Learning to Manage Up Changed My Entire Experience of My Organisation

I had been at the NGO in Hyderabad for three years when a peer who was visibly more effective at navigating the organisation than I was said something that reframed my entire experience of the place: she said that her relationship with the senior leadership was a deliberate project she invested in weekly rather than something that happened as a byproduct of doing good work.

I had been operating on the assumption that good work was the primary currency of professional relationships at all levels, including upward. She had a more sophisticated model that had produced considerably more impact in the same organisation over the same period. I asked her to explain what she meant by investing in the relationship.

What she described was specific and not manipulative in any sense I found concerning. It was the practice of understanding her manager's priorities, pressures, and preferred forms of communication well enough to make working with her as easy as possible - and in doing so, to make herself the person whose work her manager trusted most, advocated for most, and thought of first for the best opportunities.

I had been providing good work to my manager without much attention to the form in which it was most useful to her, the timing that served her best, or the specific problems she most needed solved in any given week.

The deliberate version of the relationship produced changes that I noticed within about six weeks. Not because I had become more political but because I had become more useful - more attuned to what was actually needed rather than what I had decided was good. The work I was doing had not changed.

Its visibility and its uptake had changed because the person above me understood it better and received it better.