The Looking Glass: Managing your Manager
Stop tolerating mediocre management
Dear Readers,
Some of us will be formal managers. Many more of us will have formal managers.
Unfortunately most of us do a shitty job of getting the most out of our manager. So let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of one of our key work relationships and stop tolerating mediocre management.
Warmly,
~Julie
In this issue:
- What your manager is not
- If your relationship with your manager sucks
- What a magnificent manager-report relationship looks like
- From the archives: performance reviews
For paid subscribers:
- The expectations you should hold for your manager
- How to give feedback about your underperforming manager
What your manager is not
It’s common for people to think of their managers as executioners. As in, “If my manager catches me doing <a thing they disapprove of>, they will axe me!”
In this mental model, the manager creeps around policing rules and judging for negligence. The underlying emotional current is fear.
It’s also common for people to think of their managers as white knights. As in, “My manager will defend me against <people who are against me> and fight to get me a promotion!”
In this mental model, the manager takes up your cause and provides for your dreams. The underlying emotional current is pining.
Let’s shatter both these illusions.
Of course, it’s easy to see why we believe them — the challenge with the manager-report relationship is an imbalance of power. Managers can fire or promote us far more easily than we can fire or promote them. So we end up thinking that managers have an “edge”, and as a result we unconsciously make them the main characters in the story of our career advancement.
It may very well be that your manager doesn’t understand you, or overlooked your good work, or is on your case about something trivial. But do not give away your power by making your career all about them!
You are the main character in your career journey — this is the singular belief that will transform your relationship with your manager.
If your relationship with your manager sucks, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and be your own hero.
If your relationship with your manager sucks…
Here are 7 step-by-step actions you can take:
- First, understand what a great relationship looks like.
- Do your research. Ask your friends. Write down the qualities you’re looking for.
- Describe to your manager the relationship you’re aspiring for.
Bring up your vision in your next 1:1. See if your manager agrees. - Explicitly describe to your manager what you’d like their help with.
Are you hoping for more context? More feedback? On what issues? Be specific. - Give your manager feedback at least once a month on how well they are helping you with what you asked.
Share what you appreciate, and ask for more of what you want. - Ask your manager for feedback at least once a month.
Feedback is a gift that helps you understand your blind spots. - If your manager ignores actioning on your strong feedback multiple times, let your manager’s manager know.
If you’re disappointed and losing hope your manager will change, it’s time to escalate. - If your manager’s manager does nothing, and you find yourself having lost trust in the entire management chain, it’s time to seek greener pastures.
Life’s too short to work with people who lose your trust.
What a magnificent manager-report relationship looks like
The best relationships are built on trust. Ask yourself: “Do I trust my manager to do their job well? Does my manager trust me to do my job well?”
Of course, you can’t answer that without knowing what doing the job well means. This is the first thing you and your manager must align on.
This seems obvious, but I cannot tell you how many people come to me frustrated because they think their manager’s job is to have their backs which means “wholeheartedly support my ideas”, while their manager thinks their job is to get quality output which means “critique my reports’ work and push them for better ideas.” This is a subtle misunderstanding, but it leads to repeated minor tensions which erode trust like waves crashing against a cliff.
Ask yourself: do you really understand how your manager sees success for their role? If not, ask this in your next 1:1: “I’m really curious how you think about your role. What makes you feel you’re doing a great job?”
It’s a simple and powerful question. And yet. The number of people who have asked me this in my career, I can count on one hand.
Once your manager gives their answer, you might find elements you’re curious about. Keep following that curiosity to expand your understanding. “So alignment with XYZ is a big part of your role? How much energy do you spent on that versus on ABC?”
A natural extension to this question is to then turn the spotlight on yourself. “How about for me? What would make you feel I’m doing a great job?”
Once you get your manager sharing, you’ve created space for you to share also. So follow up their answers with: “Here’s what would make me feel really engaged and successful in my role…”
After everyone’s hopes and dreams and success criteria are on the table, the task becomes to mold these pieces into a vision for a great relationship. “Let’s figure out how to help each other both succeed…”
A shared goal is the backbone of a trusting relationship. Before you start with evaluations and judgements, make sure you’ve explicitly mind-melded on this piece.
From the archives: Receiving a performance review
If feedback is a gift, then performance review season is like work Christmas! Rather than worrying about being called out as an imposter, take the feedback that your manager and peers have neatly packaged for you and fully embrace the opportunity for a growing moment. Here are some ways to make the most of the performance review process:
Hear the Good
Performance reviews often start with a description of your strengths and recognition for the ways you had impact, followed by constructive feedback. If you’re like me (or many of the people I know), you’ll give the strengths and recognition part a passing glance, and dwell mostly on the criticism.
We humans are wired to see the bad more clearly than the good. I mean, it’s an evolutionary advantage! When you’re surveying the landscape as an ancient human, do you want to be exceptionally good at noticing everything that’s good and normal — deer grazing, tree branches swaying, the sun shining — or do you want to excel at spotting the hungry lion in the shadows?
Thankfully, most corporate environments don’t have carnivorous beasts to deal with, and so we need to reset our instincts as well. Give as much attention to the positive points as you do to the problem areas. The recognition for things you’re doing well well are guideposts to where you can double down to have even greater impact.
For example, if you were appreciated for helping to ramp up other new hires, consider how you can further formalize your role as a mentor or systematize your support into improved documentation or scheduled meet-ups with new hires. Or if you were praised for the attention to detail you paid when a new feature was being rolled out, consider doing even more there — manage the launches going forward, or create a new process for other teams to launch products successfully.
In general, there are two ways to improve: Correcting for your weaknesses, and further emphasizing your strengths. If you neglect the latter, you’re missing out on what often are bigger (and more enjoyable!) ways to have impact.
Recognize patterns and over-correct for them
Unless this is the first time you’ve ever received a performance review, you’re likely to hear some constructive feedback you’ve heard before. Year after year, I got similar feedback from my manager. And year after year, I gave similar feedback.
It wasn’t that I or my colleagues didn’t hear or agree with the feedback. Rather, we were trying, but changing our habits and defaults is hard! A lot of the feedback seemed like it was getting at the heart of who we were (for example, an introvert getting feedback that she should speak up more.) So even when it felt like I was making a big change in my actions, it often came across to my colleagues as not much of a change.
I’m a big fan of my colleague Mark Rabkin’s article, Make the Other Mistake, where he describes this phenomenon and how you’ll likely need to over-correct for these persistent traits if you hope to make progress to where you ultimately want to be.
Perhaps you’re too quiet in meetings and aren’t expressing your opinions. Set a goal for yourself to say three things in every meeting you’re in. It may feel to you like you’re going overboard and talking too much, chiming in with input when nobody asked you to speak, but it’s more likely this fear is all in your head and you actually do have valuable things to contribute. And, only through the experience of speaking up more will you grow more comfortable with engaging in the discussion.
Maybe your issue is that you aren’t sharing out your learnings enough with the broader team, and are viewed as being too insular or opaque. Set a goal that you will share out broadly once a week, every week. Overcome the fear that you’re oversharing mundane details or that you should only share when you have some big news or brilliant insight. Set a deadline and hit send. You’ll get better at writing these updates, and you can seek feedback to understand how to craft them to be more valuable.
Save your performance summaries from previous cycles, check for patterns in the feedback, and see if there are patterns that warrant extra attention to address.
Tell your manager what you want your next performance review to be
A lot of times, performance reviews can feel like a moment of judgement. It’s like, “Did I pass the test? Did I get an A?” And once you get your feedback, you breathe a sigh of relief, the moment is over, and it feels like you can move on. That’s how I used to feel about performance reviews, but over the years I’ve learned that the most valuable part isn’t the assessment or even the written review itself, but the conversation about the future. These days, a really good performance review to me is one in which I have a deep and honest conversation with my manager, where I feel like he or she understands what I care about at the deepest level — which includes understanding my dreams, my fears and my vulnerabilities — and is committed to helping me to reach my aspirations.
It can be hard to admit what it is you really want, whether it’s influence, a great reputation, opportunities to lead, recognition, etc. It can feel selfish to talk about, and scary too because the person who knows your dreams also knows your fears — that maybe you’ll fail. That maybe you aren’t good enough. If you don’t have a friendly and trusting relationship with your manager to begin with, it’s even harder to feel like you can open up.
But the best thing I’ve done for my career is get to having that level of candor and conversation with my manager, where I can say “this is what I hope to accomplish in the next half. I don’t know if I can do it, and I want your help.” By giving words to my aspirations, my manager can help me work through a concrete plan to get there. And as a manager, I love nothing more than understanding what my reports truly care about, and what keeps them up at night. Beyond helping us connect more deeply as humans, it gives me a clearer picture of how I can best support my team members.
One tactic to try is to visualize your next performance review. Walk through it in your head. How do you hope it will go? What do you hope your peers and manager say? I love this exercise because it helps create a crystal-clear picture of a concrete outcome to shoot for. And once this is clear to you, tell your manager. Engage their help in putting together a plan, with milestones and goals and checkins. Keep talking about it throughout the next half, so that when you get to your next performance review, it’ll go exactly how you expect.
There are two more chapters in this issue for paid subscribers
- The expectations you should hold for your manager
- How to give feedback about your underperforming manager
If you wanna dive deeper into these topics with me, consider being a paid subscriber (or check out my book The Making of a Manager!)
A major thanks to all my paid subscribers! Ya’ll keep this newsletter going.
