Manage Up with Your Mentor’s Guidance

by Jeanne C. Meister

Your mentors can help you build better relationships with your boss and colleagues. How? Jeanne Meister, an expert in workplace learning and development, recently shared her ideas in an IdeaCast interview with Susan Francis from HBR. Here are some highlights.

What kind of support can mentors offer as you’re trying to manage up?

Mentors can help you navigate your company’s political landscape and introduce you to key people so you can branch out. And they’ll get you thinking like a senior executive long before you’re anointed as a member of the upper ranks—which will prepare you for that metamorphosis. One of my first mentors shared this valuable advice with me: Know who the thought leaders are across the organization, get to know them personally, and show them how your ideas can further their business agendas.

Mentors can also help you communicate your ideas to senior executives, who juggle myriad demands and don’t have time to wade through a sea of PowerPoint slides. If you want to present a complex idea to a group like this, take a first pass at boiling it down to a one-page memo that focuses on business outcomes. Then turn to one of your mentors for input: Have you crafted a message that will get executives’ attention—one that clearly and succinctly shows how your idea will affect the bottom line? What details should you trim? Where do you need to add data for support?

How can mentors help you work more effectively with your boss?

They can provide insight into the high-level challenges your boss faces and suggest realistic ways of supporting his goals. Ask your boss to clarify his top priorities with you—and write up a one- or two-page summary of that conversation to share with a trusted mentor. Then think with your mentor about how you can contribute. Maybe you can volunteer to assemble sales data your boss will need for his big presentation to the executive board, for example, or tap your network to gather anecdotal feedback on a product idea he’s considering.

Also try asking a mentor for help processing and incorporating feedback from your boss. Suppose you’ve been told you need to speak up more in large staff meetings, but you’re shy. You and a mentor can practice graceful ways of jumping into the conversation or brainstorm other things you can do to show you’re engaged.

Part of managing up is figuring out which organizational battles to fight and how to fight them. What can mentors do to make this easier?

They can help you develop your personal brand— which will make it clearer which battles you should take on. For instance, if you want to be known at your company for your creative product ideas, a mentor can broker opportunities for you to present them. She’ll also help you develop a better sense of when to go to the mat over them. For example, you and your mentor may decide it’s worth fighting to protect your vision for a new product’s positioning, but not to control the timing of its introduction.

Making sure your mentor gets value out of working with you is obviously good practice for managing up. Any suggestions on how?

This is almost the same as understanding your boss’s priorities. When you know what’s important to her, you can find ways to work toward her objectives. Simple gestures go a long way—for instance, putting her top three subjects of interest in your Google alerts and passing along links you think she’ll like. Look at her Twitter feed for insights into what she cares about: What kinds of conversations is she having— and how can you participate? Ask your mentor about her personal goals and see how you can help her achieve them. Suppose she’s writing an article on pricing strategy for a marketing journal. Offer to read the manuscript and provide feedback from an execution perspective. If you find ways to give as well as receive, your mentor will take note—and become all the more invested in your development.

Jeanne C. Meister is a partner at Future Workplace, which helps organizations redefine their corporate learning and talent management strategies. She is a coauthor, with Karie Willyerd, of The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today (HarperBusiness, 2010).