Up-Down-Up Directions of Management
Career arcs of Learning, Managing, and Leading
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We are thrilled to bring you a guest post by Luke Congdon, Senior Director of Product Management in enterprise software at Nutanix. Luke writes a blog for new and aspirational PMs, Breaking Into Enterprise Product Management.
He has worked in product for 18 years across companies including Sun Microsystems, NetApp, VMware, startups, and Nutanix. Luke started his career in NYC, but quickly moved to tech in Silicon Valley after three years.
He has an MBA from Santa Clara University, a bachelor's from UCONN, and completed Harvard Business School’s Leadership for Senior Executives program.
Below, Luke shares the importance of managing both up and down, and explains when to focus in each direction as your career progresses across three major arcs: Learning, managing, and leading.
Apply to be featured as a guest post: If you are an expert and want to share actionable career advice with our readers, get in touch.
Your Career Phase Drives the Direction of Management
Careers are primarily formed in three long arcs:
Learning.
Managing.
Leading.
In each phase, how you work with your manager and team will change.
As a new employee in the workforce, you’re in the learning phase. You will be responsible for managing up to your manager, and they will have the most direct influence on your direction, growth, and opportunities. This phase can last from a few to many years.
Once you cross the threshold of being a manager yourself, you start to manage down and up at the same time. This arc can last a long time, on the order of decades. This arc is challenging because you will lead your team as well as manage up to your own manager.
Once you reach Director and above, you start a new career arc into leadership. You will still have a large personal workload, but now you’re leading an organization with trusted managers to lean on and support you. In this phase, you will start to lead and principally manage up to the VPs and CxOs above you, and you will do a lot more managing up than managing down.
Takeaway: Understand what your manager and your team need at each phase of your career. This will help you manage up and down appropriately, and help you succeed and grow at a faster rate.
1. For New Employees: The Learning Phase
Early in your career, just about everyone starts out learning and applying newly learned skills from college as an individual contributor (IC). As an IC starting out you lack experience and work for a manager.
Your manager will direct your work and your expectations, measure your performance, and potentially reward you long-term with salary or equity increases if you are performing well.
In this phase, you must learn to keep your manager happy while you are also learning and improving in your role. Simply being good in the role is not enough, you must ensure your manager knows that you’re reliable and that they are aware of your abilities and results.
Takeaway: Proactively keep your manager informed of your progress, your roadblocks, and things that are starting to veer off course early. Do this along with the work they assign you and you will be in good shape.
At some companies, however, even this is not enough. Be aware of what kind of company you work for. For example, a high-performance-culture company like Netflix has a policy where average performance is rewarded with a generous severance check. In other words, meeting expectations is not enough.
Personal example 1: In my own tech career, I had several roles that fit into the IC learning arc category. These included roles at Yahoo!, Sun Microsystems, NetApp, and VMware. Between the first two roles is when I completed my MBA degree.
In total, I spent 9 years progressing in IC roles. Over each I got better at delivering while increasing my results, knowledge, skill set, and ability to work proactively with management. In time, this created a personal reputation my manager’s could trust, and opened the opportunity for me to take on larger initiatives.
Counter example: Not all employees succeed at driving results and self-advocacy. This presents a difficult situation which can be hard to bring back to a positive result. I once had an employee who was not performing well and was also not engaging to allow guidance or visibility. This included late results, no contribution or visibility on team video calls, and an inability to respond to coaching. This created a downward spiral.
Takeaway: Hiding from view won’t allow poor performance to go unseen. If you need help, that’s what your manager is there for. Ask for help. If you or your company are a bad fit for your work style, consider a new role where you can be more successful.
Personal example 2: In a different example I had an IC team member who was reliable in terms of accepting assignments, asking questions, and delivering results. This person still needed guidance now and then, and as their manager I asked clarifying questions and gave guidance.
I also sometimes asked for better results. The difference between this team member and the employee in the previous example was responsiveness and knowing that I was going to get consistent, high-quality results. This let me rely on them, and over time they became an obvious candidate for additional projects and responsibilities.
Takeaway: Being reliable with your results and responsibilities is always seen. Additionally, creating a positive communication loop with your manager will accelerate your growth. This will set you up for greater opportunities to do more impactful work, and in time, candidacy for promotion.
Learn to Manage Up
As an IC, the way you let your manager know you’re doing your work is by managing up. For example, proactively tell them what they need to know and what will make their job (not yours) easier. Don’t wait for them to ask.
By ensuring your manager sees that you’re meeting your responsibilities, performing with excellence, and keeping them informed if something starts to go sideways, you are managing up effectively.
Takeaway: Be reliable and communicative. Do your work and ensure your manager knows it’s getting done correctly and on time.
If things are starting to go poorly, let them know early so they can adjust before they need to be in crisis management mode. Never let your manager get surprised by bad news from leaders above them.
If you manage up properly, your boss will generally be very happy with you.
Failure to manage up effectively may result in you remaining an IC for a very long time despite aspirations to move up.
2. The New Manager
After a few years as an IC, strong results and motivation may give you an opportunity to become a manager yourself. In early roles, this might be a first-line manager responsible for 1-3 people.
Titles change across companies and job functions, but your first manager role will likely be for a small-scope team. In a product-oriented company, this might be a team that works on elements of a single product.
As a manager, you will have a whole new range of responsibilities for your team. You will be the person to ensure they are doing the right work, setting direction, measuring performance, setting an example, and driving accountability, among other responsibilities.
Managing Bi-Directionally
In this manager role, your first priority is your team. You will work to unblock them and get them access to resources to do their jobs as well as possible. You’ve now flipped from an IC who manages up, to a people manager managing down.
Along with this flip, the measurement of your performance changes. Your new key performance output is the aggregate output of your team.
In addition to new performance standards, a new dynamic now exists which makes a manager role more challenging than an IC: You also have your own manager, and there are multiple layers of management and teams around and above you to fit into.
You still have to manage up like you did as an IC, except now, you’re representing your whole team. The reason this is challenging is that you now manage up and down, bi-directionally. This ends up being twice the work.
Takeaway: You’re now in the middle, managing down to your team and managing up to your manager and leaders. Your workload has increased, and it’s bi-directional. Enable and train your team to succeed, while still managing up effectively to your manager.
Personal example 3: Not every manager succeeds in this bi-directional squeeze. While still an IC at a large technology company, I had a manager with no interest in the role who was promoted to manage me nonetheless.
He was very focused on the expectations of his own manager, but spent little more than three minutes every couple of weeks managing or communicating with me.
As you can imagine, this was not a great outcome for me. With 15 years perspective since that time, I can see this was just a first-time manager who needed training and experience
Takeaway: If you find yourself with a manager who has no time for you, you have a few options: First, speak to them and find out if this is just a miscommunication or two working styles not meshing. This might be fixable with a conversation.
If that doesn’t work, but your company is otherwise great, find an open role and transition to another manager. This lets you keep your employment, your equity vesting, and potentially lets you have a superior manager who supports you.
The nuclear option is leaving the company. I encourage you to try the first two options first, however. Sometimes resolution is just a conversation away. Changing companies is often more risky than resolving your current conflict.
The bi-directional responsibility of middle management is particularly hard. You have a responsibility to those below and above you at the same time. You need to promote and protect your team, and you need to help your manager do the same for you by making them as successful as possible.
It should be noted that once you enter management, at any level including the CEO, you will always report up and down at the same time.
3. As an Executive: Managing Up Again (mostly)
At a certain level of seniority of role, this bi-directional dynamic flips yet again. This may sound odd because you still have teams underneath you and you still have an important set of responsibilities for them, but as an executive, you are largely managing up.
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