What You’ll Learn

Does your boss make you want to scream? Do you have more than one boss? Do you spend your day herding cats? Working across departmental silos? Corralling contractors?

Then you know that managing up and across your company is critical to doing your job well. It’s all about understanding your boss’s and colleagues’ priorities, pressures, and work styles. You need to manage up and across not just because you may have a problem boss, incompetent colleagues, or projects that involve stakeholders flung far and wide. You need to manage up and across, for example, to get your marketing and sales folks to see that your project will help them meet their goals, too; to establish authority with higher-ups so they’ll bless your new product ideas; to secure people’s time for a new team when they’re already feeling overextended.

Managing up and across will help you get the information and resources you need to solve your complex problems, increase your effectiveness, and make your work more enjoyable.

You’ll get better at:

• Getting what you need from people who don’t report to you
• Coping with micromanaging, conflict-aversive, or generally incompetent bosses
• Discovering what drives colleagues of all ages
• Partnering with your boss—and her boss
• Selling your ideas up and across your company
• Making the most of your boss’s influence
• Establishing a shared vision and commitment
• Juggling multiple bosses’ priorities
• Tailoring your pitch to your audience
• Collaborating with remote colleagues
• Working with a new boss
• Navigating office politics