Managing Up: Teaching Your Employees How to Best Communicate With You

Managing Up: Teaching Your Employees How to Best Communicate With You

Workplace communication is key to tight, smooth-functioning teams. Even if you as the boss have focused on communicating expectations effectively to your workers, the fact is most high-performing teams arrive at an effective communication system by trial and error with employees - over time - developing a sense of things like:

• How the boss prefers to receive information (email, conversation, reports…)
• Amount of detail necessary in communiques
• Degree of their autonomy to act without signoff
• Preferred frequency - and time(s) of check-ins
• What constitutes a legitimate “contact the boss” situation or emergency

Removing the guesswork from the “communicating with the boss” conundrum

Imagine if you flipped the script and rather than focus on how to best communicate with your team, you taught them how to best communicate with you? What if you as the boss took on the responsibility of setting expectations by spelling out those details for your employees, explaining not only what information you need, but how to best deliver it to you? The process of proactively defining how your team should communicate with you is what’s known as “managing up” and is a highly empowering method of employee management.

In such a “managing up” scenario, your team could relax into their workflow, free of anxiety about reaching out to you in the wrong way or at the wrong time or about something inconsequential, “bothering you unnecessarily” or being considered not ambitious enough.

Most employees don’t take the initiative to ask - just as most managers don’t think to provide this information to their employees, even though the impact of having clearly defined parameters can increase efficiency dramatically. Employees who have been relieved of the burden of worrying about “how” to approach you will work with greater confidence which will be reflected in their overall performance. When you communicate your specific preferences, they won’t waste emotional energy being concerned about such things as:

• Contacting you when you’re off the clock
• Wanting to reach out for feedback, but being concerned you’ll think they’re “needy”
• Bringing something up at a meeting you’d rather be emailed about
• Escalating an issue too quickly - or not quickly enough
• Wondering if they’re overstepping if they see a next step you haven’t explicitly authorized

When you share first, they follow

It’s a useful exercise to share a document listing your communication preferences and how you determine such things as urgency, decision-making ability and procedure so all employees are on the same page from day one. Employers who make the effort to communicate on this level are managing more authentically by bridging an often overlooked divide between workers and leadership. Once the dialogue is established, make sure it’s a channel that remains open so any changes to preferences or protocol can be easily communicated.

The practice of establishing your communication preferences with your employees establishes a precedent for it to become a two-way street. Employees who are made aware of your preferences will feel naturally comfortable sharing theirs - thus creating a greater sense of professional respect and consideration. Once implementing this practice, you may discover, for instance, an employee who processes written feedback better than that given in the moment; or another who benefits more from a standing check-in than ad hoc interruptions. Most employees would never volunteer such information about their working preferences - but in a workplace where the boss has already modeled that kind of transparency, the door is open.

"Managing up" - teaching your team to communicate with you in the way you need, and inviting them to do the same - does more than smooth the daily friction of workplace communication. When that kind of transparency becomes the norm rather than the exception, something bigger happens: your team gets better at talking with each other, not just to you. Clear, direct communication about how people work best stops being a special effort and starts being part of the culture.

How could “managing up” benefit your business?