Manage up: Use your boss’s time wisely

The last thing you want to be called is a time suck by the boss. Take a few moments to plan out what you want to communicate and then leverage your boss & all they can do to help you achieve your tasks.

Transcript

Welcome back to my podcast Scaling Out!

I’d venture to speculate that 99% of us have a boss, but maybe you don’t because you own your own company, or maybe shareholders or even your spouse acts as your manager. I could insert a bunch of jokes about being nagged by my significant other, but I will leave him out of it.

Anyhow, keeping the boss informed & satisfied with the work that you do goes a LONG way to gaining advancement. Trust me, if you can make your manager’s job as easy as possible, it can only be a positive experience for both of you! 

One trick to keeping the boss happy is to manage their time wisely. As you move up the ladder, your boss’s time as they move up the executive ladder is more & more valuable. Therefore as you use their time, you need to be extremely cognizant of HOW you use their time. It should be obvious, but this doesn’t mean only share the good stuff & hide the bad, this is not saving anyone time. Your boss is there to hear about the good stuff & HELP you with the bad. What I’m talking about here is how to leverage their time as best as possible to get everything across.

We communicate with our bosses in a few ways, so I want to segment out by the mechanism and suggest that you differentiate your approach depending on if you have a line manager or an executive upper manager.

First for Emails – If you report to a upper manager, only send bullet points summarizing the key events. Think executive summary at all times. For all managers - sending an email that requires ANY scrolling down is simply too much. If you really feel that more information is needed, put it in an agreed shareable location & link to it. But for any boss – focus on the ask, put at the beginning what you need them for & then supply the why in a succinct manner.

Second about those 1-1s – Make a list! Run that 1-1 wisely. Include time for personal chat and catching up, but the majority of your time should focus on the work. For upper managers, prepare them for upcoming big asks (like resource needs, budget changes, customer risks that will result in escalation, etc). Propose what changes are needed and what you will volunteer to work on. For any boss, bring proposed solutions and even volunteer to solve them when you bring it to them.

And third in regards to Escalations -  Once there is an escalation, the key thing is that it shouldn’t be a surprise. They should have already been aware about the risk from prior emails and 1-1s. Also, you should always be informing your boss about the escalation. I know I have gotten burned for not letting my boss know b/c when he was asked by his boss about it he had zero idea – I thought I was doing him a favor since it was being handled I thought I didn’t have to tell him, Oops. Lesson learned on that one. So escalations are really anything that the boss’s boss could know about. Not that work needs to be done by the boss.

Actually, many times the manager’s role is just to stay informed and listen to what is going on. Not that you need their help. During my next podcast I will talk about the manager’s responsibility during a 1-1.

Until then, stay safe everyone!