Mastering the Art of Managing Up: Insights from Roberta Matuson

Episode Transcript

Julianna:
Welcome to the Daring to Succeed podcast. Today, I’m joined by Roberta Matuson, who for more than 25 years has helped leaders in highly regarded companies, including General Motors, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and Microsoft, achieve dramatic growth and market leadership through the maximization of talent. She’s the author of seven books, including the newly released third edition of Suddenly In Charge, Managing Up, Managing Down, Succeeding All Around. Roberta is one of a handful of people who appeared as a guest on The O’Reilly Factor and who left the show unscathed. Welcome to the podcast.

Roberta: Thank you. What a pleasure to be here.

Julianna: Yes, I am so, so excited to get into so many topics with you today. But maybe to start, I’m so impressed by your career of helping businesses build and develop their teams and even helping individuals become better leaders. What initially drove you to moving from working as an executive to starting your own consulting company?

Roberta: Well, probably like many of your listeners, I got to the point in my career where I was like, been there, done that. I’ve done it like three times. I’ve done it for other people, meaning, you know, starting up their HR departments and made the decision that I pretty much had had enough and that I was going to work for myself. And so I launched my consulting practice and never looked back.

Julianna: Oh, that’s so amazing. And I do think you’re right about the audience that a lot of them are so primed in their career, they’re looking for their next change. So whether that’s going into their own business or moving into the next level of leadership, I think they’ll be able to learn so much from you today. Um, and I’m, I’m fascinated by your book. It’s on my reading list. Um, we hear about the term managing up a lot in the context of leadership. And I’ve worked with some leaders who really hate the term because they feel like they’ve been like, if they’re managing up, they’re trying to cozy up to their boss and, and be there like their favorite. Um, Because of this, I’m kind of wondering, what does managing up mean for you? When you talk about managing up, how do you use that term?

Roberta: Well, managing up my definition is managing your boss so that you can get the resources you need for your people and for yourself. And it’s also managing your boss’s peers. So that again, you’re building those relationships. Because if you look at most organizations, you know, take for instance, currently, we’ve got probably a number of your listeners are involved in situations where they’re hiring freezes, right? yet they really, really need another member on their team. And yet they look around and miraculously, a new employee pops up on someone else’s team, right? But we have a higher increase. And in all likelihood, that colleague, the person in the next department, has done an excellent job of managing up, whereas you have not.

Julianna: Yeah, that’s such a great example. Again, just when I think of what people usually think of with managing up, it’s almost like they think that they’re trying to manage their boss and the work that their boss is doing. So I love that you’ve put it into such concrete terms in terms of getting what you need for your team.

Roberta: Right. But I think it’s important for your listeners to understand that your boss wants you to manage him or her. Because when you do that, their life is so much easier. They don’t have to worry about you. They’re like, Oh, she’s fine. Let’s, you know, great, moving on. And so when the time comes for promotion, and it’s between you and someone else, why wouldn’t it go to you?

Julianna: Yeah, I can definitely us won that one because I remember when I was a director the managers who managed me were among my favorites on the team because I knew, like you said, I knew I didn’t have to worry about them but they also took care of what they need so even for something as simple as making sure that my ask of them was clear. If I take somebody who doesn’t manage up, I worry about them all the time because I’ll ask them to do something and they never push back, there’s no questions, they just deliver me something. And probably 50-50 chance that is actually what I wanted. But the person who’s managing me back will ask those questions and make sure that they’ve got the time and the detail they need to deliver me what I actually need from them.

Roberta: Well, it’s interesting because the book’s suddenly in charge. Half the book is on managing up and the other half’s on managing down. And if you get a physical copy of the book, you’ll see that the book actually flips. and in the middle. So I have had a number of people write to me or send me pictures and they’ve said, you know what, I’ve handed this book to my boss. And I said, listen, I’m going to read the chapter on managing up if you read the chapter, if you read the section on managing down. So, you know, together, we’re going to figure this out.

Julianna: That’s such a clever way to do it. And I think that that visual and that split is so important that you need to be managing each other, basically.

Roberta: Yes, yes. And it’s like dancing, right? I mean, it’s like, you know, you have to take the steps together. If you’re going to the left and your partner’s going to the right, that’s not going to work out so well.

Julianna: Absolutely. And you’d also talk about succeeding all around. And sort of drawing in that idea of both managing up to the person who’s above you have either yourself as a leader managing down to your team or or your leader managing down to you. There’s that up and down, but what about the managing across the organization? You mentioned earlier, managing your boss’s peers. What does that look like? Because I think a lot of people, when they look up for managing, it’s almost just a straight up where I’ve seen like in real life that managing sort of diagonally up to your boss’s peers is so critical too.

Roberta: Yes, and I think that’s why it’s really important as much as it pains many people to participate in company sponsored events. where you get exposure to the other people that your boss is, you know, working with so that you can have these informal conversations. In my book, I write a lot about how to shamelessly promote and how to throw into the conversation like, oh, that’s so interesting that, you know, we’re gonna be launching this new website. I actually, you know, was the head of, doing that for my son’s soccer team and we won an award for the best website designed in the league. So, you know, you can throw these little tidbits out when you’re in a more informal setting rather than making an appointment with your boss’s peer, which may not be looked upon as well as if, oh yeah, well, we were just chatting at the company picnic or the holiday party.

Julianna: Yeah. The way you brought it up is, it just feels so much more natural. So I know that people are going to get so much out of those chapters of your book.

Roberta: Yeah, and you know, it’s kind of interesting. I think the part that a lot of people miss is that they think that even their boss knows everything about them. And I’ll give you an example. I have a client who somebody just left the organization and they were just sort of saying, you know, I really like their job. But you know, I’m going to wait. And I’m like, no, like go in and have a conversation with your boss. Let her know about your background. Cause honestly, if you think she’s sitting there reading your resume right now, you are totally wrong. And so at the end of that conversation, her boss actually thanked her for going in. And she said, you know, you have so much more experience than anyone else on this team. You know, let me give this some consideration. Whereas if she hadn’t stepped in to have that conversation, more than likely it would have went to someone else. Maybe a guy, and then she’d be saying, oh, look at that. They only promote men here. No, the guy went in and asked for the job. You didn’t. So I think we all have to take responsibility for our careers. And if you want something, you have to go ask for it.

Julianna: And even that simple example of asking for what you want is, to me, an example of managing up. absolutely right because whether it’s your experience in your background that your boss might not know about or that you even want the promotion if you’ve never voiced it again just from when i was leading teams it’s like these people would come to me afterwards and be like why did you give it to the the promotion to this person or why did you give the opportunity to this person like i didn’t know you wanted it you never You never brought it up ever.

Roberta: You know, that is so true, because I was doing a workshop for Microsoft or for some of their female employees. And their leader was actually in the room. And as I talked about this need to self promote, one of one of the women kind of pushed back on me, and I pushed right back. And then her leader stepped up and she said, listen, and she looked at everyone in the room. She goes, the men in this organization, they come to me three times a day asking me for a promotion. And I have never seen any of you come into my office and ask me for that. She goes, who do you think I’m gonna give it to?

Julianna: That’s actually a really good point because when I think back to some of my teams, not maybe not three times a day, but the ones who were perhaps the most persistent with asking for promotion, including ones that just completely were not qualified. They were so far from it, but they still insisted on asking to the point where we finally had to actually build them a development plan. Right, so maybe they didn’t get the promotion, but they got the opportunity, they got our time because of that persistence, where I had people from other teams come to me asking me how I could help them get promoted. But the women never went directly to their own bosses. They went elsewhere for support and to do it in a way that they didn’t have to make it known to their boss, which who knows how much further they could have gotten if they had that direct conversation, even if it’s once or twice a year. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And then Maybe a little bit of a different question for you. Do you find that there are any similarities or differences in approaches of managing up versus managing down? Are there things that you would recommend people do in both directions, or is the type of managing completely different when you’re managing up versus managing down?

Roberta: Well, I think in a nutshell, I mean, it really comes down to building relationships. So when you have done a great job of building a relationship with your boss, or with your team members, I mean, it’s all about the people skills, right, and communication skills. And it’s relationship building. So, you know, if you bring it down to that, If you get good at managing up and then you use those skills to do a better job of leading your own people and then asking your people to manage you, you should be pretty successful in your role.

Julianna: I love that you put it that way because I think that will open a lot of minds in terms of how they think about managing because most people I would, I would hope leaders are thinking about their relationships with their teams. But for the most part, just from what I’ve seen and the way people talk about their own bosses, somehow that relationship upwards is a little bit different where it’s this person who tells me what I need to do. They, they assigned me work, they set my expectations and they’re the ones holding the key to my career. But I so, so agree with you that that relationship upwards with your boss makes such a difference too, because I know maybe the one or two times that I’ve had a terrible experience at work with my boss is because I didn’t put in that effort to build that relationship. For whatever reason, that’s a whole other conversation. But if I look at it factually, those times where my career grew better, where my days were just easier were when I had a really strong relationship with my boss versus those times where I didn’t put in the effort to develop that relationship and it was a completely different experience.

Roberta: Yeah, and I think it’s important for the listeners to understand, you don’t have to love your boss, but you do have to respect them. So, you know, I mean, yeah, maybe they don’t respect you. But if you can turn that around, and you can create a work, a working relationship. Like I said, you don’t have to be best friends, or should you be, it’ll make your life a lot more pleasant.

Julianna: Yeah. Well, that’s so much insight in so little time. And I can’t wait to get to your book, maybe after I get to the one you recommended to me earlier. Just as we close off, any last final thoughts you have for the audience and our listeners?

Roberta: Yeah. I mean, if you’d like to find out more about the topic of managing up, I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of articles that are available for free on my website. My website is matches and consulting.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn. If you’d like to connect, I would suggest mentioning that you heard me on this podcast. I do get like a lot of requests. And if I don’t know who you are, I’m going to be like, sorry, not today. And if I can be of any help, feel free to reach out at Roberta at matches in consulting.com.

Julianna: Great, thank you. I’ll be sure to put all those links in the show notes so people can find and connect with you. Great. Well, thanks again so much for sharing your time with us today and so many insights, like I said. And I hope you have fun at Pickleball.

Roberta: Thank you. Have a great day. Bye, everyone.