Managing upwards is being proactive about supporting your line manager to do his or her job effectively, in supporting you to do yours properly. It involves building a positive rapport with your line manager, helping them to cope on a day-to-day basis and assertively stating your needs with regard to doing your own job.

With increasing pressures on managers to be accountable it is not uncommon for a person in such a role to focus more on measuring success and on being seen to be active than supporting and delegating to staff they line manage.

The result can be poor communication and insufficient awareness of the needs of their subordinates. Equally, managers can find themselves overwhelmed with their role and may need particular support.

There are four important factors to managing your manager effectively:

• Rapport is key to the success of any relationship. Rapport can be defined as a mutual feeling of trust and a willingness to take risks. Taking time to build the relationship is key to getting another person on your side and having them communicate with you. Rapport is strongly improved by good listening. Even if your manager is not a good listener, modelling good listening for them may help to build a better relationship between you. In particular, as you listen to your manager, look out for clues about their fears and concerns. If you have needs and approaches you would like to see put in place, look at how you can tie these in with allaying your manager’s fears and concerns. This also builds rapport, when your manager sees that you are responding to their concerns.
• Assertiveness is when you behave in a fair, sensitive, respectful and optimistic manner towards others to put across your needs clearly and then stick to your request. It doesn’t always get you what you want but it can be effective in influencing others, once they are clear about your needs.
• Willingness to support. This is perhaps the most difficult area, particularly if your relationship is shaky to begin with! The key to this area is to put aside your thoughts of what your boss should or shouldn’t be doing and to look at the whole department/school and the outcomes that are right for the children. Focusing on what needs to be done to support your line manager so that children get a good deal is essential.
• Posing challenging questions is perhaps the most effective way to effect change and influence your line manager. Always to be done within the context of rapport, this will cause the individual to question their position on the area concerned. For example, what specifically will happen if we do what you have suggested? How do you know that you will get this outcome? What other possible outcomes could there be?

Ask yourself

• Examine your own beliefs about your line manager and question any thoughts that bring up negative emotions or trigger defiant or competitive reactions. Could you find a buddy to help challenge these unhelpful thoughts?
• Can you expand the range of challenging questions you ask, preferably open-style questions which encourage the individual to challenge their current position, e.g. What specifically do you mean? Always deliver this kind of question whilst in rapport.
• Do you have the interests of your key stakeholders (learners and parents) at heart when managing upwards? This is where your manager ought to be focusing too.

To do list

• Build rapport through mirroring body language and finding common interests both in and out of the work context.
• Use ‘and’ instead of ‘but’ when you need to disagree (e.g. I have listened to your ideas and I think we could also look at it from this perspective too – present your perspective followed by the benefits of this approach).
• In situations where your needs are not being met, decide what you need as a minimum in the situation you are in, and formulate the ‘bottom line’. Communicate your needs clearly and succinctly and if they are not acknowledged or if they are refused, repeat them again and again using the ‘broken record technique’. As a rule of thumb most people will listen if you do this clearly three times.

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