up, One Conversation at a Time

You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Gallo. Everyone reports to someone, and managing up is how we proactively build a productive, mutually beneficial relationship with our boss, whether that person is a VP or the CFO. It's the effort we put into understanding their priorities. It's the way we tailor updates and feedback. It's balancing their needs with ours. It's a mix of skills you keep honing because managing up isn't something you ever really finish. Thankfully, in executive coach Melody Wilding's new book, she breaks the work of navigating your relationship with your boss into 10 conversations. Her book's called Managing Up, How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge. In it, she prepares us for conversations about boundaries, about visibility, about advancement, about money. Before those, though, she strongly recommends having two foundational conversations, one about alignment and one about styles. Very simply put, the alignment conversation is creating clear expectations, getting on the same page with your manager about what success looks like. If the alignment conversation is about what we're accomplishing, what's most important to be spending time and energy on, then the styles conversation is how do we accomplish it together knowing that we may have different personalities, approaches, preferences. Melody's here to help us rethink managing up as a career long practice. And she and I will give examples of what to say so that these critical conversations are easier to get started and lead to more impact. Melody, first of all, thank you for joining me. It's always lovely to be chatting with you. Good to see you. You structure the book around 10 different conversations, and I wanna dive deep into two of them. The first is the alignment conversation. And you say, this is one, if not the first conversation you should have with your boss, whether you have a new boss or you're just getting to know them or your team is working on a new project. What if you've been working with your manager for a while and you realize, oh, we actually never had this conversation, and I've been making assumptions about what success looks like, and maybe we're not as aligned as I thought we might be. How do you bring it up? And is it ever too late to bring it up? It is never too late. And so if if you have a manager where you haven't had this explicit discussion, very easy. Tie it to some sort of natural segue. Maybe it's the beginning of the quarter, a new month, a new year, a new project, an industry change. Mhmm. Frame it as something that is a refresh or a reset that benefits both of you, not addressing a problem. So Yeah. For example, you might say, I've been thinking about how my team makes the biggest impact this quarter, and I realized it would be helpful for us to take a step back, make …