📖 favorite parts of "Managing Up"
I loved this book by Rosanne Badowski🔗 – so much gold (even though it's a bit outdated). A must-read for anyone in a supporting role who wants to get better. Here were some of my favorite parts:
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Foreword:
- 3 most important qualities in an assistant: loyal, discreet, forgiving
- Loyalty: crazy, unrelenting zeal that puts the job first / lived + breathed work
- Discretion: lock on information must be airtight to do with strategic decisions + sensitive personnel and personal matters
- Forgiveness (from your heart) / resilience (from your head): ability to bounce back + keep momentum is so important
- A great assistant (or any direct report) is not a secret weapon, but a foot soldier – ready to show up and fight everyday
- Ultimate goal is to create time for your boss, that's what they need most (i.e. 2 hours of research / prep to result in a 30 second “gun + go” decision on Jack’s desk)
- Scrub items free of non-essentials, preempt questions / action items
- Not enough to know what is happening, have to know why it's happening
- If you’re not helping, you’re hindering
- A match in commitment level
- Mutual energy
- Took about a year to master the job
- Learn the language of your boss and those around you
- To gain trust, have to give trust
- Work-Out meetings – town hall type meetings where any and all procedures or policies were up for discussion from anyone, handled by outside facilitator, and 75% of them needed action / to be decided on. Encouraged an eye toward always identifying what can be improved and fostered a culture of constant change. Was not a gripe session – if you disagreed, you had to be prepared to offer a solution
- Full disclosure early and often, but not to interrupt workflow (depending on the error)
- Don’t repeat mistakes, learn from them
- Make the agenda of the person you work for your own agenda
- Confidence isn’t static, it ebbs and flows based on 5 other elements: experience / discipline / realism / perfectionism / flexibility
- based on the above 5 things, you can tell if confidence is being killed or created
- a good manager will help develop self confidence in others
- Manage up by making life easier for the person above you
- Gain experience by offering to help someone outside of your area / role
- “Better buried than bored”
- Move on if your job has run out of ways for you to grow – that’s the sign it is time
- “Take care of it” = magic words to build confidence. Shifts into you saying “I’ll take care of it.”
- 98% of any job is follow-through – conversely, all problems are related to lack of follow through
- Pg: 39 = Morning routine helped tell how the day was going to shape up
- Preparedness / preemptive summaries
- Listened in on all phone calls - immense amount of information on what was happening + emotional intelligence.
- pg 50: “Business is about today and tomorrow” - usually only focused on current data and future plans.
- Overwhelming support on minute things - the small things really add up. Keeping folders in the same order as was on his desk when packing for a trip, etc.
- pg 53: Going through the wastebasket was still a method of information collecting - knowing what is not important to your peers is just as important as knowing what IS important.
- pg. 54 = importance of highlight + TLDR
- Don’t try to reinvent your manager - wasted effort. Everyone has downsides, but if you want to manage up effectively focus on the upsides.
- Anticipate as much as possible.
- Constant speed, exhilaration and pressure = if you love it
- Only a few weekend were call or work free and she was grateful about it and didn’t want to suggest she worked for a slavedriver. She genuinely loved her work
- pg 66: Work is the same as play = you need to form a team with the person above you and play. She got great energy from Jack himself
- Individuals solve problems, not senior management.
- You should know what your boss’s goals are and your goals should mesh with your managers in order to have a great fission of energy. If not- its a problem.
- If you aren’t passionate and commitment to the work you are doing, it is not worth doing.
There are more chapters but like most projects, this one is half done