Anyone in charge of a team has a clear remit: to manage his employees so that they do the best possible job for the company and make him look good in the process. What these employees may not realise, however, is that it’s also up to them to manage their boss.

“Most business schools don’t teach anything about how to manage your boss, although it is a critical relationship,” said Cary Cooper, professor of org-anisational psychology and health at Lancaster University Management School. “Maybe we don’t like talking about the fact that we do it, because people see ‘managing up’ as manipulating managers . . . but we should look at it instead as managing the relationship.” Get it right and both your career and the company’s prospects should benefit.

Chris Barber, 27, knows what it’s like to manage both down and up. Today he leads a team of 12 as the director of the Venture photography studio in Leamington Spa, Warwick-shire, but earlier in his career he worked in less senior positions in retailing and at Venture’s studio in Leicester. “Managing your manager is all about going that extra step,” he said. “It’s being first in, last out and making their life easier. It doesn’t mean manipulating people . . . it’s about doing your job well and helping your manager to get the best results.”

While manager management does have an element of self-interest – getting ahead at work is definitely part of it – the main goal should always be the best result for the company. After all, it will help your own prospects if you can get credit for contributing to that success. Brown-nosing or being manipulative in a blatant attempt to achieve personal preferment is not a good idea.

“In my experience [people who do this] are not the people who succeed,” said Barber. “And when people try to succeed by being underhand – saying ‘person X has done this and it’s bad’ – bosses are usually intelligent enough to see through it.”

Getting it right simply means thinking about what sort of boss you have and then adapting your approach accordingly. “The most important thing that I have found [when managing up] is to adapt my style to theirs,” said Barber. This also means looking at how you can make your manager’s life easier – for example, Barber once worked for someone who was great at ideas and starting projects but not as efficient about finishing them, so he took it on himself to be the person to do that last step. He looked good, his manager looked good and the business benefited.

Cooper added: “The critical thing about managing up is to identify what kind of boss you have.” That’s because people with different management styles need to be approached differently if the relationship is to be effective. “So you say to yourself ‘if my boss is the bureaucratic type who goes by the rules and the systems, then when I want him to agree to do something, I need to indicate to him that I have gone through all the organisation’s bureaucratic hoops’. There is no point going to him with an enthusiastic idea,” said Cooper.

“But if your boss is a control freak, someone who really wants to retain the power, then you have to convince him that it was his idea in the first place. So you go in and say ‘remember when we had that meeting and you suggested Y? I thought that was a great idea and on the back of that here’s what I thought’.”

People also tend to find that they need to adapt their approach to managing up as they become more senior, said Ali Gill, chief executive of Crelos, a business psychology company. “You often get young high-potential managers who get noticed because they say what they think and are happy to voice their opinions to senior managers. That’s a good way for senior managers to get a view from the floor.”

However, as people rise through the ranks they discover that this no-holds-barred style becomes less popular with their managers; by the time they are on the rung beneath senior management themselves, they need to take a much more considered approach, she said. “Don’t be afraid to be honest, but be careful about people’s egos and feelings and present the information in a way that does not appear to be a personal attack.” Failing to be honest can actually cause more problems. “When people are honest you can resolve problems much more quickly. When it comes to managing up, people talk about hidden agendas and can become quite Machiavellian, but there’s no need for that.”

It is also important to find and understand the hidden power bases that do not relate directly to an organisation’s reporting lines but to individual influence. Look for the person who others turn to when they want to get something done, said Gill. “Managing up is not simply about managing an individual but about a complex matrix of power relationships.”

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