What Really Influences Your Boss?

Managing Up Is a Skill You Can Build

Think about the last time you walked out of your supervisor's office frustrated.

Maybe you'd made a case for more staff on a project, or a new service, or a change in how your unit works. You had the facts. You'd thought it through. And the conversation ended somewhere between a polite "let me think about it" and a quiet no.

Most managers I work with can name a moment like that. Many of them draw the same conclusion from it: the boss didn't listen, the timing was bad, the politics were against them.

Sometimes that's true. More often, the approach needed more range.

Why this relationship carries so much weight

Gallup has spent decades studying what separates thriving teams from struggling ones inside the same organization. Its researchers estimate that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. That finding is usually read as a message to managers about the people who report to them. Gallup

Read it from the other direction.

The person you report to shapes your working life more than almost anything else in the organization. Whether your ideas get resourced. Whether your team's work is visible to the people who set priorities. Whether you have room to grow.

Leaving that relationship to chance is a costly choice. John Gabarro and John Kotter made this argument in Harvard Business Review back in 1980, in a piece called "Managing Your Boss." They described the relationship as mutual dependence between two imperfect people, and they argued that effective managers take responsibility for their half of it. Forty-plus years later, it still holds.

The research on range

So what does taking responsibility look like? This is where the research gets interesting.

In the early 1990s, Cecilia Falbe and Gary Yukl analyzed hundreds of real workplace influence attempts, including many aimed at bosses. Across 777 attempts, 37% met resistance, 34% produced compliance, and 29% produced commitment, the kind of buy-in where someone gets behind your idea and works to make it succeed. I call that a champion. 

The influence approaches mattered a great deal. The most effective were inspirational appeals and consultation, and the least effective were pressure, legitimating, and coalition tactics, meaning appeals to rules or authority and building alliances to push a request through. Logical persuasion landed in the middle. That surprises a lot of library managers, because a well-reasoned case is usually the only approach we reach for.

What about combining approaches? In the incidents where people paired two, like logical persuasion and focus on emotion or shared values, 74% ended in commitment. 

David Kipnis and Stuart Schmidt found something similar about careers. Studying workers, supervisors, and chief executive officers, they identified four distinct upward-influence styles. Direct reports with a "Shotgun" style, who pushed hard with every tactic at once, were evaluated less favorably by their managers and leaders, earned less, and reported more job tension and personal stress than "Tacticians," who led with reason and chose their other approaches deliberately. (Those results held for the men in the study; gender moderated how managers and leaders evaluated these styles, which says something too about who gets rewarded for pushing.) (PDF) Upward-Influence Styles: Relationship with Performance Evaluations, Salary, and Stress +2

Put those studies side by side and a picture emerges. Range helps. Volume hurts. The managers who move ideas, earn stronger reviews, and advance are the ones who can read a moment and choose what it calls for.

Influence is a skill. Skills can be practiced.

Consultation works because it treats your supervisor as a thinking partner. It starts with curiosity.

Ask what they're most focused on this quarter. Ask what's weighing on them. Ask what would make the biggest difference for them right now.

I've asked leaders these questions for more than thirty years, and the answers almost always surprise the person asking. The director who seems impatient about your project may be two weeks away from a difficult budget conversation with the provost. Once you know that, her impatience makes sense. You also know how to frame what you bring her next.

Connect your ideas to what they care about

When you have a proposal, build the logical case. Then take one more step, and tie it to something your supervisor values: the library's strategic plan, a commitment to students, the reputation of the unit, a goal they've named out loud.

A simple shape for the conversation:

Here's what I'm seeing. Here's what I recommend. Here's why I think it matters for what you're trying to accomplish.

That last sentence does a lot of work. It turns your request into shared purpose.

Ask before you advocate

Before you walk in with your answer, try walking in with your thinking still open.

"I'm working through how to handle the staffing gap in access services. Before I settle on a recommendation, what are you weighing?"

This feels slower. It usually isn't. People commit far more readily to ideas they helped shape, and your supervisor is no exception.

It also clears up something many managers leave murky: whose decision this is. Ask directly.

Is this mine to decide, or do you want to weigh in first?

When managers across a library are unclear about decision rights, work stalls everywhere and good people spend their energy guessing. You can build some of that clarity from where you sit, one question at a time.

Where to begin

Pick one conversation this week. Before it happens, spend five minutes thinking about what your supervisor is carrying and what they care about. Then choose your approach on purpose, and notice what's different about how it goes.

The relationship with the person you report to will shape your work whether you tend to it or not.

The question is whether you'll build it deliberately, or let it be built for you.

Warmly,
DeEtta

Sources

• Beck, R., & Harter, J. (2015). "Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement." Gallup Business Journal. Drawn from Gallup's State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders (2015).
• Falbe, C. M., & Yukl, G. (1992). "Consequences for Managers of Using Single Influence Tactics and Combinations of Tactics." Academy of Management Journal, 35(3), 638–652.
• Kipnis, D., & Schmidt, S. M. (1988). "Upward-Influence Styles: Relationship with Performance Evaluations, Salary, and Stress." Administrative Science Quarterly, 33(4), 528–542.
• Gabarro, J. J., & Kotter, J. P. (1980). "Managing Your Boss." Harvard Business Review.