#171 - Yes, Managing Up (and Sideways, and Diagonally) is Part Of Your Job
Plus: Ladder of leadership; Hidden opportunity in feedback; Good directive work phrases; Announcing departures; Get it done; Managing and communicating up tips; Introverts can be the best networkers
Manager, Ph.D. is a newsletter and community which helps people from the world of research reach their full potential managing teams and enacting changes. We’ve already developed the advanced skills to be exceptional managers; we just need help with the basics.
If you’re new to the community, drop me a note! Some past issues from the archive which you might be interested in include:
#139, “Don't Use Process To Avoid Talking About Expectations”
#144, “Engaging meetings have multiple valuable interactions”
#148 - Task Relevant Maturity: or, "micromanaging" is context dependant
Plus of course the one-on-one and feedback guides.
And whether you’re new to the community or not, feel free to email me, or even have a quick chat with me about problems you have, or things you’d like to see!
Even hearing about “Managing your boss” or “managing upwards”, like “networking” or management jargon (#157) kind of squicks a lot of us out (or, as I’m told the kids say these days, “gives us the ick”). To our minds it sounds unpleasantly foreign to academe, suspicious, probably manipulative.
But it’s not. Not only is it not bad, it’s part of our job, and a necessary good if you want to get big things done. Heck, it always was.
If you don’t like phrases like “managing your peers” or “managing your boss”, mentally replace “managing” with “developing and maintaining a productive working relationship with”. Because having productive working relationships with your boss, your peers across the organization, and occasionally even their bosses or team members is very much part of being effective in our kinds of jobs.
If we want to have a productive working relationship with someone, we need to know:
What they’re responsible for
What they care about
How to communicate effectively with them
What they’re struggling with, that maybe you can help with
What they’re good at, that maybe they can help you with
Let’s set aside our relationship with our advisor, for a moment, and instead think about some grad school work friends, particularly those that weren’t directly involved with your projects.
You probably knew those things about them. You learned these things about them not by stalking them on line, or through other stealthy means, but by talking shop with them on some semi-regular basis.
You probably also helped them out and got helped out by them a couple of times. You learned about them and helped them not to manipulate them to get them to help you, but simply because you’re not a jerk, and you’re all in this together, and in those situations it’s good to learn from each other and help each other out.
Working with people in your current organization is the same thing. Having productive working relationships with people you’re likely to interact with at work — including your boss — is just how people work best together. But because the work environment is very different, these relationships may not just spontaneously happen on their own. They take a bit more conscious effort to develop, and low-level but consistent effort to maintain.
Even as an individual contributor, as we take on work with increasingly greater scope, these relationships matter. Pretty quickly, the work we’re doing touches on other people. Knowing who it will effect, and having enough of a productive working relationship that you can ask their input or even their help, is not only good for them, it’s a basic sign of professional respect, and helps build the relationship.
And as we move into management roles, these relationships become essential.
As an individual contributor, our responsibility is the work that gets done
As a manager, we start having a hand in shaping the work that gets done, the reasons for it, and by whom
As a more senior leader, we start having a hand in driving change in how how the work gets shaped and assigned
Even at entry management levels, we simply can’t do things alone at our desk. Our work consistently affects (or requires, or both) other people, and that greatly benefits from having existing productive relationships with others.
Having these relationships ahead of time enormously accelerates things, and you never know when they’ll be useful. (there was an interesting recent paper on how groups that had existing external collaborative relationships moved much more quickly on COVID-19 research and vaccine development than groups that didn’t).
There’s no magic to developing the relationship - it happens slowly over time.
With peers, when we’re working closely with them on something we can take the opportunity to ask for a periodic sync meeting for 15 minutes or so just to quickly stay up to date on how things are going, and when the current project dies down you can just ask to keep it on your calendars every month or so, or to go for a coffee periodically to stay up to date. During these conversations, make sure to find out
What they’re responsible for, and how their organization is evaluated
What they care about
What they’re struggling with, that maybe you can help with
What they’re good at, and could maybe help you with.
With how to best communicate with them, the easiest way to find out there is just paying attention to how they actually communicate in practice, and doing the same - #164.
When they could benefit from your help, and it’s possible, try to help them. Also, ask them for help on things you know they can help you with. People (especially us) are far, far, far too reticent to ask for help. But the thing is, non-jerks actually like to help other people they know, as long as the request is respectful and they have the time.
With our bosses, the best place to do it is in our one-on-ones. (If those aren’t in place, you can often go the peer route pretty easily to start them - ask them initially for a quick weekly or biweekly sync for 15 minutes or so, so you can bundle up your questions for them and give them quick status reports. If you make sure those meetings are valuable for them — and you will, because you’re not a jerk and are respectful of their time — you will likely find that there’s no problem with them slowly expanding to regular 30 minute meetings).
Again, when you’re talking to them, make sure that over time you’re asking and staying up to date on
What they’re responsible for, and how their organization is evaluated
What they care about
What they’re struggling with, that maybe you can help with
same as anyone else. Pay attention to how they communicate; and again, ask them for help regularly. They are your manger, it’s their job to get you the help you need, and people helping you builds their relationship with you.
Developing relationships across the organization with people you work with or may work with is not manipulative, it’s not weird, it’s not crass — it’s just being a human in an organization. And it doesn’t have to be hard. Being pleasant and respectful and expressing interest in their work and listening to them goes an incredibly long way. When you’re talking to someone in another team, ask about them, maybe grab a coffee some time after a meeting you’re both in. Having a few pleasant, normal, human interactions with that person in operations or finance or HR or engineering or senior leadership builds up over time, and makes you a more effective manager and advocate for your team.
And now, on to the roundup!
Managing Individuals
The Ladder of Leadership and facilitating change - Jason Yip
This is an important corollary to the discussions of #148 about matching degree of the structure and involvement you give to a team members work with their level of task-relevant maturity.
Yip points out that if you try to communicate about a task at a level mismatched to where the person is (or thinks they are) on handling tasks, it’s going to go poorly. You’ll communicate to generally and vaguely and they’ll be confused and not act (or, worse, act).
On the other hand if you communicate at far too fine-grained a level, you’ll hinder their ability to do their job, or their growth - maybe even undermine their motivation.
The hidden opportunity in feedback - Jens Rantil
Sometimes when we finally do give feedback we’re so relieved about having said the thing we end the conversation too soon; similarly when we receive feedback it can be so uncomfortable we scurry away.
Rantil points out that this is missed opportunities either way. If this is new or important feedback, it can usefully be the beginning of a conversation.
We’re pretty good at having difficult conversations, if we let ourselves! (#151 - Our Difficult Conversation Superpowers).
Don’t get me wrong, giving (or properly hearing) the feedback is a fantastic start, and is way better than avoiding the conversation entirely (an all-too common situation!) But once you’re comfortable with short one-way exchanges of feedback, then taking the opportunity to have a conversation about it can make it doubly important. Ranil talks about the why and how in the article.
How to Boss Without Being Bossy - Jeff Wofford
One thing I’ve seen a lot of STEM PhDs turned managers wrestle with is being directive. Assigning tasks doesn’t feel very collegial!
Usually we develop our own preferred script for assigning a task, but as Wofford points out, some of these soften the request to the point of sacrificing clarity - people can be confused about whether you are expecting them to do something or not.
Wofford has a helpful list of over a dozen sentences for assigning a task to someone; it’s good for the phrases and just as a way of considering how harsh something might be.
I’ll add an endorsement for making the assignment in the form of a question - not only does it sound softer because you’re asking a question, but it invites them to either actively affirm that they’ll do it or to answer no if they don’t. That matters!
Managing Teams
How To Announce Employee Departures To Your Team - Jason Evanish, Lighthouse Blog
Telling the team that someone is leaving is a hard conversation - but like all hard conversations, waiting doesn’t make it easier. Whether a team member has chosen to leave or whether you’ve chosen that they leave - or even if the person is on another team - Evanish points out how important it is to communicate things quickly and as transparently as possible.
The article recommends:
Make the announcement quickly
Share the key details the team needs to know
Share the transition plan so far
Show gratitude and stay positive [this is really important, and can be hard to do if you’re not feeling gratitude & positivity, e.g. a key team member has suddenly decided to leave. But people switch jobs, and its best to be happy for them even if it’s not great for you]
Share farewell event details, if there is one
Managing Within Organizations
Get It Done - Andrew Bosworth
“Boz”’s article is great and short and covers an idea I routinely see people coming out of the research world struggle with.
Throughout grad school, whether in courses or as research trainees, we were given some mini project. Our role was to go off, do the best we could with it on our own (using the work of others would very explicitly be cheating unless it was some relatively rare group project), and then nervously bring our work back and wait for evaluation.
We could often get bonus marks (or at least praise) for doing something especially elegantly.
And only getting the work partially done wasn’t great, but we could at least get partial marks for it.
Our new jobs aren’t like that at all. When we’re given a task, it’s now our responsibility to get it completed. It is not a requirement that we personally do it. And there’s basically no chance of bonus points for a particularly beautiful solution.
Once you become a manager of a team, or a team lead, you are responsible for the work of your team, and much of the work will get done through your team. Delegating tasks to them is good for them and for you (e.g. #154 - Growing Your Work On The Team: Taking Everyday Opportunities).
What’s more, as you become more experienced in your management job you’ll develop relationships with peer teams. Involving them can also be good for them and for you. As we discussed above, If the work will impact them, getting their input is not only helpful but a sign of respect. Asking them to do some tasks they can do much better can lead to a more efficient use of the organization’s resources. Giving them appropriate credit will show that you can be trusted. All of this will further cement your working relationships.
STEM PhD managers way too often don’t make nearly enough use of peer teams and even their own teams in getting things done. This misunderstands how our new jobs operate and what is expected of us, and I think it all comes down to how we operated throughout grad school.
Managing Your Own Career
15 principles for managing up -
Kao goes into much more depth on managing your relationship with your boss in this very helpful and tactical article than I did above. I won’t try to summarize it; it’s well worth reading for some very specific things you can think about communicating to your boss.
How to Set Yourself Up for Big Conversations - Ashley Janssen
We tend to be excellent planners, thinkers, and analyzers, but for some things we’re uncomfortable with, sometimes we don’t make full use of those skills.
Janssen describes the process (with a helpful template!) for coming up with an outline for big conversations with bosses, stakeholders, and others: her steps are
Summarize the issue
Provide relevant background context
Map out various options
Come to a recommendation
Write out some specific questions for them (and consider questions they might have for you)
I quite like the article, and the advice is terrific. Whether you then share the outline, or simply use it as your own preparation, you’ll have paved the way for a much more productive conversation.
Introverts may be best networkers -
We’re pretty good at developing and maintaining productive work relationships once we make ourselves start. And networking is just developing professional relationships with people we don’t yet work closely with. Again, we have real strengths there, as Domański points out:
We’re the ones who enjoy listening over talking
We’re the ones that prefer few deep conversations over many shallow ones
Our voices are underrepresented and, thus, more likely to be novel
The article is a good introduction to thinking about networking for those of us who might rather not.
That’s It…
And that’s it for the week! I hope it was useful; Let me know what you thought, or if you have anything you’d like to share with me about how a newsletter or community about management for people like us might be even more valuable. Just email me at jonathan@managerphd.com, or leave a comment, or reply to this newsletter if you get it in your inbox, or schedule a quick Manager, Ph.D. reader input call.
Have a great weekend, and best of luck in the coming weeks with your team,
Jonathan
Appreciate the shoutout! It's crucial to break the bubble of the "sales'y" networking perception. Hell, in academia there's a huge hidden strength of networks that could boost the innovation. Just gotta take that step