Manage up: INCOMING!

Keeping your boss informed is a must, here are my categories of incoming and how I communicate up.

Transcript

Welcome back to my podcast, Scaling Out.

An important aspect of making your manager’s life easy is to ensure that they are informed. Early in my current role, I made the mistake of handling something & not telling my manager anything about it. Hey, I had it, it was my responsibility as the manager in that group, the issue was resolved, the customer ultimately was fine. But … another executive in the company asked my boss & he knew nothing about it. Because it caught my manager completely unaware, he felt out of touch on what was happening day-to-day. I received his constructive feedback and ever since I have done a better job at giving management a heads up ‘just in case you hear about this’. I would argue that this is a great practice for all of you, anytime you feel that something could discussed or even escalated with your manager but they needed that background – go ahead and give them the background.

In order to communicate these events, I itemize the information to send them into three categories: Urgent, Imminent, Likely

1. Anything urgent is communicated via SMS Text or via the company chat functionality. I keep the communication extremely brief. Such as ‘x customer is upset, this is the issue, here is the action we are in the midst of. More information to follow, but ping ME if you need anything sooner.’
2. Anything imminent is communicated via Email. I will share more next time about the how to effectively email, but for this quick example I include a relevant subject line, mark the email as important. Provide a quick summary as the first paragraph and then include subsequent detail below. 
3. Finally anything likely to come up is communicated & discussed via our 1-1 sessions. This might be an ongoing conversation with a customer, team member or another organization that includes a disagreement on the approach to take, giving your manager the talking points covered and then getting their advice (or backing) is part of this conversation.

There is a balancing act here. So ask for input from your manager about what is working or not working, they might want more at first but as they gain trust in you ask for less. They might want more communication on a certain topic/customer/objective. 

Alright – next time Ill jump into emails & wrap up the manage up thread. 

Until then, stay safe everyone!