Managing up and across
An engineering manager spends a large part of every week with people who are not on their teams: their own manager, peer managers, stakeholders and vendors. This lesson gives you methods for each: keep your manager free of surprises, run one priority path for two teams, bring bad news early with real options, hold difficult conversations, and say no to a leader without losing them.
By the end you can
- Agree a written operating agreement with your manager: goals, updates, bad news and decision rights
- Run one priority path for two teams and their stakeholders, including an outside vendor
- Turn a late date into options (cut scope, move the date, add people) and judge each with Brooks's law in mind
- Prepare a difficult conversation using the three conversations of Stone, Patton and Heen
- Say no to a leader by offering a trade-off they can choose
The everyday picture
You run the kitchen for a catering company, and tonight is a wedding for 300 guests. At 2 pm the bakery calls: the cake will be three hours late. You could hope for the best and tell nobody. A good kitchen manager calls the owner of the company first. It takes two minutes, and the owner is never the last to know.
Then she goes to the bride's family with choices: a smaller cake that the bakery can finish on time, the full cake served late after the dancing, or extra bakers in the kitchen. She knows the last one is a trap. Her kitchen is small, and three new cooks would need to be shown where everything is and would bump into each other. She recommends the smaller cake tonight and the full cake at the family lunch tomorrow. The family chooses. Next week she sits down with the bakery for a calm, hard talk about why it happened. That is the whole job of managing up and across: no surprises upward, real options sideways, an honest no where it is needed, and repair afterwards.
Managing up: an operating agreement with your manager
In The manager's job you saw that a manager's output is the output of their team. Your manager's output is the output of every team under them, and you are one of their main levers. Managing up means making it easy for your manager to help your teams, and hard for anything to surprise them. Stakeholders, negotiation and leading without authority gave the basic moves: know their goals, no surprises, bring options and a recommendation, ask for specific help. As an engineering manager (EM) you add one tool that makes those moves routine: a short written operating agreement, agreed in your first two weeks and reviewed every quarter.
John Gabarro and John Kotter's 1980 Harvard Business Review article "Managing Your Boss" describes the relationship as one of mutual dependence. Your manager depends on you for cooperation, reliability and honesty; you depend on them for priorities, connections and resources. So you need to understand their goals, pressures and working style, and your own, and build a way of working that fits both. The operating agreement writes that down. It has six parts:
- Goals and pressures. What your manager is measured on this year, and what their own boss asks about most.
- Rhythm. A weekly 1:1 where you bring decisions and risks, and a short written update on a fixed day. Use the update shape from Executive updates and presentations: status with a reason, a few numbers against targets, what changed, decisions needed, risks, next update.
- How bad news travels. The same day, privately, by message, followed by a conversation. Never first in a meeting with others.
- Decision rights, in three lists. Decide and tell after: team process, who works on what inside one team, the design of a hiring loop. Tell before: anything that moves a promised date, affects another team or changes what a stakeholder was told. Ask first: money, headcount, vendor contracts, anything that goes to the managing director.
- Help you will ask for, such as backing in a meeting with another department.
- How you disagree. Privately, early and with evidence; then you commit to the decision in public.
One trap is common after a reorganisation. If your manager used to run one of your teams, people on that team will still go to them directly, and your manager will still answer. That gives the team two bosses. Agree that your manager sends those questions back to you, and that you keep them close to the team through your update instead.
Quick check
Ken has agreed that you decide team process yourself, tell him before anything that affects a date or another team, and ask him before spending money. Which of these needs a message to Ken before you act?
Lending Nell affects two teams and probably the offline stock counts date, so it sits on the tell-before list. The stand-up time, pairing inside one team and the retrospective format are team process: decide them yourself and mention them afterwards if at all. Asking about everything teaches your manager that you need watching.