Learning to lead and manage upward is critical to delivering winning results for your career and for your organization – double win.
This is a follow-on article to “The Myth of Hierarchical Leadership“, which I published in the IAMX blog on December 22nd. In that article we discussed how leadership in organizations does not just flow from the top. In fact, the majority of day-to-day leadership decisions and actions can and should emanate from all over the organization, particularly from the front lines of action.
In the healthiest organizations, front-line people are enabled, empowered and trusted to make autonomous decisions in real-time that benefit the health and goals of the organization. This kind of autonomy also enables higher job satisfaction and fulfillment in our personal careers. This is a key bridge between what IAMX refers to as “Career Alignment” and “Workplace Alignment”.
From where does that trusted enablement and empowerment emanate? Is this yet another type of blessing that people must wait for from “top management”? No … and that is the point!
The very words “enablement” and “empowerment” have become soured over time largely because many people see them as something they need to wait for someone else to bestow on them. If so, the people and the organization as a whole choose to remain entrapped and limited within the Myth of Hierarchical Leadership.
It Begins with You
For decisions and actions that relate to your area of responsibility and your career, the path to trusted enablement and empowerment must begin with you. That begins by first realizing that most organizations have their management hierarchies turned upside-down. Healthy organizations flip the model of who leads and who serves.
One of the most important roles of senior management in any organization is to serve the needs of the groups and individual contributors within the organization, not the other way around. The best senior management leaders know that they serve their organizations and their people best when they operate continuously in service and support roles rather than in modes of artificial command-and-control. If yours don’t, it is critical to your job and your career to help retrain yourself and them.
The best way for people in senior positions to know what service the organization needs from them is for you to tell and show them … you “Leading and Managing Upward”. Unless the people who have authority over budgets, people and resources know what you need to accomplish your goals, they are left in a position of guessing and you are left in a position of waiting. This simply perpetuates the Myth and a continuous cycle of us-versus-them … “We can’t get anything done because we are always waiting for them” … “They don’t accomplish things fast enough because they are always waiting for us”.
Key Factors of Managing Upward
The most effective way that you can serve your organization, your own career and your personal job satisfaction is to realize your role as a leader in your organization and Manage Upward. That means being very clear in your communications about exactly what you need to accomplish your role in the organization and exactly how you need senior management to serve you in that role.
To be most effective, your communications about your wants and needs should have at least five important characteristics:
Context: Understand the other goals and priorities of the organization and do your best to present your request within the context of those other priorities. You do not work in isolation. Often decision-makers must weigh your requests and recommendations in the context of other, perhaps competing, priorities. Help them with that.
Fact-Based: Do your homework, understand the details as best you can and present the facts. Stay away from speculation, estimations and personal assumptions. The time to use your gut-feel and intuitive judgment is AFTER you have the resources you need, not when you are trying to get them.
Results-Oriented: Frame your requests and recommendations within the context of how they will benefit the organization. These benefits should be as tangible, realistic to achieve and measureable as possible.
Concise Clarity of Need: Be as specific as possible about what you need from the person you are asking, as well as from the other resources within his or her range of responsibility.
Timing: Timing is very important. Being specific about urgency and when you need the resources will help ensure you get what you need when you need it.
Fruits of Empowerment
The fruits of a workplace of enabled and empowered people are literally limitless.
When individuals and teams operate in an environment of autonomous freedom, the agility of thinking, nimbleness of response and latitude in the ability to be creative and innovative takes on dimensions that cannot be achieved by environments constrained by structures of top-down management.
When you realize that empowerment is yours to create, your career and your workplace will be transformed in ways beyond your imagination.
Managing Upward Requires Re-Training
Creating an environment of empowered autonomy for yourself and your organization will probably require some retraining for you and for the people who have ascended to senior management positions. The Myth is strong, self-perpetuating and requires work to dismantle its fallacies of command-and-control. The best way for you to help dismantle it is through your communications and actions. Letting people in senior management positions know exactly what you need and why you need them will not only build their confidence in you, it will give them guidance in what the organization needs from them.
Your enablement and empowerment begins with enabling and empowering yourself.
If you choose to remain trapped within the Myth of Hierarchical Leadership, including the crippling effects it has on your organization and on your personal career, look nowhere else to blame but in your own mirror.