book review
By Alyson Nyiri, CHRL
MANAGING UP: HOW TO MOVE UP, WIN AT WORK, AND SUCCEED WITH ANY TYPE OF BOSS
BY MARY ABBAJAY
WILEY, 2018
Helping your organization and the individuals in it become
positive and productive is probably high on your radar.
And you’re no doubt keeping an eye out for good material
you can share with your teams. Managing Up is a quick,
yet comprehensive reference guide to helping people better under-stand
their workplace and their colleagues, and develop better
relationships with their bosses.
Abbajay says HR professionals are using Managing Up in mul-tiple
ways: as a tool to help teams and managers develop robust
working relationships; as a framework to identify types of bosses
for whom they are recruiting talent so that they can select good-fit
candidates; and as an onboarding tool for new employees to help
them succeed.
Managing Up is about learning how to manage those who man-age
us. While you’ve read and trained leaders on how to lead and
manage those below them, how often do you train workers on
how to manage those above them? Abbajay says this is critical for
career success and is a form a leadership. Followership – the abil-ity
to take direction well, support a program, be part of a team
and to deliver what is expected of you – often gets a bad rap. This
is unfortunate because we must learn to use our position as a fol-lower
to increase our ability to thrive and/or survive with the boss
that we actually have.
Abbajay realizes that encouraging people to study their bosses
and learn how to give them what they want invites objections like
“it’s sucking up,” “it’s my boss that needs to change,” and “it rein-forces
her/his bad behaviours.” The reality is that the workplace is
not a meritocracy. And as long as organizations continue to pro-mote
people based on technical skills and not people-management
skills, then it’s a good bet we will encounter ineffective man-agement
styles. Individuals can’t change the culture of their
organizations, writes Abbajay, so all we can change is how we nav-igate
it and respond to it.
Managing Up details more than 20 “types” of bosses, starting
with whether your boss is an introvert or an extrovert. With each
type, Abbajay offers a real-life story followed by a description, pros
and cons and proven strategies to “manage up” this type of boss.
The types range from the benign to the “truly terrible.”
Abbajay has an interesting way of isolating the difference
between the annoying, difficult boss and truly terrible: it’s a matter
of frequency and potency. Identifying how often your boss exhib-its
the behaviour and how forceful that behaviour is provides clues
to how toxic or dangerous they are and whether you should stay
in this company. HR, she cautions, can be helpful, but only if the
department has the right kind of power. And that’s really the bot-tom
line. As HR professionals, we can recruit, train and develop
our employees to help them fit, but how do we help when those
that wish to follow must try to do so behind leaders who are
“truly terrible?” n
44 ❚ JUNE 2018 ❚ HR PROFESSIONAL