Old images die slowly. Many businesspeople still operate as though the organization is a pyramid with all the power at the top. This is not just Boomer-speak, it's just as true of Gen-Y. Late last year, Elizabeth Garone, in a Wall Street Journal article, addressed the topic. The comments were more interesting than the article which, although reflective of some views of the subject, never got around to explaining what "managing up" actually means.
In contrast to fairly tangible competencies like project management or marketing research, competencies which developed a constructive definition and value, some people skills get relegated to a cynical dustbin. Indeed, I suspect that anything with political overtones lends itself to the pejorative. And managing up, like passing a congressional bill has political overtones.
FYI: Politics is the human effort to gain cooperation. In a democratic society almost every relationship requires political action. And that includes the successful management of your teenagers and their achievements.
The competency of managing up is a complex set of skills for gaining cooperation from your boss, especially when you're managing projects and people. Although Peter Drucker wrote an article on the subject in the 1960s, John Gabarro and John Kotter defined and clarified it in a Harvard Business Review article in 1980. Nearly everything written since about managing up or managing your boss is latent within that seminal work.
Gabarro and Kotter make it very clear that managing up is not about apple polishing, cozying up or brown nosing. Indeed, as they point out the boss/employee relationship fails because the two don't recognize that the relationship involves mutual dependence between two fallible human beings. To quote them,
Failing to recognize this, a manager (or employee) typically either avoids trying to manage his or her relationship with a boss or manages it ineffectively.
To simplify, managing your boss is a matter of mutual understanding and mutual benefit. In coming days I will prescribe some well-tested strategies and steps that you will find immediately useful. When Harvey Golub was CEO of American Express Financial Planners in Minneapolis, one of his comments regularly went the rounds of his workforce: "If you don't understand influence management and how to manage your boss, you'll have very little success in this company." That's a reminder, I believe, that applies to any organization.
A question: how do you understand managing your boss, or managing up?