Managing Up: From Perception to Reality
As Venture for America preps for the upcoming 2015 Class of Fellows, the team asked me to write a post aimed at this group about "Managing Up." Here's what I came up with:
If you don’t know the story of Hill Holliday’s CEO Karen Kaplan, you should. Over the course of a 32-year career at the Boston-based advertising agency, Mrs. Kaplan has risen from receptionist to CEO, with sixteen or so other jobs along the way (and the business cards to prove it). I had the privilege of interning at Hill Holliday in college and hearing Mrs. Kaplan speak on a number of occasions. Audiences naturally often asked her how she had been so successful at advancing within the company; in her answers, Mrs. Kaplan always stressed that whenever anyone needed something done, she was the first person to raise her hand. It didn’t matter if she was an expert in the subject matter or she had no idea what she was signing up for, she made a point of always being the one people could rely on to get things done.
While Hill Holliday is far from being a start-up, the importance of how your peers and superiors perceive you at work is applicable in any setting. One of the skills that Venture for America is trying to equip you with before jumping in at your companies is “managing up,” and in my experience, managing the perception that others within an organization have of you is the best way to do just that.
I agree with about 99% of the things that Venture for America embodies and works to instill in its Fellows. The one qualm I have is the frequency with which VFA tells us how amazing and talented and special we all are. No matter how smart you are or what school you graduated from, on the first day at your new start-up, you know less than everyone else there, even the person who started a single day before you. The sooner you accept that reality, the better position you’re putting yourself in to learn, develop, and ultimately advance in your role at the company.
Setting the Tone
Even in a fast-paced, start-up environment, managing how others perceive you takes time. When I started as the twenty-fifth employee at my start-up in August 2012, one of the first lessons I learned was that no one was going to hand me a to-do list every morning. I needed to carve out my own role, seek opportunities to make an impact, and prove that my colleagues could confidently give me any task. How do you do that? For me, it started with never going to anyone (especially my boss) with a problem if I didn’t also come armed with handful of proposed solutions as well. My objective was to become the go-to resource for everything my team did (and, accidentally, other teams as well).
A few months after I joined the company, someone on our Finance Team had a question about analyzing a merchant’s statement and, for some reason, he came to me for the answer (For the record, I’m a Communications major and I work in Customer Success. Institutional knowledge is one of the most valuable assets you can have at a growing company; oftentimes, people assume that simply because you’ve been there longer than them, you know all the answers). Thinking back to what Mrs. Kaplan had preached at Hill Holliday, I helped him to solve the problem despite having zero experience with that type of work. By doing so, I was starting to cement that go-to perception I had set out to create across the organization.
Maintaining the relationships and reputation you work so hard to build is difficult though, especially at a start-up where things can change so drastically every day. I had three different managers in my first twelve months on the job, and each time a change came, I needed to forge a new relationship with that manager and prove myself all over again. Thanks largely in part to the work I had put in with my previous bosses and others in the organization, each of those transitions became markedly easier than the last.
View from the Other Side
One of the lessons my current manager taught me is that preparing for a new role takes considerable planning, strategy, and most importantly, communication. I’m fortunate enough to work for a company at which 1-on-1s with managers are held weekly, so communication and feedback are constants. After 18 months at my start-up, my boss and I started talking about my trajectory at the company, specifically managing my own team. While I was lucky that someone proactively opened up these options to me, that is not always the case. If you don’t have a regularly scheduled check-in with your manager, ask for one. The conversations I have every week are crucial to my development and my readiness to take on a new challenges at the company (not to mention great opportunities to build rapport with my manager).
Today, I find myself on the opposite end of the “managing up” relationship, leading a team of nearly ten people and one glaring truth has emerged: managing is hard. I am constantly trying to strike the balance between 1) putting the team in a position to hit its goals and 2) motivating people to hit those goals while still enjoying their jobs and feeling like they are constantly learning and growing in their roles. I want my team to be the most consistent and reliable one in the organization. I want the people on my team to be the type of people who want to solve tough problems and find the answers themselves. I want them to be experts in something I know nothing about. That’s how I want to perceive them and how I hope they want to be perceived.
These are not easy tasks and they are not meant to be. They have only deepened my appreciation for what my managers have done in the past and put me in a better position to not only work with those on my team, but with my own manager as well.
Chances are none of you will be thrust into a management position when you start at your company; however, if you can understand and appreciate what both sides of that relationship look like ahead of time, you are setting yourself up for success. Even in my new role, as more and more talented people join the company, I am always seeking out opportunities to approach them, raise my hand for a project, and prove to them that how others perceive me is a reality.
