Progress in Your Career by Managing Up

Management is an important skill, and something I didn’t even realize I could do until I became a senior engineer at Facebook. I could have unlocked a lot more career support and investment if I had worked better with my manager.

Here are three core ideas that have had a significant impact on how I approach my relationship with my manager:

First, understand your manager’s motivations. Many early career engineers have no idea how their managers are evaluated. Ultimately, your manager is evaluated on the overall impact of their team. Your manager will often spend time providing feedback on reports and making sure engineers are unblocked. But they may also need to remove people from the team or cancel projects. You need to determine what your manager cares about and how your work fits into their priorities.

Second, understand your boss’s preferred communication style. Many software projects come with a README file that describes how to use them. Imagine that you had to write a README file for your manager: the information necessary to best interact with him. This document would include their communication preferences and pet peeves, their preferred work environments, and their strengths and weaknesses. Once you have a README file, either something you wrote on behalf of your manager or something you developed collaboratively with input from your manager, apply it to your interactions.

Finally, learn how to work productively with your manager as you plan your tasks. Instead of wondering how you can get involved in something new, provide value. Provide data, information, or suggestions that move the conversation forward, rather than just waiting for an assignment. Additionally, no manager wants to deal with surprises. Make sure you communicate before any surprises and have thought through next steps when things inevitably go wrong.

You can control, at least partially, your manager’s investment in you. It’s not about after-work drinks or political maneuvering: management is an essential skill for career advancement, whether we do it consciously or not.

—Rahul

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