How to Make Your Boss Look Good — Without Becoming a Sycophant

by Michael Schrage

I find suck-ups loathsome. But I admire the managing-up technique I’ve seen ambitious people skillfully deploy. No fawning or flattery—they make smart use of technology to make their bosses look good.

For example, the boss’s boss at one marketing firm had given a keynote speech at a major industry event. A twentysomething analyst easily found a couple of complimentary tweets referencing the talk. He e-mailed them to his fortysomething boss, who barely knew what Twitter was, but who was thrilled to bring them to his boss’s attention. Win. Win. Win. Everyone was happy. A simple 90-second investment made his boss look good.

At another firm, a project manager found that her boss’s boss had an offbeat sense of humor and liked injecting levity into boring project reviews. She made it her mission to find the appropriate New Yorker or Dilbert cartoon to paste into a PowerPoint slide for presentations. Of course, she didn’t do this for her own presentations; she selected amusing and relevant options for her boss’s talk. He was grateful, and the boss’s boss liked them.

What I like about making your boss look good is that it is the mirror image of the marketing mantra about knowing the customer’s customer. Understanding your boss is vital. But researching, knowing, and appreciating your boss’s boss ought to give you valuable insight into what makes your boss effective—and frustrated. That shapes how to better position your boss in the mind of his boss.

Your Boss as a Brand

If you saw your boss as a brand, how would you sell that brand to the ultimate customer—your boss’s boss? Answering this question well requires market research. What can you do that will move your project forward and make your boss look good to his boss and peers, too? It can be a worthwhile investment of your time to consider what tools and technologies may help you.

The economic and technological “barriers of entry” to figuring out appropriate approaches to making your boss look good have collapsed. Most managers are but a LinkedIn connection or a blog comment away from insights into their boss’s boss that makes a win-win-win outcome a good bet. Should this occur daily? Only if you’re comfortable being the teacher’s pet. But there’s nothing wrong with making your boss look good be a part of your brand.

Perhaps you think it would test the outer limits of your creativity and authenticity to make your boss look good. But give it a try. Think of it as a marketing challenge: What are the two things you could do in the next three days that would make your boss look better to his boss?

Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, is the author of Serious Play (Harvard Business School Press, 1999) and the forthcoming Getting Beyond Ideas.

Adapted from content posted on hbr.org on April 15, 2010