Managing Up:
How to Get the Best from Your Relationship with Your Boss

What Participants Will Learn…

• How to build your relationship with your manager
• Understanding your manager’s style, pressures, goals, priorities and preferred way of interacting
• Personal success requires an “accountability” (vs. blaming) mindset
• How to exhibit leadership from your level
• Determining what you really want from your work (i.e. your current motivators)
• How to express your ideas and needs clearly and assertively
• Soliciting feedback to increase your effectiveness, credibility and career potential
• How to manage your own job performance and work objectives
• How to be a partner in the Performance Management Process

Overview…

Note: In our leadership training for managers we show how to shift accountability to your employee for meeting job performance standards and the completing tasks satisfactorily and on-time. Participants practice these skills in simulated performance-related conversations with an employee.

Managers in these courses have often said to us, “You are teaching us how to hold our employees accountable for their performance. If only our employees would step forward and accept that personal accountability. Do you have a workshop for them?”

Managing Up is exactly the course managers have been asking for! It mirrors, for your staff, the flip side of what we teach your managers. Here we train employees how to take on accountability for their own job performance and career development.

This workshop challenges your individual contributors: If they want to get ahead or even just have a good experience in their current job–they must start treating their boss and others in management as their “customers.”

We show your employees how this calls for a shift in their mindset. We discuss the courage it takes to make and keep commitments and to speak their mind. Participants are given ample opportunity for reflection to identify:

• What their responsibility is for their job satisfaction and performance
• Their manager’s situation–what they imagine he or she is facing
• What they want from their job and to what extent they are still getting it
• What they think their current “brand image” is in the organization
• One current work goal and how they can progress to achieving it

Points Regarding This Program…

• Target audience is primarily non-supervisory staff and individual contributors. It is also very suitable, by the way, for supervisors and managers in their other role…as employees.
• A great training strategy is to first put your managers through our leadership development program and then cycle your entire staff through Managing Up.
• This course has plenty of participant involvement, including small group discussions, personal reflection and application activities.
• We have integrated two excellent videos into the program: Courageous Followers, Courageous Leaders and Accountability that Works.