Surviving Bad Managers: Learn to Manage Up Well
Your manager is probably untrained.
You need a survival toolkit for this situation. It likely won’t make the situation great, but it will allow you to survive, perhaps thrive, and at least hang on until you can move on. It’s also a useful set of skills even with a good manager.
Your manager was likely never trained in most aspects of management. They were educated as engineers, lawyers, accountants, or even business leaders, and then promoted because they were good at those tasks. But ask any MBA, even that degree has only a limited amount about managing human beings.
The result is, managers learn on the job — they learn by practicing on you.
This explains in large part why many managers struggle to give honest feedback, to have hard discussions, to delegate effectively, to recognize the strengths and talents of their employees, and many more things.
Note that they are not necessarily bad people…but you wouldn’t want your life in the hands of an untrained doctor, either.
To best deal with this reality, your only choice is to become very good at managing up.
Some people only understand managing up as a political act and associate it with phrases I cannot write here that begin with “kissing.” This is a limited view. Everyone can benefit from learning how to manage up well.
What is good managing up?
Become talented at initiating and facilitating difficult conversations calmly (see the book, Crucial Conversations).
Let go of your anger or frustration that the manager does things poorly and start to see this as a lack of training and experience, not a personal vendetta against you.
If your manager does not give you good career feedback, learn how to ask for it in a way that is safe for both of you.
If your manager does not provide you with opportunities to grow, learn how to create them and bring them into being.
All of this is extra work for you and it is made harder by the power imbalance in the roles.
But it is possible.
In writing that you should do this, I am not excusing poor management (I have written many times on how managers must realize that they lack formally trained skills and educate themselves) nor am I saying that is “fair” or “right” that you should have to do all the heavy lifting. I also applaud all the managers who have invested effort to learn critical skills and become good leaders. However, I try to specialize in *realistic* advice that deals with “what is” rather than what “should be.”
Reality is, the better you are at easing your manager’s job, the better you will do under a good boss or a poor one.
The point of this post is to emphasize the need to develop these skills rather than hoping your manager has them and being disappointed.
Audience Insights
As will be the case with all posts in this series, I first post my answer, above, on LinkedIn, and then my audience comments. I have consolidated additional ideas worth considering, including:
As someone who reports to a manager, it helps to understand what they are dealing with. Take the “10,000 hours to being an expert” example:
A software engineer between school and career likely has multiples of 10,000 hours of writing code.
When you become a manager, you start with 0. Assume a new manager gives candid and detailed feedback once a month in 1 hour 1:1s to every direct report (not easy), after 5 years of managing a team of 7, that manager has 420 hours of experience (4.2% of the 10,000 goal). Plus, the challenge is twofold: learning on the job + learning new skills.
As a manager (or an aspiring manager), recognize that most companies do not train managers effectively. To take matters into your own hands, actively seek mentoring or coaching. Seek out the leaders who have a track record of developing their direct reports or the leaders who have a long line of talented people willing to follow them.
For individual contributors (IC) who move into management, it presents an opportunity for the skip level to closely coach the new manager for the first 6-12 months. This action could be the difference between raising their team’s performance bar vs dealing with a leaky bucket.
Stakeholder management becomes increasingly important as you progress in your career, and the more developed your own skills, the more effectively you can partner with others (e.g. peers, managers, skip level, etc).
Remember that what “should” be done is not always done. Thus, equip yourself to thrive even when your are not getting what you “should.”
Learn to Manage Up Successfully
I developed the course, Managing Up Successfully, to teach you the skills to develop a productive relationship with your manager, senior peers, and your skip level leadership chain.
The class also covers how to handle difficult situations such as:
Giving your manager feedback.
Resolving conflicts with your manager.
How to enlist your manager into supporting your career growth.
Watch the introduction video below to see what you will get.
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Level Up is a free newsletter from retired Amazon Vice President Ethan Evans that breaks down how he succeeded and how you can get to the next level.