Issue 50: Managing Up Without Stepping on Toes
How Chiefs of Staff can use soft power to lead and influence superiors
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How Can Chiefs of Staff Use Soft Power to Manage Up?
This week’s issue is inspired by a question I received about managing up:
As a reminder, you can always submit questions to be answered in future newsletters.
Managing up can be an intimidating initiative, especially when leading with indirect power. It becomes even more challenging when executives feel threatened by your influence. As a Chief of Staff, leveraging “soft power” – the ability to influence through attraction rather than coercion or authority – can make a significant difference in your ability to lead and influence those above you. Soft power relies on relationship building, trust, and shared values, making it an effective tool for those without formal authority over their higher ups.
In this article, you’ll find practical strategies to help you manage up using this indirect approach.
Key Strategies for Managing Up and Influencing Superiors
Effectively managing up requires a nuanced approach that leverages a mix of soft skills and smart tactics. Master these and you’ll be on your way to building influential relationships – even with reluctant superiors.
🤝 Building Trust through the Trust Formula
Though it may feel obvious already, trust is the foundation of effective relationships, especially when managing up. Trust is also a key pillar when it comes to building the Chief of Staff and Principal relationship, so it should come as no surprise that trust is at the foundation of managing upwards. To gain the respect and trust of your superiors, it’s essential to focus on three key elements: credibility, reliability, and intimacy, while minimizing self-orientation.
Credibility is about establishing yourself as knowledgeable, competent, and trustworthy. This can be achieved by demonstrating your expertise, sharing relevant experience, and consistently delivering results.
One way you can accomplish this is by finding projects and initiatives that will alleviate your leadership team’s pain points. Maybe it’s following up meetings with action points and notes. Maybe it’s finding something that your leaders need to get done but the item keeps getting punted, and so you shoulder that responsibility and present a completed project to gain credibility.
Reliability is about being consistent and dependable. Do what you say you’re going to do, meet deadlines, and avoid making excuses.
If a deadline isn’t going to be met, make sure you’re updating the stakeholders consistently, not only when the deadline is looming. Clear and consistent updates can also provide reliability if the project at hand turns out to be more complex than originally anticipated.
Intimacy doesn’t mean sharing personal details, but rather building a sense of connection and understanding. This can be achieved by actively listening to your superiors, showing empathy and vulnerability, and demonstrating genuine interest in their goals and priorities.
Many of us have heard of psychological safety and Chiefs of Staff are the perfect team members to demonstrate this and exemplify it.
To further strengthen trust, it’s important to minimize self-orientation. This means focusing on the needs and concerns of your superiors, rather than your own. By demonstrating a selfless attitude and putting their interests first, you can reduce the perception of threats and build trust.
🗺️ Identifying Influence through Stakeholder Mapping
Stakeholder mapping is a valuable tool for understanding the relationships, interests, and influence of different individuals or groups within an organization. By mapping out these relationships, you can gain a clearer picture of the power dynamics and identify key players who can influence your superiors.
In many organizations, power is not solely determined by formal titles or hierarchical position. Instead, it can be influenced by factors such as relationships, expertise, access to information, and personal charisma. This is why it’s important to look beyond the hierarchy when mapping stakeholders and understanding influence dynamics.
Follow these steps to create a stakeholder map:
Identify key players: Begin by identifying all the individuals or groups who have an interest in or are affected by your work. This may include your leadership team, individual contributors, colleagues with similar tenure, others who have held your title before, and more.
Assess interest and power: Evaluate each stakeholder’s level of interest in your work and their level of power within the organization. This will help you categorize them into four quadrants:
High Interest, High Power: These stakeholders have a strong interest in your work and significant influence within the organization. They are critical to your success and should be prioritized.
High Interest, Low Power: These stakeholders have a strong interest in your work but limited influence. While they may not be able to directly influence your superiors, they can still provide valuable insights and support.
Low Interest, High Power: These stakeholders have significant influence within the organization but little interest in your work. While they may not be directly involved, it's important to maintain a positive relationship with them to avoid any potential conflicts.
Low Interest, Low Power: These stakeholders have little interest in your work and limited influence. While they may not be primary stakeholders for a project, it's still worth keeping them informed as needed.
Map the relationships: Visualize the relationships between stakeholders, including who influences whom and who has the most power.
Identify peripheral influencers: Look for individuals who may not have formal titles or positions of power but can still influence the decision-making process. These peripheral influencers can often be more powerful than you might think:
Unofficial experts: Individuals with deep knowledge or expertise in a particular area, even if they don't hold a formal position.
Informal leaders: Individuals who have a strong influence over their peers or colleagues, even if they don't have formal authority.
Opinion leaders: Individuals whose opinions are highly respected and valued within the organization.
Gatekeepers: Individuals who control access to information or resources.
Revisit the map regularly: Remember that the stakeholder map is not static – it can change over time as people’s roles, relationships, and influence shifts. Regularly revisiting the map is important.
John Doerr as a Peripheral Influencer
In 2006, John Doerr, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist and author of Measure What Matters, watched Al Gore’s "An Inconvenient Truth" with his 15-year-old daughter, Mary. The next morning, Mary asked her father, "What are you going to do about climate change? Because your generation created this problem, so what are you going to do to fix it?"
This conversation with his daughter, who was not a direct stakeholder, profoundly shifted Doerr's perspective and motivated him to start working behind the scenes to address climate change. This story underscores the importance of looking beyond just the obvious power structures and hierarchies when doing stakeholder mapping. There may be peripheral or unexpected influencers who can have a significant impact, even if they don't hold a formal position of authority.
🧩 Navigating Politics through Strategic Delegation
When managing up and delegating tasks, especially in cross-functional or cross-organizational settings, Chiefs of Staff must consider the impact of in-group dynamics.
Turf wars, territorial teams, and cultural differences in the way projects are delegated can all cause roadblocks when Chiefs of Staff are attempting to delegate to other superiors’ teams.
Some strategies for navigating these organizational politics include:
Sell the problem, not just the objective: Explain the context, importance, and goals behind the work to gain buy-in and alignment.
Build relationships and trust: Cultivate strong relationships through regular one-on-ones and a service-minded approach.
Start small and prove value: Begin with smaller tasks to demonstrate value and earn trust before tackling larger cross-functional projects.
Act as a gatekeeper: Carefully prioritize and manage potential work to avoid overloading individuals and creating resentment.
Be aware of biases: Recognize your own biases and how they may influence your interactions with others.
Overcome tendencies that hinder collaboration: Address any personal habits or behaviors that can create barriers to effective teamwork.
🕰️ Gaining Support through Effective Framing and Timing
By framing your ideas appropriately and choosing the right time to discuss them, you can increase your chances of gaining support and influencing your superiors.
When framing your ideas:
Align with your superiors’ goals, priorities, objectives so they’re more likely to be receptive to your proposals.
Highlight the benefits of your ideas, emphasizing how they will help achieve the organization’s goals.
Use persuasive language to make your ideas more compelling.
Provide evidence to support your ideas with data, facts, or examples to make them more credible.
As any Chief of Staff knows, timing is everything when approaching company leaders with important information:
Choose a time when your superiors are likely to be receptive to your ideas.
Avoid approaching them when they are stressed, overwhelmed, or distracted.
Consider the timing of your ideas in relation to the broader organizational context.
⚖️ Achieving Outcomes through Structured Negotiation
Negotiation in the context of leadership and managing up is the process of influencing others to achieve desired outcomes. It involves effectively communicating, problem-solving, and finding common ground to reach mutually beneficial agreements
By following a structured negotiation strategy like the IPIOS framework, which is an interest-based problem-solving strategy, you can be better prepared for negotiations and increase your chances of achieving your goal. The IPIOS framework includes:
Issues - The specific thing that is being negotiated or addressed together.
Positions - The fixed stances or demands that people take, which is often where negotiations get stuck.
Interests - The underlying reasons, motivations or needs that drive the positions people take. Understanding the interests is key to successful negotiations.
Options - Generating alternative solutions or approaches, rather than just splitting the difference between positions.
Solution - Arriving at a mutually agreeable solution by focusing on interests and exploring options.
One common mistake is to get stuck on positions, rather than digging into the underlying interests. By separating the people from the problem and focusing on interests, it becomes possible to generate better options and reach a solution.
Bringing It All Together: Leading Without Threatening
Managing up, especially when dealing with superiors who feel threatened, is about more than just influencing decisions — it’s about creating a space where collaboration and trust can thrive.
By applying these strategies, you’re not only leading from behind but also helping to diffuse any sense of threat or competition. Remember, your goal is to align objectives, build mutual respect, and foster positive relationships that strengthen the organization as a whole. Stay patient and persistent; the influence you build through soft power will create a ripple effect that benefits everyone involved.
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