Three Ways You Can Get Your Boss To Help

Read Time: 7 Minutes

I recently talked about three things that allow you to influence the organization around you: trust, credibility, and relationships. Now, I want to get a bit more practical about managing up.

Nearly everyone has someone over them in game dev. 

Whether it’s a team lead, a discipline lead, senior stakeholders, a director or VP, maybe someone at the C-level - heck even CEOs end up accountable to boards and VCs and Publishers to some degree or another - we’re all answering to someone in authority.

Now, in an ideal world, those above set clear expectations, engage when appropriate, use their greater influence and authority to support others, and seek to create an environment where the people they are in authority over can succeed.

We don’t live in an ideal world. 

Our relationship with the people above us in our organizations is not always the pretty picture we wish it was. Too often, expectations are unknown, interactions are infrequent and unhelpful, we don’t get the support we were told we would have and are still asked to “figure it out,” and on and on and on.

To make this an even tougher problem, failures in senior leadership are often not overt maliciousness or rampant ego (though those both exist). Most leaders above us are untrained, unsupported, and doing the best they know how while in over their head.

Now, you may be in one of the studios/teams out there with pretty strong leadership and a good culture. They do exist, often in smaller pockets of larger organizations, or in small and mid-size companies. If you are, that’s awesome. It will be a great opportunity to learn, so be bold and take advantage. But it is not the norm.

I have found many leaders out there who truly want to be great leaders and set their teams up for success. BUT, as with every level of an org, they are faced with perverse incentives that drive them down poor paths. Combine that with the aforementioned lack of any good leadership training, and you have someone creating a ton of pain without much awareness of it, as they seek to enhance their career and appease “even more senior” leaders.

When this happens, the leadership failure ladders all the way up to the top. Ever seen the organization where everyone is blaming the layer above for every single problem? Well, the problem isn’t only that blame has become a cultural norm, it’s also that the origin of that blame is frequently justified.

So… how do you “manage up” in a modern company? What does it look like to try to thread the needle between ineffective passivity and a “career limiting move”?

That’s what we’re going to explore a bit today.

BUT, before we do that, I want to be really clear here: results are not guaranteed. I recommend caution.

See, sometimes there IS extreme and self-focused ego in leadership. Sometimes people enjoy making other people suffer or playing power games. You may run into a truly incompetent person with a ton of authority who is insanely proficient at protecting themselves from accountability through skills that aren’t helping them do their real job at all. Sometimes that needle just won’t be threaded.

In my opinion, these toxic situations are NOT the majority case, but they do exist. So beware!

OK, first step: let’s make sure we’re not overthinking this whole “influencing senior leadership” thing.

Before you go about doing anything complicated to manage up, remember something that might work and is worth trying: just ask or say what you think should happen to your boss or stakeholders.

Yeah, it might not work, but if it does you’ve saved yourself a ton of time. So if you need something or see a problem you want their help solving, try asking first. If that doesn’t work for whatever reason, you then enter the more complex world of “managing up.”

Seriously, I’ve had it happen where I’ve gone to a leader above me with all kinds of data and a coalition and having done really well for the last quarter so I could ask for this super hard thing, only to discover it wasn’t super hard and the senior people above me would have helped me with it months before.

Bosses and stakeholders are rarely evil menaces looking to screw you over. Sometimes asking the question gets you what you need. Don’t overcomplicate things unless that fails or is for some other reason not viable.

With that covered, let’s continue on to the more meaty suggestions.

Solving Your Own Role

Everyone but the first founder in game dev is there because someone else decided they needed something done that they couldn’t or didn’t want to do themselves. 

Your boss had reasons for hiring you. Yes, sometimes it’s because the spreadsheet said we needed another producer, but more often it’s because a hole developed and you filled it. Your first and primary job then, is to perform that function when seeking to manage up.

It’s a good thing to spot all the problems in an org and want to drive change and get the senior leaders onboard with what’s wrong. But if that happens before you’ve fully taken on and understood your own role, you may be shooting yourself in the foot for two reasons:

1. You don’t really know how to operate within the system yet, so you may be seeing solutions to worse problems as the problems themselves.

2. You haven’t built up the trust and confidence you need from those senior leaders.

My first recommendation to managing up is to really lock down your own role. I’ve made the mistake of going into a new space and taking on all kinds of responsibilities, and then gotten destroyed because it didn’t seem like I was fulfilling the core reason I was brought on. 

You may think that the role you were brought on to fill is just not as important as the other things you see, but the problem is if you want to drive change through hierarchical layers above you, you have to figure out how to see the world through their eyes. They have a different perspective, and if you clash with that directly and without credibility, it won’t end well.

When the stuff you’re being asked to do really isn’t that important, I still encourage leaders to put the effort in to fulfill the expectations their boss or stakeholders are placing on them. It’s an organizational tax you have to pay to get to a place where you can solve the bigger problems.

So, first thing for “managing up”? Crush your own role. Knock it out of the park, do what you were hired or brought in to do. If you’re absolutely nailing it, it will make things. 

What Are THEY Facing?

The second thing I want to do: understand what my boss and stakeholders are trying to achieve, and what they see as the obstacles in their way. Honestly, the more you are solving your bosses problems and resolving stakeholder concerns, the more leeway you have to suggest change and “manage up.”

I have personally been guilty of spotting serious problems, getting self-righteous about my awareness and cleverness, talking about how we should solve it to others, complaining to anyone who will listen about how dumb everything is, and then talking to my boss about it at the end of that whole line. What I discovered: they are very aware of the problem, they are working on solving it, and here are the four reasons that the solution is much more complex than I had assumed.

Further, sometimes they’ve clued me into even bigger problems they are facing, and are struggling to solve. So one of the reasons that big problem I saw isn’t being fixed is because it’s relatively small compared to something else.

Now, this is all a matter of perspective. Sometimes what I think is a big problem, my boss thinks is a small problem, and vice versa. But regardless of whether we agree or not, the reality is that my boss and my stakeholders have an entirely different experience that they are parsing through as they do their job. They may know the problems, but have reasons - good or bad - for dealing with them. Just like all of us.

My intuitive assumption that I’m seeing everything important is not only wrong, it’s misguided and toxic. 

To manage up then, one of the things I encourage people to do is try to understand their boss. What are their problems, what are their incentives? Are they in a delicate position already where taking on additional “organizational politics” risk would doom the good they are trying to do? 

Yes, sometimes it is true that they are just sucking at their job, or have terrible selfish motivations, but far more often there is a lot going on.

Have the conversation with them. Frame it as a training opportunity, because that’s what it is. Ask them to walk you through their world, their priorities, the obstacles they are working through, the opportunities they see, and whatever else they choose to share. Some might tell you a lot, some might tell you a little, but in all cases you’ve gained a perspective and learned more about how your boss (or a key stakeholder) views their job. 

If there are ways you can help them achieve their goals, they might be super appreciative. Taking work from them and handling it, or sometimes even being a sounding board can be useful. 

You want their help getting where you want the team to go. Help them get where they want to go too. 

Steven Covey said that we should, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” This is the same principle. Do this well, and they are far more likely to have time to listen to you.

Alright, so second thing you can do to manage up: understand your boss or stakeholders working reality, and see if you can help them by lightening their load, or maybe even resolving some of their biggest challenges.

Create a Cohort

When only one person has an idea to get something done, someone who trusts them might listen, but it’s pretty easy to ignore/deprioritize. 

When most of the leaders in a space all agree something should get done, that’s much harder to gloss over.

This creates a “managing up” opportunity, albeit one that walks a knife’s edge.

If you can bring together a lot of people and agree on some specific approaches to solve some problems you collectively observe, you will likely have a much easier time getting support to take the next steps. Even if you can’t get support, often a group of leaders can make the changes happen on their own, and the quantity of people committed means that those above are less likely to interfere.

Here’s the knife’s edge part though: it is easy for a cohort of leaders hoping to make things better to look like insubordination or rebellion against the senior leaders in the org. While that is SOMETIMES something that needs to be done, it should be very rare. So unless your intention is actually mutiny, you need to be careful to keep the group problem focused and goal oriented.

You don’t want to bring together a group of people and have everyone complain about how the leaders above are all sucking and we need to solve the problems they should be solving. That’s undermining their role, probably unfairly.

Instead, bring a group of people together to talk about the problems you see and to discuss how you’d resolve them with and without help. 

This can start as 1:1s to see if other people are seeing the challenges you are seeing, and to expand your view of the overall space. It’s doubly valuable because you also get insight into their problems and perspective on your own from an outsider. Do this a few times, and you’ll probably have a much stronger thesis and also better potential solutions.

I usually start with people I know and trust and who know and trust me just in case I’ve lost my mind and need them to tell me that. Then I will solidify my “pitch” for what improvement looks like, take it to a set of peers, and eventually bring it to the most sympathetic senior person involved. That I’ve run the idea by many others and they are aligned creates a compelling narrative that this is worth doing.

Remember though, frame it as, “Here’s an idea to make things better,” not, “Here’s how you’re screwing up and how we all need to fix it.” 

I can’t emphasize enough how important framing is when taking ideas to senior levels. People want to know you support them, their goals, and the org, not that you’re just sniping at all the problems. I’ve made the mistake of being “right” at the expense of being “helpful” because I framed everything through the lens of senior leadership failures, rather than through opportunities to improve.

Alright, so third thing to do when managing up: Get buy-in from peers and surrounding leaders, and use that to create momentum around an idea before bringing it to senior leaders.

Some Other Tips

Here’s a few more things that might help you.

• Bring data (at least at first)

Data can help show people that something is wrong or that something could be more right. Take the time to collect, organize, and present data that helps your position. My caution here: to some leaders, data is threatening. See if you can figure that out and understand who cares and who doesn’t. If you bring data to the wrong person it can torpedo your whole effort. I wish the world wasn’t like that, but the world doesn’t care about my wishes. (Thanks to Kenn White!)

• Be clear about what you want

Many efforts at managing up fail because they are vague and difficult to understand. Sometimes someone is “struggling to manage up” when in fact the people they are trying to influence have no idea they want anything and are perfectly willing to help if that someone would tell them a clear need. Here, you need to understand how the OTHER person communicates, and adjust what you say to meet their style. Clarity is hard, and senior people tend to be busy for a lot of valid reasons. Being brief and concise will help them help you.

• Framing, framing, framing

What you want and how you say you want it are two different things. Framing is how you say what you want, and there is no neutral frame. Choose your frame carefully. An example of this is what I said earlier; don’t make your suggestion look like the senior person’s failure, make it look like an opportunity for more success. Both are probably true, but the latter definitely is AND is more likely to convince the people you need to convince. Framing does not imply dishonesty, it does imply awareness that framing matter. 

• Managing up is personally expensive

Managing up takes time and is not usually captured in the job description or expectations you’ve been given. You have to find time to do it, and you have to be careful because you are coming from a position of relative weakness. You may spend a long time pondering how to most effectively influence senior leaders, but they get to respond with whatever is top of mind without any consequence. It’s your job as the person attempting to “manage up” to expend those calories. But be aware it comes at cost, and don’t start failing at your core role because you’re spending all your time managing those above you.

• Choose your battles

Every organization has tons of challenges to overcome. Problems are not exceptions, they are the rule, and dysfunction is the norm. If you go after everything all the time you’ll exhaust yourself and fail to influence the leaders around you. The only time that works is if you are well connected to someone senior enough to provide air cover, and even then it’s dicey. 

Pick the things that matter most, then make sure you’re building trust by crushing your own job, understanding the senior leader’s world, and creating effective cohorts to drive change.

Summary

Managing up is hard.

I wish I could tell you some guaranteed technique to drive the change you want via the leaders above you. Perhaps you can find someone somewhere that has that wisdom for you. But the brutal reality is that managing up is a challenge. Even in relatively healthy environments, it can be exhausting.

My three suggestions…

• Crush your own job

• Understand the leaders above you, then help them

• Create a cohort

…are all time-consuming endeavors. It’s not something you can usually swing in two days. 

And that’s ok. The nice thing about managing up? It’s often NOT expected. This is all bonus credit to the org. It’s good practice for seeing how the studio or team work. It’s exposure to problems and getting reps building influence and driving change.

It’s worth doing, and most things that are worth doing are hard.

My recommendation: don’t wait to start building these muscles. I didn’t want to “play politics” early in my career, probably because I didn’t know how. I just skipped it, and the consequences of that were when it became necessary to “manage up” I didn’t know how. That hurt me, it hurt my team, it hurt the product. Don’t get stuck there.

Find ways to drive positive change. Put time aside to see the bigger picture and engage with your boss or stakeholders around it. Get used to thinking creatively about solving organizational problems that your peers all claim are, “over their head” or “above their paygrade.” 

Try anyway. You might be surprised at the positive impact you can have.

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