Manage Up With Courage Vs. Fear.
Hands up who frets when communicating up the chain? I do! But often times our fear can interfere with the tone (and approach) we hope to convey: Hopeful. Pragmatic. Diplomatic. Firm and clear on what we want and why. In this week’s post, I respond to a popular holler for help to manage up the chain in ways which show respect while taking charge in calm, collected, non-bossy ways.
Address what feels tough anyway
I embrace mental fitness as a communication tool and find the best step one becomes pausing to contemplate all of the negative emotions coming up for you around communicating with this high-stakes audience. From the field I hear:
- Fear of offending those in charge, especially if the audience can influence a future promotion
- Fear of not having all of the answers and looking/sounding stupid
- Fear of letting down your direct manager/team/others depending on you
- Fear of coming across as fearful — and with that, creating a flag you’re weak and not ‘leadership’ material
Whatever the fear, get to the root of what feels hard here. Failure to understand the ‘why’ means building a strategy without substance — or planting a shrub without space for the roots. If you want lasting change, understand your fears.
Ask someone to leverage you
Sometimes our fear of managing up the chain stems from knowing the audience might question our authority. If this fear resonates, ask your manager to position you well in any messaging up the chain. This step helps on several fronts by:
- Positioning you as the subject matter expert and someone helpful and worthy of trust
- Avoiding blind sighting the audience
- Saving time and removing the need for you to position yourself to this audience when you get that face time
Think: What’s In It For the Audience?
Once you’ve established that face time and ensured your audience knows why you’re qualified to deliver any news or make any ask, contemplate what’s in it for the audience. This step requires researching a little; ask around to understand the wants and needs of this leader, how they prefer to be communicated with, their current challenges — and through that, how you can help. Notice any ask of your audience must stay audience centered and combine logical and emotional appeal so it feels clear what’s in it for them. I write on persuading an audience in more depth here.
From the field, I hear the following emotions becoming helpful ones to appeal to when persuading and managing up the chain:
- Fear that if they don’t comply, something will look bad or become bad
- Hope that if they do comply, they’ll save time and have fewer worries or struggles
- Joy and pride that saying ‘yes’ will lead to job creation, a successful program, an extremely happy customer, or an elated board, etc.
Effective logical appeal might include:
- Reports or studies, especially if you can show vs. tell what happened to competitors facing similar struggles to what your group encounters
- Data showing vs. telling what’s at stake, cherry picking the most relevant or compelling data to do the trick. (The selectivity piece feels vital as your audience will likely feel time pressed. Brevity rules.)
Manage your Judge’s lies about you, the audience, and the whole situation
In his NY Times bestseller Positive Intelligence, Shirzad Chamine cautions us against our Judge wrongly assuming things about us, others, and our situations. I find the Judge can become sneaky when communicating with higher ups. We often wrongly assume this audience will become feisty, recalcitrant, or dismissive and bristly. Often, the opposite becomes true. Leaders are people, just like us, and with their own fears and frustrations, too.
One technique to drive home this point: The empathy power. Try visualizing yourself as a child and imagining all the sweet characteristics within your boyhood or girlhood self — and note these qualities remain with you today. (Consulting a childhood picture helps activate this empathy power as does intentionally gaze at the irises of your eyes in a mirror.) Note how far you’ve come. Revel in this moment.
Transferring this same empathy to your audience can ground you. Imagine this leader as a child. Consider their worries and joy. This process helps generate positive vs. negative emotions and replaces fear of failure, falling back, disappointing others, no longer mattering, wasting the person’s time, etc. with love for discovery, solving problems, learning and development — and most of all, gratitude just for being. Techniques like these minimize anxiety.
Stay clear, succinct, and spacious
With all this back-end strategy to calm and ground yourself, strategy on the actual message comes next. You’ll want to:
- Build rapport in the beginning. A simple asking how things are going becomes a good start; then, what you hope to achieve from the meeting and what they hope for, too.
- Stay brief. Bottom line what you want, how, and why becomes crucial given the time-strapped audience we’re communicating with.
- Create room for discovery — not only your solutions but what go arounds they see. E.G. I’ve a plan in mind; but before sharing, what comes to you? With that, listen well and mirror back what you hear and sense. This coach approach shows respect and courage while acknowledging you have ideas; but you honor the audience as the subject matter expert and together, you can collaborate towards what’s best.
Now you’ve a handful of tools in your back pocket for the next time you must manage up. Try these techniques out and let me know what lands and what doesn’t. Feel brave and equal. Go forth as a brave, informed, and strategic communicator.
Debbi coaches and trains leaders all over the globe to become more confident and authentic communicators, and with that, more concise, too. From Wisconsin, she owns and runs Hanging Rock Coaching and is a communications specialist fellow coach with BetterUp.