Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning, This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode is going to be a longer one part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us. So today I am delighted to welcome Melody Wilding to the show. Melody is the author of the brand new book Managing Up, how to get what you need from the people in charge.
So Melody, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
I'm excited to have you. So why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.
Yeah, my background is as a therapist and that's how I started my career. I teach human behavior at their graduate level and am a executive coach, and all of my work is really about helping people find what I call your professional power position, where you are able to manage your own psychology at work, your own insecurities, doubts, hang ups, but you're also tackling the other side of the equation, which is influencing other people's psychology. And that's where managing Up comes in.
Yeah, well, I have to say I get a lot of career books, leadership books, etc. Crossing my desk, there are not that many that go in that direction, right, that are about managing up. And so I wonder how you came to this topic and why it was interesting to you.
Yeah. Well, A big thing is because my first book, Trust Yourself, came out in twenty twenty one, and that was really the managing yourself side of the equation, and what I kept hearing from people over and over, regardless of what level they were at, whether they were more junior, but most of my clients are mid to senior level, and there was this theme of where all of my confidence breaks down is when I have to deal with people that feel more intimidating to me, or I'm in
those rooms or those conversations that feel higher stakes. And there was this conce distant theme about managing up, dealing with people in authority, navigating politics and power dynamics. And so I think for so many of us, especially those who are recovering people pleasers, this is not a skill you're really taught yet. So much of it comes down to being able to leverage your empathy, your emotional intelligence, just channel it in a different way.
Yeah. And one of the things you say in the book is, I mean, this is not about, you know, flattering your boss, like managing up is not purely about making sure your boss thinks he or she is the most awesome person in the world, and by reflection, you are too. I guess maybe you can talk a little bit more about what it truly means and why this might be a benefit to someone beyond just you know, getting in good with the people in charge.
Yeah. I appreciate you saying that, because that is most of the time we hear managing up and we think sucking up. Right, we equate those two things together. And it makes sense because traditionally, for decades, that's how it was portrayed. If you think about like Wolf of Wall Street or any of those old movies, the person who's managing up is the person who's running behind the boss
with the coffee order and just the yes person. And the workplace has changed, but also what people want out of work has changed, and so rather than having that subordinate order taker mentality where it's just managing up is me pleasing my boss, what I am advocating for and when I see people do this successfully, they realize that
managing up is something you actually do for yourself. It's something you do to create the conditions for your success, whether that is pushing back, giving feedback up the chain of command, being able to set limits and expectations around the work, getting clarity around what success does look like in your role so you can track against that, advocating for your own advancement. Those are all things that put you in the best position to get what you need from the people who.
Are in charge. Absolutely, So you have ten conversations in this book that you want people to have with with their managers as part of managing this relationship. We're not gonna be able to talk through all ten, unfortunately, but I do want to talk about a few of them. Why don't we start with the alignment conversation? I guess we truly want to know what the person sees as good, right.
That's right, we have We have to start there because if we don't know what we're trying to work towards, we're we're going to be spinning our wheels, right, And that's that's where when we fail to have the alignment conversation, we feel frustrated. We feel like we're sidelined because unbeknownst to us, we may not be working on what our boss or the organization actually sees as important or promotable work. And so that's why it is the first conversation in
the book. It is the most foundational. It also tends to be an easy entry point because so much of it is about observation, noticing what is important to your manager, but also asking good questions. So this is not having to come right out and advocate for yourself. It's mostly being a good listener.
And we're not starting with promote me. We're going first in with being like, well, well, you can tell me what are some good questions I should be asking a manager in order to make sure that our visions of success are aligned.
Correct. Yeah, ask a better question, you get a better answer. And so instead of just saying, well, what are your priorities, you might get a surface level answer from that. A few of my favorites from that chapter. One of them is what are the metrics your boss is discussing with you? Because that gives you almost a very instant shortcut into what your manager is being evaluated against and guess what they're going to care a lot and give a lot
of attention to that. So that's one of them. Another one is what does good performance look like in this role to you? And then pause, let your manager answer and say, great, what does great performance look like now?
And you may put a.
Timeframe around that over the next three or six months or by the end of the year. But that one's really useful because that comparison between good and great it helps get under the hood of maybe some of the unspoken or abstract, the intangible qualities that your manager or the organization sees make someone a high performer that may not come out in a roadmapping or KPI exercise.
Yeah, and you mentioned that earlier in your career at one point, like sometimes all these alignment conversations or sense it will surface some things like you've learned that your role is expendable, And I guess that's good to know. I mean, you went through that in your career at one point.
Right, I did I talk about that in that first chapter. It is really something I kept hidden for many years because I was embarrassed by it. And yes, I had failed to have the alignment conversation deep enough. I had surface level alignment with my manager, what are we accomplishing day to day, week to week? But I really fail to push further and say why is what I'm working on important to the business and how is that being reported? And what budget is going into this? I did not
dig deeper. I didn't have the courage to do it. Frankly, I think maybe I was afraid of the answer now as I reflect on it further, But yes, you know when time came for cuts that my role was eliminated because it wasn't core, was seen as a money pit. And this is where, yes, we're not going to get to all ten conversations today, but were some of the
other ones could save you. For example, if I had been on top of having more of the visibility or the networking conversation, then I might have had other advocates behind my boss who knew about my skills beyond just what I was doing on this one project, who may have been willing to pull me over to their teams. But I did it. So it's an extreme example of what can happen.
Absolutely Well, we're going to take a quick ad break and then I'll be back with more from Melody Wilding. Well with Melody Wilding, who is talking about her brand new book, Managing Up. We're learning how to deal with the people in charge, not just to flatter them, but in order to make sure that we get what we want out of our careers. So we were talking about aligning and making sure that what success looks for our managers is informing what we are we are doing with
our time at work. Another one of these important conversations, though, is the style one. And I wonder how much of clashes or people perceive as trouble and like I have a terrible boss or something like that, is a different style and how we can sort of suss out what this person.
Is A lot to answer your question, A lot of what I see conflict tension in the workplace does come down to a difference in styles, because what we often perceive as someone being difficult, you know, they're hard to work with, is actually a we're talking past each other in terms of our preferences, our approaches are values around the work And so how can we susce this out?
You said, we need to really focus on decoding the people around us, because when we can understand that, when we can put their behavior in context and see this is a product of how this person's lens and this is not them trying to talk over me, railroad me. We stop taking the work so personally and we can make thoughtful adjustments to how we do that. So in the book I talk about how, if you look at a lot of the psychological research, communication styles really break
down into two dimensions. We have dominance, how assertive and how much control does someone like? And we have associability how much connection and rapport building interaction with other people does the person want so higher low. You plot that and we get again, broadly speaking, four different communication styles. There are lots of different models for this. In the book, I call them the four c's. And let's just take a classic example. You may be working for someone who
in the book I would call a commander. This is someone who is highly dominant and lower on sociability. These people are very results oriented, they get to the point fast, they move quickly. They really don't care as much about people's feelings and consensus, and so sometimes they can seem a bit dismissive and dominant. Frankly, now, you may be someone who is what I would call a caretaker, the exact opposite someone who is low on dominance and high
on sociability. You value stability, harmony, You do value relationships. You want everyone to be happy and on board. You care about morale. And a classic clash between these two people is that the caretaker is someone who likes to think before they act, who may need questions in advance, who want to deliberate before they make a decision, whereas the commander is someone who just wants you to get
right to the point. And so if you, as a caretaker employee, are approaching your manager and you're leading with all of the context and background and the theory and how we got here, your manager is likely going to cut you off and say that's great, I don't really care. Can you tell me the main point of what you need from me right now? And that's when you feel dismissed, right you feel like I put so much time into
this and you're just cutting me off here. And so not only again, we can put that into context and not take it personally that my boss hates me and I should just leave, but we can also just make little tweaks. I call it flexing in the book flexing your style. You don't have to change who you are and what you value. You just change how you package and present it. So instead of leading with all the context, you give your executives a summary or a few bullet points.
And at the end of the day, that benefits you because you eliminate a lot of stress for yourself. Your message actually lands and again you're not you're not not being true to yourself. You are still getting what's important to you across but in a way they're actually going to hear.
And I suppose that goes in the other direction too. I mean you can envision the opposite where you have more of a caretaker boss and you are very kind of to the point kind of person. You're walking in and saying I want this, and the person's like, WHOA, can't do that right now? And because they want the whole context, they want you to lead up to it, like why or why am I asking for this? Like what's the background? Who else has done this? They want all that sort of information first.
That's exactly right. Yeah, and you can you can make that thoughtful adjustment pretty easily, right, just just come with a little bit of the background and that's it.
Yeah, really quick story gets them on the all at ease. It'll all be good. And part of this though, of course, is you have to know yourself then, because I'm sure there's plenty of people like, well, I don't know which C I am? So how are we? How do we? How do we go about figuring that out?
Yes? Well, in the book there's there's a much deeper kind of diagnostic that it that it walks through all of the different values, the strengths, the weaknesses of all of the different types. But in that chapter there's one exercise that actually is my favorite in the entire book. I call it the me Manual, which is you creating a guide to yourself as a professional. This is something you do first and foremost for yourself because most of us never slow down to think about our own preferences.
It's just the water we swim in, so we've never taken the time to articulate actually, how do I make decisions? How do I like to receive feedback? What are some of the maybe unspoken expectations I have about how quickly work should be done or when when my hours on or off are And so your MEW manual actually forces you to get that down on paper. It's almost like your operation manual to you it can absolutely be something
you share with your manager. I have people who are in workplace cultures where they bring this to their boss and they say, listen, I want to give you the chee chet for getting the best performance out of me, and we can talk through some highlights here. And I have had people who say their boss is like, this is pretty cool.
Can can I do this too?
Because I want to give this to my leader. So you never know the reaction you might get, but at the very least, it gives you a way to be able to assert your preferences and your style when you need to. So an example is, let's say that a
new project team is coming together. And I'm using this example intentionally because managing up it, especially in today's workplace, it doesn't always look like or rather I should say, it has to look like extending beyond just our direct supervisor, because we're dealing with other people in power beyond our boss. And so let's say you have a new project team coming together and there's other folks from cross functional divisions
who have more authority than you. What I always suggest is that people at the beginning of those types of relationships, you are the one to say we are not always going to see eye to eye. And when we have those situations where we have to work through some sort of conflict or tension or prioritization, how do you want to approach that. What are the sorts of things you weigh or that are important to you that I could bring to that conversation, And you let that person respond,
and you say, that's so helpful for me. Here's what I would really value, Here's how I tend to think through these things. So it becomes more of a two way street rather than you just becoming a chameleon who's adapting to everybody else.
Absolutely. One of the other conversations is about boundaries, and you know, this is a podcast about time management, and so one of the things that obviously you know, keeps people from managing their time in the way that they want is that their manager is making demands that are perhaps not helping in that regard. So let's say that your boss is making demands that is making your life bad. How can you approach them to get to a better place.
Yes, well, let's start with the fact that why is this so hard for us? And because most of us we're trying to straddle this tightrope of wanting to be a team player, right, we need to create that perception that we're collaborative. We step up when it matters, but at the same time, we don't want to be a pushover. And I always say, you teach people how to treat you, and so those having those boundaries, we want to make sure we're teaching people to respect our time and our bandwidth.
And so start by asking questions, because so often, when yet another thing is dumped on our plate, yet another task is given to us, we go to one extreme or the other. We go to the extreme of the people pleaser passive, Sure, I'll get it done, I'll figure out how to fit it in. Or we are already at our limit and we snap back, and even if it's our manager, we might say, I can't believe you're
giving this us. We're already underwater. So rather than those two extremes, ask questions first by yourself a little bit of time to calm down and get more details about what's involved, because you may not always know on the face of it, is this something I want to say yes to or no? You can ask things like what's driving the urgency here, what's the real deadline, Who else is this visible to or who else is going to be involved? Why did myself or my team come to
mind for this at first? And that can give you a lot of good details to decide maybe this is a good exposure opportunity or a skill building opportunity for me or somebody else on my team. It can also give you information about maybe I can redirect this to somebody else. Maybe you find actually this is a process that sits with operations or HR not with us, and it gives you a leg to stand on to redirect it. That's one thing is to ask questions first so you
know what's involved in that chapter. I give a number of other different frameworks you can use for setting boundaries. My favorite of those is the trade off approach, which is essentially saying, I hear that you want both X and Y done. In order to do that, then we need to delegate or deprioritize something else. Are you okay
with that? When you do that, you're setting up a Actually what's in what in research is called force choice, right, you are setting up the illusion of control that someone can only choose from A or B, and you're just highlighting the reality that both of these things cannot be done, but you're also approaching it from problem solving perspective. You're not just shutting the request down and saying we can't
do that. You're approaching it to say, Okay, I understand, I want to make both of these things happen, but something has to give and subtly, especially if this is someone who is maybe a level or two above you, it's important to also signal that you do have some recognition of the hierarchy. You are putting it back in the other person's core to say, you make the call. I can make a recommendation to say, based on from where I said, I think we should prioritize A and
then pick up B in a couple of weeks. But at the end of the day, it's your call. You tell us what to do, and then we'll execute that.
Yeah, I love it. It's like what we do with toddlers. You could wear the red pants or the blue pants. It's like, I don't want to wear any pants. Well, that's not really a choice.
Do you know what is so funny? As I have been talking about the book, that example has been brought up over I would say a dozen times now it's so interesting what we do with.
Course choice with everyone. All Right, well, we're going to take one more quick ad break and then we'll be back with more for Melody Wilding. Well, I am back with Melody Wilding, who is the author of the new book Managing Up about getting what we want from the people in charge. Let's talk about if it doesn't happen the first time though, maybe you ask for something, you try to have a conversation about boundaries or even about you know, future promotions or anything like that, and you
get a lot of resistance. Is this just the way it is? Or the things we can do to kind of work through the resistance over time?
I would say there's always things you can do. Everyone has their threshold of how much they are willing to do. But in the book, I took a lot of care to make sure that there was a lot of tips and strategies for what do I do when this happens or I get this objection or this type of resistance. So a moment ago we were talking about boundaries and a common form of resistance you may get there is when someone tries to guilt trip you to say, oh, but I thought you were a team player, I really
expected more from you. When that happens, you can actually turn that assumption around and say, I'm bringing this up because I am a team player, because I do care about us being successful, and because of that, I to make sure our deadline is realistic here. And so that's a really good strategy there.
When that happens, excellent, excellent.
Well.
One of the things I always ask people with this show is about your own personal productivity. Do you have any routines in your daily life that help you be more effective?
Yes, I am disciplined. Is my top strength finder strength if you're familiar with that. And the way that ends up manifesting for me is I try to eliminate so much decision fatigue from my life, and so I am one of those boring people who eats the same thing every day because I want to remove the decision fatigue of worrying about what I have to eat, and I have processes for things I need to do in my business.
I am always looking for ways how do I remove little choices and decisions so that I have brain power for all of the other things. I start all of my days the same way with a workout, and that really helps just wake my brain up in the morning. But yes, routine is huge for me because I forget who said it, but that idea of discipline equals freedom for me, That's absolutely true.
I'm curious when you say there are certain things you do with your business to like, do you devote certain times each week to certain aspects of your business? Is it like time block that way? What's the what does that look like?
Great question? So I do time block. But what I have found works for me is I do almost like themed days when I can. So I have sort of on days and then content creation days. My on days are podcasting, speaking, meetings clients, and then I have days where I don't have to be on camera, I don't really have to be speaking out loud, and I'm heads down and creating emails or writing podcasts and things like that.
So for me, I kind of kind of think about what mode do I need to be in, and I try to you know, thankfully, I do have more control over my schedule than the average person. I try to batch those things together. It's not always possible, but it definitely helps me eliminate some of that context switching.
Excellent, excellent. And then I also ask guests, what is something you've done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
Oh, what is something I've done to take a day from great to awesome? I have really been making an effort to get outside more because someone who works from home, it's very easy to just sit at your desk for eight hours a day, and finally the weather is starting to get better, and it just it just shifts your whole perspective. There's something just about getting outside that and also just changing modes. Like I was saying, context switching a moment ago, sometimes you need those breaks in the
day as almost a reset moment. I'm always telling my clients because they are people who will beat themselves up and say, oh, well I wasted today, the day is gone. Don't get into that all or nothing thinking. Every moment. You know, every hour is another chance to reset, and just taking that break to go outside can be that opportunity to say, all right, now, this is the second half of the day, how do I want to make
this successful? Even if the first half didn't quite turn out just as I wanted it to.
Absolutely, you can always seize any sort of fresh start. What are you looking forward to these days?
Oh, I am looking forward to we are actually now that the book is out, we're in the process of completely revamping a lot of my programs and we just went through a huge rebrand, so it's been very fun and exciting to shift everything to be around this idea I was talking about before, of the professional power position, kind of the combination of mastering yourself and also influencing others. So that's been a lot of fun, and it's also been intellectually challenging, let's put it that way.
That's so exciting. It's always good to shake things up in a good way. Melodie, where can people find you?
You can head to Melody Wilding dot com. All the information about my books speaking, everything's there.
Awesome, Melie, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for everyone for listening. If you have feedback about this or any other episode, you can always reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast
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