Don't Manage Up, Team Up Instead

Why Managing Up is culturally limiting and how the Teaming Up approach can help grow your team

In the engineering world, “Managing Up” is often sold as the key to career success.

The concept is straightforward: understand your manager's priorities, align your work to meet their expectations, and effectively communicate your progress.

While managing up draws its principles from some good best practices, it inherently reinforces a hierarchical structure that can limit collaboration and innovation.

But what if there was a better way?

Imagine a team where mutual help, open communication, and shared responsibility are the main drivers, and managers are just normal roles within the team with their specific duties.

I call this “Teaming Up”.

I know what you are thinking; it sounds a bit utopian.

But it’s not.

I have used this approach for years to manage my teams, and while it’s not free from challenges, I can say it works and contributes to growing happy teams.

So, in today’s essay, this is what I’m going to explore, and specifically, I will cover the following:

• 📈 The Concept of Managing Up and its limitations

• 👫 The Power of Teaming Up and why it could be beneficial to your team

• 🛠️ How to put the Teaming Up concept into practice

• 💪 Challenges of Teaming Up and how to Overcome them

📈 The Concept of Managing Up

Managing up is a strategy that focuses on building a univocal, productive relationship with your manager by understanding their needs, preferences, and expectations.

The goal is to make the manager’s job easier and, in turn, create a more favorable working environment for the individual contributor.

This approach involves several key elements:

• 🔍 Understanding Expectations: clarifying what your manager expects from you regarding deliverables, deadlines, and quality of work.

• 📬 Effective Communication: keeping your manager informed about your progress, potential issues, and successes through regular updates.

• 🔮 Anticipating Needs: proactively identifying and addressing potential problems before they escalate.

• 🗣️ Adapting to Their Style: understanding and adapting to your manager's communication and decision-making style.

• 💡 Providing Solutions, Not Problems: presenting potential solutions when issues arise rather than just highlighting the problems.

• 🎯 Aligning Goals: ensuring that your work aligns with your manager’s and the organization’s goals.

• 🤝 Building Trust: being reliable, meeting deadlines, and producing quality work consistently.

• 📝 Seeking Feedback: actively seeking and acting on feedback to improve your performance.

Limitations of Managing Up Culture

While these strategies can lead to a more efficient and harmonious working relationship with managers and help individual contributors grow in their careers, they also contribute to setting a wrong culture for the following reasons:

• 📊 Reinforce Hierarchies: they emphasize top-down culture, which can undermine a sense of equality and collaboration.

• 📉 Limit Creativity: they encourage a focus on pleasing the manager rather than exploring innovative ideas.

• 😕 Create Dependency: they can lead to over-reliance on the manager for guidance and approval, reducing individual and team independence.

• 🤐 Discourage Honest Feedback: fear of displeasing the manager may prevent team members from providing honest and constructive feedback.

• 💪 Undermine Autonomy: team members may feel less empowered to make decisions and take initiative.

Leaders and Managers are Not Special Roles

A common misconception is that leaders and managers hold special roles that set them apart from other team members.

In reality, leaders and managers are simply team members with different tasks, duties, and responsibilities.

This is why I believe the concept of managing up is culturally wrong, and to fix that, despite the role we cover, we should all agree on the following principles:

• 🤝 Equal Importance of All Roles: every role in a team is important, whether it's a leadership role or a support role. Each person contributes uniquely to the team's success. Leaders and managers are not inherently more valuable; they just have different duties.

• 🔄 Shared Responsibility: leadership should be seen as a shared responsibility. Different team members can take on leadership roles at different times based on their expertise and the task at hand.

• 🌐 Diverse Skills and Perspectives: teams thrive on the diversity of skills and perspectives. Managers and leaders bring organizational and strategic skills, while other team members bring technical expertise and hands-on work.

• 🔗 Interdependent Roles: a team's success depends on its roles' interdependence. Leaders and managers rely on the contributions of their team just as much as the team relies on their direction and support.

This shift in perspective is foundational to understanding the teaming-up approach.

👫 The Power of Teaming Up

Teaming Up promotes a collaborative and egalitarian approach where all team members contribute equally, share responsibilities, and support each other.

This approach applies the same principles of managing up, like building productive relationships, understanding others’ expectations, and making others’ lives easier, but it focuses on doing this horizontally instead of just versus one person (the manager).

Here are the core concepts of teaming up:

• 👥 Mutual Understanding and Respect: recognizing and valuing each team member's skills, perspectives, and contributions.

• 🗣️ Over-communication and Feedback: encouraging transparent and frequent communication, ensuring everyone has a voice and can share ideas, concerns, and feedback freely.

• 🛠️ Shared Responsibility and Accountability: distributing tasks and responsibilities evenly among team members, holding each other accountable for individual and collective performance.

• 🤝 Collaborative Decision-Making: making decisions as a group, with input from all team members, seeking consensus, and ensuring that decisions reflect the collective will of the team.

• 🌟 Supporting Each Other: offering help and support to team members when needed, celebrating successes together, and providing encouragement during difficult times.

Practical Applications

Understanding the principles of managing up and teaming up is one thing, but how do they play out in practice?

Here’s a closer look at how these approaches can manifest in various aspects of work life and how they compare to each other.

Communication

• Managing Up: communication tends to be vertical, with individual contributors primarily updating their manager on progress and seeking approval for decisions. This can lead to a bottleneck effect, where important information and decisions are delayed.

• Teaming Up: communication is horizontal and multi-directional. Team members share information freely with each other, hold regular meetings to discuss progress, and collectively decide on the best course of action. This ensures everyone is on the same page and can contribute to decision-making. Moreover all communications happen publicly.

Leadership and Influence

• Managing Up: leadership is top-down. The manager makes the majority of decisions, and employees try to act proactively to meet them. Influence is often based on one’s position within the hierarchy.

• Teaming Up: leadership is distributed. Different team members may lead on different tasks or projects based on their expertise and the team’s needs. Influence is based on contribution and collaboration rather than rank.

Mutual Help

• Managing Up: team members may focus on impressing the manager rather than helping each other, which can lead to isolated efforts and a lack of team cohesion.

• Teaming Up: mutual help is a core principle where team members actively support one another, share workloads, and collaborate to solve problems. This builds a stronger, more cohesive team.

Benefits and Challenges of Teaming Up

Building teams based on these principles offers numerous benefits. Over the years, I’ve seen many of these advantages firsthand.

Here are a few notable ones:

• 🤝 Teams Strive to Innovate: when team members work together closely and don’t work to please their managers, they are more likely to come up with creative and effective solutions. The diverse perspectives and expertise of the team lead to innovative approaches to problems and opportunities.

• 😊 Teams Engage More: a collaborative environment where everyone feels valued and heard can lead to higher job satisfaction and motivation. Team members are more likely to be engaged and committed to the team’s success.

• 🏃 Agility and Flexibility: teams that operate without rigid hierarchies can adapt more quickly to changes and new challenges. Shifting roles and responsibilities based on the situation makes the team more responsive and agile.

• 🤗 Stronger Relationships and Trust: teaming up fosters strong relationships and trust among team members.

• 🔍 Greater Accountability and Ownership: when responsibilities are shared, team members are more likely to hold each other accountable and take ownership of their work. This leads to higher standards of performance and accountability.

While teaming up has many benefits, it also comes with its own set of challenges.

Here are some roadblocks that I experienced and you can encounter following this approach:

• ⏳ Decision-Making Gridlock: consensus-based decision-making can sometimes lead to delays if the team struggles to agree.

• ⚖️ Uneven Contribution: some team members may contribute more than others, leading to imbalances in workload and effort.

• 🔍 Clarity of Roles: ensuring that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities can be difficult in a flexible, team-oriented structure.

• 🚫 Not for Everyone: while most people appreciate this approach, some who are used to a more hierarchical structure may feel uncomfortable with this view.

🌟 How to Make the Teaming Up Approach Successful

Creating a successful teaming-up culture starts with managers but requires the support and commitment of the entire team.

It’s a process that takes time to build and cannot be forced or imposed.

Here are some final tips to make it work:

• 🎯 Focus on the Vision: ensure that everyone understands the team’s goals and their own roles and responsibilities. This helps to align efforts and prevent misunderstandings.

• 🛡️ Foster Psychological Safety: create an environment where team members feel safe to speak up, share ideas, and take risks without fear.

• 📬 Encourage Open Communication: establish regular meetings and communication channels to keep everyone informed and engaged.

• 📊 Promote Equal Participation: ensure that all team members have the opportunity to contribute and that their voices are heard. Rotate roles and responsibilities to distribute workload evenly.

• 📚 Provide Training and Support: offer training and resources to help team members develop the skills needed for effective collaboration and communication.

• 🎉 Celebrate Successes Together: recognize and celebrate the team’s achievements, both big and small. This helps to build morale and reinforce a sense of shared purpose.

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✌️ That’s all folks

That's all for today! As always, I would love to hear from my readers (and if you've made it this far, you're one of the bravest). Please don't hesitate to connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter and send a message. I always respond to everyone!