Habit 3: Manage up, down, and around
#managing_others We need to talk
Habit 3: Manage up, down, and around
This article is Part 4 of 4 in the 3 habits of highly effective organizations series
The University of Alabama’s college football program is one of the greatest dynasties in sports, dating all the way back to 2008. Unlike professional sports where star players may play for a franchise for a decade or more, college football is a game where the best players rarely stay for the four years necessary to earn a college degree, and instead turn pro early. Yet, Alabama’s record under their head coach Nick Saban has won an astonishing 189 games as of this writing and lost only 27, which amounts to an 87% win rate during this time. The culmination of this effort has resulted in Alabama appearing in 22 bowl games with 16 victories to show for it, including 9 SEC west titles, eight SEC championships, and six national championships. As a sports leader, Nick Saban has no equal. His secret is derived from cognitive behavioral thinking often referred to as the process. In Saban’s case, he ingrains process thinking into his players - a meticulous attention to detail on how to play the game in the present regardless of how trivial any one move may seem. The belief is that all actions taken on the field affect the desired outcome. As effective organizations in sports go, Alabama’s modern day football program is unparalleled.
Ten years ago I was watching the BCS title game between University of Alabama and Notre Dame. The game was effectively over before half time with the outcome a foregone conclusion by the 4th quarter. Yet something strange happened at around 7 minutes.
The video above shows two Alabama teammates, the quarterback (AJ McCarron) and the center (Barrett Jones), get into a heated disagreement that became physical. They would no longer be teammates after this year, with both players destined for the NFL. There was no doubt they would finish their college careers as champions, so what happened? Years later, AJ McCarron explains:
We had known for weeks that Notre Dame likes to stem or move their defensive line at the last second to make you have to call a timeout or be confused. So we decided in practice that once I called out the mike (middle linebacker) we were not going to change it no matter if they shifted or not. In the first quarter, I called out the mike and Barrett changed it at the last second. I told him not to do that. The same thing happened in the third quarter and I told him again. Then, in the fourth quarter and we were winning big he did it again and I had to call a timeout with one second left. But the ref still called me for a delay of game penalty which made me even more mad. I said some things that I wouldn’t say here today. That’s when Barrett pushed me and screamed “stop cursing me!”
Nick Saban’s process was so ingrained in the players, that they never stopped communicating with each other. They were completely focused on the outcome of the game and the details needed to win even if victory is all but guaranteed. To create a dynasty, Nick Saban had made it a habit for their players to manage up, down, and around, effectively transforming each player into a leader. At each step the players relentlessly held each other accountable to the process, and in this case the center had no qualms about giving his quarterback some feedback, too.
The great sage Taylor Swift once said, “Just because you made a good plan, doesn’t mean that’s what’s gonna happen.” You can be clear on your goals, and you can have a solid plan, but as in sports, life, and business the unexpected can happen. However, when organizations manage expectations freely, in a high trust environment, winning is often a foregone conclusion. A robust control plane across the organization allows you to understand if you’re going the right way or the wrong way, so that like a GPS, you can re-route to where you want to go.
Manage up, down, and around in software
Before we discuss how highly effective teams implement “Manage up, down, and around,” we need to go over some prerequisites and assumptions. From there, we review how the Manage up, down, and around motions work.
Prerequisites
For this discussion, we assume that the organization operates on a philosophy that welcomes hard truths over optimistic forecasts. The organization aspires to reward teams for outcomes: actually making a business impact over minor activity such as implementing shipping software for free t-shirts. Psychological safety is a covenant that the organization wishes to ratify between colleagues such that disagreements can occur in a healthy way with no hard feelings lingering afterwards. Your organization might not be there today, but if this isn’t an aspiration of yours, then you can expect status reports riddled with “watermelon metrics” where the world reported to you from your teams happens to be green, but the experiences from your customers and your finances are actually red. You’ll happily waste away your days driving the business in the wrong direction until it is too late.
Admittedly this is a difficult ask to make of founders and leaders who’ve had a long track record of being correct, or of rank and file employees who have seen too many people promoted to their next job because they said something a senior leader did not want to hear. However, if the will is there, I believe all organizations can change for the better.
We also assume that for the purposes of this discussion you are a middle-manager of an organization. Your organization plays a key role in projects across the company and you also play a key role as the leader who has enough command power to bring on change, even if it is limited to within your immediate sphere of control. If you’re ready to bring the change, then read on.
Step 1: Define the right language for your audience
The audience you manage up to is different from the audience you manage around you, which is still different from the members of your team. Effective organizations understand this at every level.
As a middle-manager, you have to speak in a language that your audience cares about in terms that matter to them. If you’re watching a game of sport, you care about the score. However, if you’re playing the game, you care about a host of statistics that tell you how you can play the game more effectively. In the same way, different levels of the organization require different information from you in order to function.
Up
Managing up refers to managing anyone above your pay grade as well as anyone not in your peer group or your organization. When you manage up, the language and metrics you use need to be broadly understood by everyone in the company. Communications at this level often takes the form of operations reviews, status reports sent to the company, or even all-hands meetings. When communicating to this general audience, it is easy to fall back on the language you understand within your organization; if you’re the CTO it may be service latency, or if you’re the CPO it might be customer acquisition related metrics. But here’s the rub, the rest of the organization likely won’t understand the stakes in the way an organization head would understand the impact of service latency or customer acquisition on revenue. As a result, you need to elevate the discourse. You might be wondering, how do I know if I am speaking at the right level? Luckily, there’s a simple litmus test.
Customers hire your company to solve their problem in one of the following three dimensions:
How does your company help them make money,
How does your company help them save money, or
How does your company help them save time?
In the same vein, an organization exists to serve the needs of the company to solve a problem. Every line item your organization reports up to needs to make it plain to any person in the company how your organization is helping the company make money, save money, or save time.
Around
Managing around refers to managing everyone that makes requests of you or your organization or is directly impacted by your organization’s work. This can include a broad group of people such as your boss, potentially your boss’ peers, but also anyone in any function who is impacted by your organization’s work and needs support. When you manage around, you’re managing a whirlwind of activities that relate to your organization and how your organization interfaces with the rest of the company.
While there are many approaches on how leaders manage around, I like Patty Azzarello’s approach best. Patty advocates that leaders maintain three lists at all times:
List of everything anyone has asked of the leader or their organization in a forced rank priority,
List of everything their team is working on, and
List of what their supervisor or the company believes is the priority for their organization.
With these three lists in hand, you now have a clear lexicon to engage the whirlwind around you. When someone wants to understand why your organization hasn’t delivered on something requested, the list will hopefully make it obvious that there are other things folks have asked for, and those things are more important. Similarly, the list also serves as a checksum to ensure that you’re doing the best job you can as a leader and if not, you’re providing folks an opportunity to suggest a course correction.
By speaking in a language that discusses tactics and projects, you create the foundation to synchronize work by laying bare what the assumptions are.
Down
Effective organizations do not waste time or resources. For these reasons, effective organizations manage their teams relative to the broader stakes that are aligned with how they manage up. In practice, this means that every activity in your organization must map to the master narrative of how the organization is helping the company make money, save money, or save time. This context is critical because it provides your teams the information to make the best decisions day to day.
One common scenario where I’ve seen teams misstep - but effective organizations do not - is what I describe as the “rewrite trap.” After some years of success, most companies will conclude that their existing code base is no longer well-suited for the future direction of the company. It could be the case that the code is solving a problem today it was not originally designed for. It may be cumbersome to alter or it may be fragile. Whatever the reason, the engineering organization may understand the pain of working with the code, but the rest of the organization may not understand why it needs to be rewritten.
Effective organizations present technical options whose merits are objective and aligned with the master narrative of the company - as milestones are met, the company experiences benefits immediately.
Ineffective organizations justify changes based on implementation purity and computer science theory, devoid of company impact, and get trapped into years-long or even decades-long exercises where resources are deployed but no value is being generated.
Ineffective organizations align around the quality of life or intellectual curiosity of their engineering teams.
Effective organizations harmonize every technical decision by justifying why a specific proposal will impact the business and by how much.
Step 2: Report on a regular cadence
Once you’ve established the language you will use for how you manage up, around, and down, the next step is to communicate status regularly in that language.
While reporting regularly may feel onerous, when done well, regular communication channels save time by reducing miscommunication while creating the control plane for alignment.
A basic report should convey a general sense of if the organization is operating to a plan. Metrics should be used whenever possible, but in circumstances where a project is not delivering business or customer value yet, dates for key milestones should be used instead.
Step 3: Re-route if you are off course
Regardless of if dates or metrics are used in reporting, as an organization leader you will need to define upfront when a metric or date has slipped to the point where it is out of bounds.
Invariably, there will be times when it has been decided that things are off course. The source of the alarm could come from up, around, or down. If you’ve been successful in communicating to your stakeholders in a language they understand on a regular basis, then you’ll have some confidence someone in the company will raise a relevant concern when the time comes.
The implications of any given exception could have local or broad effects, situation depending. For this reason, effective organizations establish protocols for re-routing when the business is off course ahead of time. Ineffective organizations only realize when things are off course when it’s too late, then make rash decisions in a panic.
A typical protocol includes four components:
Description: What is the nature of the exception?
Impact: Which metric or date was impacted unexpectedly?
Consequences: What are the cascading side-effects that also need to be addressed?
Scope: Is the scope of the exception company-wide, department-wide, or team-wide?
Due to cascading effects of interdependent projects and teams, it’s possible that when an exception occurs many people and teams may be impacted. For this reason, I recommend that either a person or someone in the office of program management take the lead and re-route projects when scope is at the company or department levels.
The language of leadership (and management)
James Humes, a speech writer of five presidents, once said, “The art of communication is the language of leadership.” I argue that communication is both the language of leadership and management. Poor communication creates an environment where individuals do not know who to follow and do not know what to do. In these circumstances, organizations cannot be effective.
A company that has a hit product but has broken lines of communication internally may have their moment, but it will be brief. On the other hand, I’ve seen first hand where companies have risen from the depths of chaos and despair. The difference is communication. When a company has refined its language of leadership and management, what the company is actually doing is bridging the gap between the leaders who have authority and the individuals doing the work and have the control. Communication bridges the gap between authority and control so that leaders understand what’s actually happening in their business, and individuals are empowered to make the right decisions on a daily basis, knowing that their work matters.
Hence the vitality of managing up, down, and around, creating cohesion where team members at all levels work and communicate together for impactful success of the company.