“Managing up” is a relatively new concept in the business world. It refers to taking care of your boss’ and senior management’s needs as a part of your duties. Managing down, presumably, refers to managing subordinates, but managing up, not just managing down, has a significant impact on one’s career trajectory. Brownlee seeks to explore this concept by describing what this looks like pragmatically as a newer employee.
Most employees have encountered difficult bosses at some point in their career. Many are quick to relate horror stories when trying to empathize with new employees. However, Brownlee points out that a few techniques could mitigate many of these horror stories. Bosses can be “managed” – not told what to do, but handled by appropriate skills. In this book, she hopes to identify the dynamics of the relationship and introduce specific strategies on how to deal with it.
Throughout the book, her metaphors entertain, and she tries bring the book to life with real stories. Management books sometime have a theoretical tinge to them, without much grounding in day-to-day life. In contrast, Brownlee’s analysis comes from the bottom up and finds its primary font in regular business life. She sprinkles each chapter with a questionnaire to detect whether the reader herself/himself exhibit traits of one of these difficult bosses. It’s packaged as a fairly standard business book that touches all the bases, but still lacks any fireworks.
This accessible book is primarily geared towards newer employees (who are just getting used to the workplace and bosses) and towards newer managers (who are just getting used to supervising other employees). However, its potential audience can be much wider and potentially engages anyone in a hierarchical workplace. Managing up, like this book, is simply about taking care of others’ needs so that you can get your work done more effectively. It’s not “brown-nosing” or “kissing up” but rather a strategy to accomplish more and more with your work and your career.
The Unwritten Rules of Managing Up: Project Management Techniques from the Trenches
By Dana Brownlee
Narrated by Sandy Weaver
Copyright (c) 2019
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ASIN: B07PKRV6BY
Length: 5:22
Genre: Business/Management
www.amazon.com