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Within any organization, almost everyone has at least one boss. In all the interactions of your working life, it is inevitable that you will at some point encounter difficulties in maximizing the productivity of these ‘upward’ relationships. In extreme cases, you may find it almost impossible to work with your immediate senior managers in any meaningful way. Given that your interactions with your boss will have a direct impact on your work productivity and happiness, your ability to communicate and influence upwards is vital.
Influencing, Not Manipulating
The concept of influencing those in a senior position might, at first, seem a little audacious. Many organizations continue to operate in a traditional ‘top-down’ power arrangement, so that attempts to influence senior staff could be interpreted as insubordination, or meddling for personal or political gain. However, it is only if influencing skills are deployed in an unethical manner that this is really an issue.
In the context of ‘managing the boss’, or upwards influencing, these skills are used to construct a relationship that is not only mutually beneficial, but which will also positively affect the wider productivity of your organization.
Understanding the Relationship
The first step in successful upward influencing and communication is to appreciate that your relationship with your boss is one of interdependence. While your boss will benefit from your ideas, feedback and support, you must also recognize that he/she plays a critical role in linking you into the web of organizational relationships, as well as monitoring your priorities, values, needs, and resources. Too great an emphasis on your own self-sufficiency can prevent you from gaining the benefits of this two-way relationship.
Recognizing that you are both interdependent, and both human, you should seek to do some groundwork:
- Establish the strengths, weaknesses, work styles, and support needs of both you and your manager.
- Determine the ways in which these individual tendencies and requirements can most productively be integrated. Essentially, given observation and forethought, how can you best work together?
Observation of your boss ‘in context’, in his/her daily working environment, will help you to understand the values, goals, pressures, and challenges of his/her role. You should make use of any opportunities, formal or informal, to question your boss about his/her assumptions, expectations, and aspirations. This may prove particularly useful when working with a new boss for the first time, but regular reviews will improve your relationship greatly.
The dependent nature of your relationship could sometimes lead to feelings of frustration towards your boss. This frustration is a feature of the majority of superior-subordinate relationships, and must be managed. You will likely be predisposed to respond to this relationship of dependence in a certain way, usually somewhere between the following extremes:
- Counter-dependent behavior: you are hostile to demands from above, even though you might not speak out. You will tend to have a history of problematic relationships with your bosses, particularly the more authoritarian ones.
- Over-dependent behavior: you will tend to have an unrealistic picture of your boss’s responsibilities to you, and fail to take initiative for your own development and career opportunities. You will tend to comply with your boss’s demands unquestioningly, even if they are unwise or impractical.
Managing the Relationship: Six Steps
- Ensure that you make good, considerate use of your boss’s resources and time. Make selective use of what your boss has to offer, for example, by carefully considering whether a minor problem needs to be raised. This ensures that when you need help or support, your boss’s time and patience should be available to you.
- Be dependable and honest to the best of your abilities. For example, an over-ambitious project completion date will be impressive to your boss in the short term, but will test his/her patience when it proves impossible. Honesty and integrity keep the channels of communication open, and are perhaps the most vital aspects of this influencing relationship.
- Moderate the flow of information to your boss. It is important to assess his/her information needs, and likes/dislikes. Troubling your boss with an overload of information about your progress can eat into his/her time. However, some bosses will relish the chance to learn details of your activities. Getting the level of information flow wrong can cause the relationship to falter.
- Assess mutual expectations as early on as possible in the relationship, and continue to review them. Your organization may have a system in place that facilitates the exchange of information, such as weekly meetings or formal planning processes. If this is not the case, you may have to actively seek an expectation outline. This effort removes the possibility of disappointing your boss, which can destroy your influencing capacity.
- Once your levels of understanding are adequate, it should be possible for you and your boss to draw on each other’s strengths, and supplement one another’s weaknesses. This will not only prove practically useful, but will also serve to emphasize the interdependency of your relationship.
- Finally, you will need to gather information in two further areas: working style, and decision-making style. This information is vital, preventing the possibility of your generating dislike or frustration by approaching meetings, conversations or planning in a way incompatible with the preferences and needs of your manager. By attempting to match your boss’s style, or modifying your own to complement his/hers, you will propagate goodwill, respect and trust. Perceived similarity in these areas will create liking, and stimulate your capacity to influence.
Day-to-Day Managing
The above recommendations are long-term projects requiring careful observation, alterations to personal working style, and the cultivation of relationships. However, there are a few simple things that you can immediately do on a day-to-day basis to establish positivity and mutual influence between you and your boss. They are particularly useful in correcting minor issues within the relationship.
- Compliment the positive aspects of your existing relationship. If there are some things that your boss consistently ‘gets right’, e.g. he/she might be excellent at offering feedback, then mention this in a casual or formal context, to reinforce that you value the relationship.
- Understand the pressures that your boss is under, and communicate this understanding.
- Be a role model for your own relationship. If you believe, for example, that your boss has difficulty being clear and succinct in communications, strive for these behaviors yourself. Your positive behavior may well be matched in return.
Given the critical nature of any relationship with a boss, it is essential to actively work on your understanding of the relationship, and the expectations and needs from both sides. It is also vitally important to deploy this information ethically and sensitively, to create a positive relationship of interdependence, and thus to maximize the mutual benefits of your upward-influencing capacity.
