Business Management Career Development

HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across (Summary)

by Harvard Business Review

What if your 'difficult' boss isn't the problem, but a puzzle to be solved? Most people think their job is to simply do the work their boss assigns. The most effective people realize their real job is to manage their boss—to understand their secret priorities, anticipate their needs, and gently guide their decisions. It's not about manipulation; it's about making your boss successful, which in turn, makes you indispensable.

Treat Your Boss Like Your Most Important Customer

Your success is inextricably linked to your boss's success. Your primary job is to understand their goals, pressures, and preferred work styles, and then align your work to help them succeed. It's not about sucking up; it's about strategic alignment.

An employee notices her boss is constantly stressed about an upcoming board presentation. Instead of just delivering her own part of the work, she proactively creates a one-page summary of the key data points she knows the board will ask about, formatted exactly how her boss likes to see information. This saves her boss hours of work and makes them both look good.

Become an Anthropologist of Your Boss

To manage up effectively, you must diagnose your boss's communication style, decision-making process, and key priorities. Are they a 'reader' who wants detailed memos, or a 'listener' who prefers verbal briefings? Do they value data above all else, or are they swayed by personal stories?

A junior analyst realizes his boss hates long email chains and rarely reads them. Instead of sending another detailed status update email, he starts sending a brief, three-bullet-point summary via Slack every Friday afternoon, with a link to a full document for details. His boss starts responding immediately, and the analyst's work gets much more visibility.

Influence Without Authority

Managing 'across' means influencing peers and colleagues over whom you have no formal power. This is achieved by building trust, understanding their motivations, and finding common ground, not by giving orders.

A project manager needs an engineer from another team to prioritize a specific task. Instead of just demanding it, she sits down with the engineer, explains how this task is a critical blocker for the entire project's launch, and offers to help with some of the engineer's documentation work in return. This creates a collaborative win-win, not a power struggle.

Never Present a Problem Without a Solution

A core principle of managing up is to avoid simply dumping problems on your boss's desk. Instead, analyze the issue, develop a few potential solutions with their pros and cons, and present a clear recommendation. This shows initiative and makes you a problem-solver, not a problem-bringer.

A marketing lead discovers a campaign is significantly underperforming. Instead of just reporting the bad news, she comes to her boss with the data, a diagnosis of why it's failing, and three potential pivots: reallocating budget to a different channel, changing the creative, or pausing the campaign. She recommends reallocating the budget and has a plan ready to execute.

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