Managing Up And Building Influence
Learning how to manage up and build influence at work can be challenging. However, you have the power to tell people how to treat you at work. In this week’s newsletter, global communication expert, Jessica Chen, chats with author of “Managing Up” and “Trust Yourself”, Melody Wilding.
Below is a small snippet of their entire conversation held on our Soulcast Media Event show on LinkedIn.
If you’d like to watch or listen to the entire interview, click below. The transcript has been slightly edited for ease of reading.
📺 Watch the full live event here
🎙️ Listen to the Podcast episode here
🔗 Order the book, “Smart, Not Loud”
On Mindset
Melody – when it comes to the managing-up philosophy in this book, it’s more about being a trusted partner or advisor to your manager than just acting like a subordinate.
The subordinate mindset is about reacting and always being on your back foot, putting yourself in a one-down position.
The trusted advisor or the partner mindset is more about, I let my manager know. It’s my responsibility and obligation to surface when we have these conflicts of interest or these risks.
Another important mindset shift is that it’s part of my duty to let my manager know when a timeline may be jeopardized because I have three projects on my plate, and I may not be able to get to one in time or do it at the level of quality that’s expected now.
On Saying No To Your Manager
Melody – The first strategy is the trade-off approach, and that’s where we say, okay, I hear both X and Y are important. What would you like me to deprioritize in order to make space for Y? Or what would you like us to temporarily slow down on to delegate to another team?
The magic of the trade-off is that you’re approaching it more like a problem-solving exercise. You are framing the question, so you are subtly saying both of these are not possible. We have to, we have to make a trade-off here. Our compromise here ultimately puts the decision-making power back in the other person’s hand.
The second is the conditional yes approach. This is where you say yes now, but you set a boundary for the future.
So you may say, “I’m happy to step in because I know this is an important request for the client, but I want to make sure we both know that in the future, I may not be able to accommodate a 24-hour turnaround.” Or you might say, “I would love to sit down after we get through the next two weeks and talk about how we put a process in place for these types of requests moving forward.”
📺 Watch the full live event here
🎙️ Listen to the Podcast episode here
🔗 Order the book, “Smart, Not Loud”
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