To Be Promotable, You Need to Manage Up

Have you ever been passed over for a promotion and wondered, how did that happen? Or wondered, how did that person get promoted or get the job? All of these are great questions. There is a good chance the person who received the job or was promoted was more effective at building a strong relationship with the person responsible for making the decision. To be upwardly promotable, you need to build a strong relationship with your boss, your boss’s boss and your boss’s peers. On a scale of one to ten, with one low and ten high, how good are you at managing up?

Here are ten tips to help you manage up and increase the chances of you scoring the next promotion opportunity in your organization.

1. Know your manager’s goals. It will also be helpful to know your manager’s boss’s goals. When you know your manager’s goals, you can make daily decisions that are alignment with his or her goals.
2. Be clear on your goals, outcomes and expected timeframes. You want to be crystal clear on what your manager expects from you and your team. With clear expectations, you can build a reputation as someone who can be counted on to get stuff done.
3. Hold regular, consistent meetings with your boss. So many people I coach complain that they do not have consistent, ongoing meetings with their boss and that communication is poor. With poor communication, you can only guarantee that, most likely, the next promotion is going to someone else. During meetings with your boss, use the time to review project status, discuss strategic topics and gain any clarification you need to successfully accomplish your manager’s goals.
4. Over communicate. In a strong relationship with your boss, there should never be any negative surprises because the right and left hand always know what each other is doing.
5. Negotiate in the right order. Before you promise anything to members of your team, ensure that you have agreement and alignment with your boss. That way you will always appear to have clout and credibility with your team as well as a strong relationship with your boss.
6. Be accountable. When things go wrong, admit it quickly and let your manager know before she hears about it from others. Let your manager know that you are responsible and what actions you and the team are taking to solve the problem.
7. Be inclusive. Invite your boss to one of your monthly or quarterly team meetings. Let them talk about the strategic things they are working on. Collect questions for your boss to answer in advance of the meeting so your manager is well prepared to make her contribution worthwhile to your team.
8. Lead change. Your role as a leader is to improve the condition of your team and organization. Go out of your way to daily do the right thing for your team and organization. Indirectly, this will build your manager’s reputation for being a smart leader who hires the right people to get the job done.
9. Offer to help. Go out of your way to make your manager’s job easier. Solve problems before they get to her level. Take on additional assignments with an “It’s my pleasure” attitude.
10. Build your leadership reputation. When it comes to reputations, there are only two types. Good reputations and bad reputations. Everything else in the middle is not a reputation but just doing a job. Go out of your way so the people above you in the organization see you as someone who builds strong relationships, adds significant value to your team and the organization, and has a reputation for getting stuff done.

So you want the next promotion? Start now and put a list of actions together that you will implement daily to effectively manage up and build a reputation where people have a strong desire to give you a larger role with more influence in the organization.