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Your relationship with your manager is the single most important relationship you have at work. We can’t control who our manager is, but we can shape that relationship to better work for us.
Managing up is an important skill, and something I didn’t even realize I could do until I was a Senior Engineer at Facebook. I could have unlocked considerably more career support and investment if I had worked better with my manager.
Here are three core ideas that made a meaningful impact on how I approach my manager relationship:
First, understand your manager’s motivations. Many early-career engineers are completely clueless about how their managers are evaluated. Ultimately, your manager is assessed on the overall impact of their team. Your manager will often spend time giving feedback to reports and ensuring engineers are unblocked. But they may also need to remove people from the team or cancel projects. You need to determine what your manager cares about and how your work fits into their priorities.
Second, understand your boss’s preferred communication style. Many software projects come with a README file that describes how to use them. Imagine you had to write a README file for your manager: the need-to-know information to best interact with them. This document would include their preferences and pet peeves around communication, their preferred work environments, and their strengths and weaknesses. Once you have a README file, either something you wrote on behalf of your manager or something you collaboratively put together with your manager’s input, apply it to your interactions.
Finally, figure out how to work productively with your manager as you plan your tasks. Instead of asking how you can get involved in something new, bring value. Provide data, insights, or proposals that move the conversation forward, rather than simply waiting for an assignment. Also, no manager wants to deal with surprises. Ensure that you communicate ahead of any surprises, and you’ve thought about next steps when things inevitably go wrong.
You can control, at least partially, your manager’s investment in you. This is not about after-work drinks or political maneuvering — managing up is a critical skill for career advancement, whether we do it consciously or not.
—Rahul
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