Managing Upward as Opposed to Downward
Published on March 7th, 2010
Tommy Wong brought up an interesting subject this week – upward management. The critical role that middle managers achieve when supporting their own manager and making that manager look good. Its about managing your own manager. Its about reflective glory rather than direct ego-driven pursuit of credit.
The management of peers and employees is a much simpler concept to grasp because we usually think of management as (almost) synonymous with the leadership role. The POLC acronym – planning, organising, leading and controlling. But it would be naive to believe that your main management role is to manage downward. When you think about it a little, most of your role should be focused on using the resources of your peers and employees to support your upward management hierarchy – put simply, if they are made to look good then you also look good (and vice versa).
As a middle manager your downward objective is to create leaders (not followers) and to ensure the company’s available resources are efficiently and effectively put to work. As a middle manager your upward objective is to supply all the relevant inputs – reports, advice and assistance – to support your boss. Its a matter of perspective, seeing yourself as a part of an organic structure rather than as an individual working solely on your own inputs and outputs throughout the day.
Which leads me to the question of the day – what synergistic capacity does your business have in the middle? By that I mean to ask how effective and efficient the conduits in the middle of your business structure are able to add synergistic benefit between the top and the bottom. For example, is your design team leader an ego boiling for self-satisfying portfolio opportunity… or an effective supporting structure for both employees on the team as well as the manager above?
That’s an important question and one that just may be costing your business bottom-line more than you might expect.
