Managing “Down”
The third in a series of posts elaborating on my list of skills to use when dealing with difficult personalities.
So, you think you’re at the bottom of the totem pole. Managing subordinates is for your boss and your boss’s boss. You are wrong. And when it comes to difficult personalities, they’re all over.
Some people you interact with will see you as being higher on the org chart somehow. Consider the building maintenance staff, receptionists and customers. The person who empties the trash can may not show up on the org chart, but if you’re working 80 hour days, you’re going to discover it’s not house elves vaccuming the rug.
In some companies, seniority is so important (this will come up again when I talk about local currency - everything connects!) the guy who was hired two days after you may see you as higher on the org chart. Be sensitive to this.
So now we know who we’re talking about when we’re talking about managing down, let’s talk about how to manage. The best definition I’ve heard of what managing really is goes like this: managing is the act of helping other people do their job. One of my own favorite managers described herself as my “human shield.” She stood between me and everything in the company trying to stop me from being productive. She fought for me to have the freedom to be creative. She took all the boring administrative meetings so I didn’t have to worry about who changes the toner in the copier. She was my facilitator.
This is how you should see yourself when managing down. It will save you tons of heartache, and sometimes just brighten your day.
Real life example of how managing down can brighten your day:
Like many of us in this industry, I work many late hours. In one office where I lived (as you do during crunch), the maintenance staff came through to empty wastepaper baskets under the cubicle desks promptly at 7:00pm every night. Being a frequent occupant of my desk in the evenings, I would often see the older woman who came through to clean up after all of us. I would say hi and hand her my basket so she didn’t have to try to get around me. She didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Polish, but we could both smile and laugh when my cluttered desk generated only one tiny little piece of trash.
On my birthday one year, a dozen roses were delivered to my desk from a handsome fella trying to catch my eye. I was totally unprepared to deal with a dozen roses at work, although I could outfit a special ops team for a nerf gun battle at the drop of a hat. The roses were still sitting in their box when 7:00pm rolled around. The garbage collection started as usual, but when she got to my desk the Polish woman let out a terrific squeal and ran away. I was mystified and just sat there blinking, trying to figure out what just happened, until she returned with the perfect vase. I have no idea where she found it, but she filled it up with water, trimmed the stems and arranged my flowers for me. What a sweetheart! I don’t even know her name, but she made my day (evening?).
Real life example of how managing down can help your career:
I did a certain amount of traveling in one job, and would sometimes find myself working in LA out of someone else’s office. There was never deskspace for me, and at one point I had to set up shop in the waiting area of a TV producer I worked with. His secretary was in the same space, and we were having a pretty good time. Every phone call I made to this office for a year was answered by this woman, so we had built up something of a friendship.
While I was sharing physical space with her, I got to see and hear her interact with other people on the phone and in person. All of these people wanted a piece of her boss’s time, and she handled them with varying degrees of politeness. I was surprised to hear her dismissing out of hand most of the people who tried to get past her - even people with a lot more clout than I had. At the time I was fairly middle-management, and I realized on a daily basis I was getting more access to her boss than people several rungs up the pay scale. When she had a minute to chat with me, I asked how that happened. She said, “well, you always treat me like a human being. For you, I’ll go ask him if he has a minute.”
Having access to this producer had made the product I was working on worlds better, and I never would have had his cooperation if I hadn’t been nice to the person who answered his phone.
Real life example of how not managing down can ruin your career:
One thing you can always count on in business is change. People move up the ladder at different rates, and in your career you’re bound to be leapfrogged at least once. In the entertainment industry at least, the freight operator really does sometimes go on to be your boss in a few years. And believe me, he will remember if you managed down badly.
This happened to me with someone who worked in HR. When I first met her, she was lower on the org chart than I was. She helped me hire some good people and I found her a pleasure to work with. She did an excellent job of managing up. This skill moved her up the ladder in her department pretty quickly, and in a few years while I was still middle management, she trucked up to a spot higher on the chart than me.
That’s when I discovered her skills at managing down were sadly lacking. Where she had once been pleasant to talk to and happy to help me out, she was now antagonistic and actively undermined me at least once. I realized I couldn’t trust her — and many other people learned the same thing. This did not help her career.