Building a strong relationship with your manager is important to your career. Your manager can support you and help you gain visibility to move up in your career or they can also be the person that holds you back from progressing any further. Managing up is focused on finding the best ways to work together which ultimately supports you.
How can you help them achieve their goals which can provide you additional opportunities for visibility? What strengths do you have that they don’t and how can you leverage those strengths to support them? Ask where they could use your help. It will allow you to understand how to support them so they look good and it helps you and your team look good in their eyes.
Aside from having a strong relationship, you will also gain additional benefits. A trusted relationship will give you insight into the organization in ways that you may not be privy to from where you sit. Information on conversations that have happened, the politics of who is doing what and upcoming changes that may impact you or your team are all examples of what you could learn.
Each of these pieces of information is like a puzzle piece that helps you fill in the picture of how things work and how to get things done. All of this information allows you to increase your influence, better understand how things work and helps you navigate through upcoming challenges. This relationship with your manager is critical to achieving career success in an organization. What could you do to manage up in a more effective way?