The Conversations You Should Be Having with Your Manager

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As you advance in your career, you develop the skills to lead teams and manage direct reports. But no matter your role or seniority, you’ll always need to manage those above you and to develop the right relationships to progress. The secret to managing up, says Melody Wilding, is being strategic and thoughtful in several key kinds of conversations with your boss and boss’s boss—including finding alignment, setting boundaries, getting visibility for your work, and winning a promotion. She explains how the effort pays off both in future opportunities and your day-to-day satisfaction on the job. Wilding is an executive coach and the author of the book Managing Up: How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Before we begin, we have a couple of questions.
0:04.2	What do you love about HBR IdeaCast?
0:07.0	What would make IdeaCast even better?
0:09.4	What do you want less of?
0:11.7	Tell us, head over to HBR.org slash podcast survey to share your thoughts.
0:17.6	We want to make the show even better, but we need your help to do that. So head to
0:22.2	HBR.org slash podcast survey. Thank you.
0:37.3	Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review.
0:41.7	I'm Kurt Nicky.
0:46.5	You want to advance in your career, from getting things done as an individual contributor,
0:53.9	to showing you can build
0:55.4	and motivate a team, to demonstrating ROI and results. You're most often doing that within
1:02.2	an organization, a management system, an organizational culture, and a power structure that
1:08.6	you don't often fully understand,
1:11.4	appreciate, or even see sometimes.
1:14.8	How to succeed within such a system,
1:16.6	what many people call managing up,
1:19.4	is a skill that you can learn and develop with experience.
1:23.8	And that effort pays off,
1:25.8	not just in opportunities and rewards, but also just in your satisfaction
1:30.0	in your work day to day.
1:32.6	Today's guest is here to help you stop seeing yourself as a victim of workplace whims and start
	...

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