G8 Career / Being Managed, And Managing Upward

Find Out What Your Manager Is Actually Measured On

Your manager has a job too, with pressures you probably cannot see from where you sit.

It is easy to experience a manager as a source of instructions and a bottleneck for approvals. It is more useful to experience them as a person with their own set of commitments, their own reporting obligations, and their own manager asking them questions they may struggle to answer. Almost every behaviour that looks arbitrary from below has a shape once you know what they are accountable for. The sudden interest in a report you thought was routine, the insistence on a deadline that seems artificial, the reluctance to approve something obviously sensible: these usually trace back to a pressure you have not been told about.

You can just ask. Not in a pointed way, but as a straightforward professional question early in the relationship: what does a good quarter look like for you, and what are the things that come back at you if they go wrong? Most managers will answer, and some will be relieved that somebody asked. Once you know the answer, your work can be aimed at it. The same piece of work can be delivered in a form that helps them or in a form that creates more work for them, and the difference is often trivial to you and significant to them.

This is not about anticipating a boss's moods or becoming an unpaid assistant. It is about accuracy. A team where people understand what the layer above is carrying makes fewer pointless requests, produces fewer surprises, and argues about real things rather than imagined ones. It also protects you. When you can see the pressures, you can tell the difference between a manager making an unreasonable demand and a manager passing on a constraint they did not choose, and you can respond to each appropriately instead of treating everything as personal.