Fresh Thinking – Managing Up

Management for non-managers, also known as ‘managing up’ or ‘influencing up’ is gaining a lot of attention in the business world. Why? Find out here!

It’s increasingly hard to progress up the career ladder and nearly everyone is under pressure to generate results. Managing up, or aligning yourself with your manager to work for the mutual benefit of the business may help you be taken more seriously as a future manager and it just might also help you feel differently about work. It’s also a great way to support colleagues who might be struggling with the dual burden of clinical and managerial work and feeling isolated in their managerial role.

Here are our top tips for managing up:

1. Shift your perspective – seek to understand your manager’s goals and objectives and identify ways you can support them to achieve their aims.
2. Understand your manager’s communication style – do they prefer email, short meetings or a conversation over coffee. It’s the best way to get their attention.
3. Be clear about your role – make sure that you do all the duties assigned to your job role as well as you can. Once those are covered anything else you achieve is a bonus for your practice. By doing your own role really well, you are more likely to gain support for additional projects or areas of work you want to develop, such as nurse clinics.
4. The greater good – understand what the practice needs to achieve and go above and beyond to make it happen.
5. Anticipate opportunities to help – work out what you can do, when, to support your manager so they don’t always have to ask.