How to Manage Upward and Influence Without Authority

Are you a manager who struggles with managing upward or cross-functionally?

Do you find it difficult to gain buy-in from peers and teams that you don't have authority over?

Maybe you have great ideas that you feel like would really drive your business forward, but you can't seem to get your boss on board with any of them. As a leader, your impact is limited by your ability to influence people. In this video, I'm going to teach you a simple five-step framework that you can use to manage upward and cross-functionally.

But before we get too far, let me just quickly introduce myself for those of you who are new to the channel. My name is Doug Howard, and I'm a leadership coach and consultant. I use this YouTube to give you the best tips on how to level up your leadership skills. So make sure you hit that subscribe button.

Influence is one of my favorite topics to cover because it really opens up so many doors for you as a leader. It's a great way for you to create efficiencies in your work. When you have strong people skills and when you know how to influence people's decisions to work in your favor, when you know how to hit those motivational triggers that get them to want to take action. You can almost like get gravity working in your favor versus working against gravity where you're really pushing and forcing things to get moving.

One of the areas that a lot of managers struggle with is influencing upward because you never learned how to develop this skill. Learning how to influence upward at work can make all the difference in your career. You could possess all the same skills, qualities, characteristics, and everything as a leader. But if you don't know how to manage upward, your impact is going to be heavily limited. That goes for the impact you have on your team and on your company, as well as on your own career.

5 Step Framework

Managing upward involves developing effective strategies to communicate, collaborate, and build positive relationships with your superiors, your boss, upper management, as well as cross-functional leaders throughout your company. Here's a simple five step framework. That's going to help you do this effectively at your company.

Step 1 - Consider the Other Person's Perspective

After you figured out what it is that you want to influence them on. Step one is consider their perspective. When you think about it, we have no problem building a compelling argument that convinces us. We naturally craft our points in a way that's going to convince our twin to go along with the idea that we have, but the problem is that it doesn't influence the other person. We don't present our points in a way that's compelling to their perspective or to their point of view or their background or, or what they have going on currently.

I used to make this all the time with one of my first bosses. I was a young manager. Kind of just getting my feet wet, learning my management style and my management skills. I reported to someone who was not an engineer. He was the CEO of our small company, but he had a heavy sales background. Now the engineer in me would always present my ideas to him in a way that, focused on quality and focused on, facts and focused on metrics and focused on doing things the right way.

I was always coming at it from this very engineering minded perspective, but the problem was, the CEO, my boss, you know, he was a sales centric guy. His background was in sales. So when I told him all these things, it was going over his head or he just didn't care. All he cared about was generating more sales.

I'm not saying that like, it's a bad thing. It's just the truth of the matter is he was driven by sales and that's all he really cared about and he cared about customer service too. So once I started figuring out how to craft my messages and my pitches to him in a way that focused on how it would impact our customers or how it would impact our sales team or how it would impact our bottom line. That got his attention. So when I was explaining how this is going to make the sales team's job more easy, or this is going to give them more resources to sell more products to our customers. Or how does this going to make our customers more happy.

Presenting it this way would help me get his attention, get his buy-in. He would ask more questions. He'd want to know more about it. But when I was coming at these ideas and these pitches from a engineering perspective, I could just see his eyes glaze over and not really be interested in it.

Now, as you hear that, you might think, well, what a bad boss, but at the same time, it's on me to figure out how to present these ideas in a way that's going to resonate with my boss. So before you're pitching your case or pitching your idea or your suggestion to your boss, you want to take a step back and ask things like, what's his perspective going to be on this? How familiar is he with this topic or this idea that I'm proposing? Is he going to care about this? How could I craft this in a way that's going to touch the things he cares about? What's important to him? What does he value? What is he going to be concerned with? Really get inside the mind of your boss and figure out, you know, what is going to really get their perspective.

What is going to be something that's they're going to find so important that they won't be able to resist exploring this idea with you. When you're doing this, what you wanna do is get their perspective, think about these things so that you can really empathize with their perspective and craft your message in a way that's speaking to their point of view.

Step 2 - Consider Your Relationship with the Other Person

Step two is to take a step back and consider your relationship with this person.

Now step one is all about, you know, taking another person's perspective into account. But in addition to that, you need to realize this, we think people make decisions based on facts and logic and objective considerations. But that's not true. Any sales book will tell you that people make decisions based on emotions. When that comes to you and your ability to manage upward or manage cross-functionally, it means that people make decisions based on how they feel about you. They're not going to approve your idea or buy into your idea because it's objective really good. They're going to buy into your idea because they like you and they feel good about you. They feel like you're the type of person who brings value to the table. You're the type of person that won't let them down. Your reputation with them and how they feel about you has a big impact on how much work it's going to take for you to influence them.

The reason I'm explaining this is because you need to take a step back and think, what is your relationship like with this person? Is it a really strong relationship where you can speak openly and, and there's not going to be any biases involved. Or is it a neutral relationship where neither of you really know each other that well. It's just strictly professional. Or maybe it's a bad relationship where there's some damage that needs to be repaired before you can get them to open up to hearing you.

You want to take a step back and figure out where is your relationship currently at if it's neutral or worse. You're going to need to put some effort into building that relationship and enhancing it because if you have a bad relationship with them or, or a neutral relationship, it's going to be nearly impossible for you to convince them to do something that they don't want to do already. If maybe they happen to agree with your logic and if that's the case, then they're going to go with it. But if they don't, you're going to have a really hard time convincing them to go against whatever their inclination is or whatever their concerns are.

That's why it's really important to build a strong relationship with the person you're trying to influence. You need to build that relationship with them before you're trying to influence them.

Now, if you struggle with building relationships with people, if you don't know how to approach it, if you don't know what to talk about or where to begin. You should check out my episode called How To Build A Relationship With Anyone.

Step 3 - Make the Minimum Viable Ask

Step three is the minimum viable ask. What that means is you need to ask for something small before asking for something big.

So many people make this mistake. They swing for the fences right away. They ask for the moonshot and then they're unpleasantly surprised when they get shut down right away. The minimum viable ask technique is a way to make sure that you get your boss always saying yes.

I'll tell you a quick story behind this before I explain how it works. Back when I was an engineering manager, I somehow overnight started absorbing more director level responsibilities. I had 40 direct reports that were all reporting to me and our company was growing so fast that this just kind of happened in the blink of an eye and over the course of six to 12 months. I went from 20 to 40 direct reports because we were growing so fast and I couldn't keep up. I couldn't possibly give all that the proper attention and support and coaching to each of my direct reports when you have 40 of them.

So there was a need to create middle-management within my team reporting between me and the rest of the team. I actually had two people that I thought would be perfect fits for manager roles. I was comfortable with them. I'd worked with them for a long time. They were already demonstrating a lot of natural leadership skills working under me for a long time.

So I had no doubts in my mind. Yes, they need a little bit of training in some areas, but they had great respect from the team. This was going to be a very smooth transition. To me it seemed like a no brainer, but I made the mistake of just swinging for the fences with my boss right away, thinking she would agree with this.

So I brought it up to my boss saying, Hey, you know, I want to promote these two women into these manager roles that they can each get a third of the direct reports in my team. We can divvy up the workload. This would free me up to focus on X, Y, and Z. I'm thinking this is a no brainer. I'm showing her that I'm taking initiative. Right away, her first concern was well do either of them have formal management experience, which they didn't. So that was a big loophole that I didn't expect her to say that to me. In talking it through with her, what I realized was she just wasn't comfortable with putting someone in a management role for the first time without demonstrating that, they can be qualified to manage people.

So when I took a step back and thought, well, how can I create a minimum viable ask here. What a minimum viable ask is, it's something that they can't say no to. It's something that's so obviously good, it's easy for them to say yes. It needs to be something that's in route to the major ask or the moonshot that you want to pitch them.

So if my major ask was promoting them into manager positions, well, then I wanted to ask for her support in me giving them leadership training. Right? So that's something that why would we give them training if we're not going to put them in management positions? So I wanted to get her support on that. I started small. I told her that I wanted to start working with them on management training and coaching them and mentoring them to become managers and to become leaders on my own. I was going to spend time on that each week.

So I told her the plan I had for coaching and mentoring them on helping them develop leadership skills. So this is going to cost the company nothing, but a little bit of time, me spending some time with them on a regular basis. But I pointed out to my boss that I was already spending that much time with them on one-on-ones. I was just going to refocus the purpose of that one-on-one time so it was focused on giving them leadership training and leadership skills. That's so simple. That's so easy. How could she say no to it?

I wasn't asking for any resources I wasn't asking for any money. She'd basically have to be a real jerk to say no to that, because here I am talking about wanting to develop two people on our team and it's going to be tough for her to say no to that. So I gave her a minimum viable asks something that was very difficult for her to say no to. What this does was it creates a psychological effect where it gets her used to saying yes to the idea of putting these people into a management position. Which was going to be a big change too, by the way. This was going to be a complete restructuring of our department. There was going to be a lot of other impacts to it. So this is what is the importance of starting small.

Once I started spending time on that for a few weeks. Then I started asking her if she was okay with me, delegating some higher level leadership responsibilities to them, like reviewing some other people's work and giving some people constructive feedback in situations. Very, very light stuff, nothing that was too formal or anything like that. I kept increasing that minimum viable ask.

What'd you do with this is, you start with the minimum viable ask, then you prove that that was a good decision by either doing it or carrying it out or pointing it out to your boss. Hey, we did this and this is the results that got. Then you follow up with an ask that's slightly bigger than that, but this still is something very easy for them to say yes. Then you keep working up gradually to that level of ask is big enough to the moonshot.

This took me about a year, but I was giving them more leadership responsibilities. Then I started getting my boss's approval to pull these two ladies into management readings, where it was appropriate and asking if it was okay for them to contribute to some decision making on things that impacted the engineering team at the upper management level.

So I kept just gradually pulling them into more leadership responsibility, slowly sprinkling them into situations so my boss could see what it was like for them to be managers. Basically helped my boss visualize what it would look like for them to be managers to slowly make her more comfortable with this idea.

When I brought it up the first time it was a major shift, it was going way outside of our comfort zone. So you want to create a minimum viable ask. So thinking about what does that thing you're trying to influence right now? What is something that could be a minimum viable ask for you and pitching that idea to your boss? What's something that is so, so much of a no brainer that it will be impossible for them to say yes. Get them used to saying yes, because the more they say yes, the harder it will be for them to say no to future asks from you.

Step 4 - Make it Easy for Them to Understand

Step four is my favorite and that's make them understand it. Now remember, just because whatever you're asking for or whatever you want to influence them for, remember just because it's black and white to you, doesn't mean, it's going to make sense to the other person. When they're not getting it, you need to make it really easy and obvious for them to understand.

Sometimes this requires some creativity on your part. I had a situation with one of my boss's boss, where we were being forced by the company to switch to a new software tool. It was for our ERP system. We had been working in the previous ERP system for years and the department was very comfortable with it. It's how we entered our bill of materials. So there was a lot of time spent from all the detailers and drafters working in this software. Then overnight we were asked to switch into a new ERP system.

Someone in the company had some shiny object syndrome and they fell in love with this new piece of software. And they didn't really think about how this impacts all the other departments. Once we started working in the software, it was taking us at least 10 times as long to enter our bill of materials. Every project went through this process. So every project had a large percentage of the lead time that was increased by literally 10 times over. This wasn't like a training problem. This wasn't a familiarity problem. It literally just took that much longer to enter a bill of materials into the program for this project, per project.

I would explain this to my boss, anecdotally I would explain, Hey, it takes this much longer. This is impacting lead times, but it wasn't getting his attention. My boss was at the executive level. So, he couldn't really picture what went into detailing the bill of materials and how to enter those into the ERP system.

So, what did I do? I challenged him. I said, well, I just want to show you how this ERP system works. Would you mind shadowing a few of the detailers on our team so you could see how they enter the bill of materials with the new ERP system, but I'd also like you to watch them enter the bill of materials in our previous ERP system too.

So we basically created a, a Pepsi challenge, a before and after. I created a clear visual for him to see how much longer it took cause he wasn't understanding that on his own. Once he saw that though, he sat with one of our detailers and watched them enter the bill of materials the new way and the old way. He got it right away.

He's like we can't be having our engineers spending this much time on this, we're paying them a lot of money to do their job. We can't be wasting money on having them redundantly do all this data entry work. So then we worked together immediately on figuring out a different solution, which ended up being the rest of the company used the new ERP system, but we had a software developer develop a plugin that we could still do it our own way and then have it automatically get uploaded into the new system.

So it wasn't all or nothing, if I didn't take a step back and consider this, I probably would have proposed not using this ERP system, but that wouldn't have been the right solution either. Instead, you know, I got my boss to see the problem, and then we work together on coming up with a creative solution, which was developing a piece of custom software.

Another example of this when I was a manager. I want it to offload production scheduling because it was eating up so much of my time. It was eating up over 20 hours a week. I wasn't really good at production scheduling. I didn't like it. We were growing too so it was just absorbing more and more and more of my time.

So I wanted us to get a new position, an engineering coordinator position that would take care of all the scheduling. But my boss, didn't think that that wasn't necessary. She didn't see the value in that. She felt like I should be able to manage all that stuff. So she wasn't getting it. She wasn't understanding how much work I had on my plate. So what did I do?

I physically listed out all the tasks that go into running the production schedule. I made a list for every single task I was doing that went into managing the production schedule from entering a project into the program, through updating people and other stakeholders throughout the week. I listed all those things out and how much time went into it. So I gave her a tangible list and showed her physically how much time this was eating up, instead of just saying it anecdotally. Once she saw that, she realized what she was paying me versus what it would cost to pay an engineering coordinator to do this work and then it became a no brainer.

It seemed like common sense to me because I was doing it, but I had to take a step back and figure out how can I make this tangibly obvious? How can I make this so obvious to her that she gets it?

So that's step four. You just got to make it really easy for them to understand. You do that by figuring out physical and tangible ways to demonstrate your points versus relying on them to connect the dots on their own.

Step 5 - Mentally Rehearse How You're Going to Influence Them

Step five is mentally practice. What I mean by that is you want to rehearse, you know, rehearse your influence pitch.

So first give some thought to what you're going to say and how you're going to say it. You also want to consider where you're going to do it. You're going to do it in their office, or you gonna do it off site. Are you going to do it in a team meeting? How are you going to deliver your ask? Really picture this crystal clear.

Then once you've done this. Mentally visualize and mentally practice you delivering your pitch. You want to imagine? How are they going to react? What questions or concerns do you think they're going to have? What will be the reason they say yes or what will be the reason they say no? You want to use this mental practice to do a few things.

First, you want to sniff out the potential roadblocks and advance. So that you can take these things into account and revise your pitch accordingly. That way you can pre address their concerns before they come up.

The other thing this accomplishes is that it gets you more comfortable with the pitch, you know, by mentally practicing this and mentally visualizing yourself in this scenario, you're going to feel more comfortable and less stressed when you're actually in this narrow, because you've already gone through it.

As far as your brain considers it, your brain can't tell the difference between what you imagined and what's reality. So your brain is going to be, feel a lot more comfortable in that scenario.

I actually use this technique, this mentally visualizing technique for when I convinced my boss to give me the okay on letting a few people on my team work from home on Fridays. I did this to increase productivity because I noticed that some people were working more productively from home. Now this is before COVID and before people were working from home on the regular. So back then, this is a little bit more taboo of a topic. I knew that when I presented it to my boss, his main concern would be that if we let a few people work from home, then everyone was going to want to do it. He was very all or nothing like that.

So I pre addressed his concern in my pitch and I called attention to it by saying, now, obviously a concern would be that if we let one or two people to do this, everyone's going to want to do this. But my thoughts on that is if this helps people on our team work more productively and they can prove that it helps them work more productively, why wouldn't we let them do it? Why wouldn't we want them to be more productive? When I said that he had no counter argument for it, you know, why wouldn't he want people to be more productive? So he immediately gave me the okay to try it out.

When you try this mental visualizing technique, it's amazing how quickly you identify all the potential roadblocks upfront, which again, gives you the ability to build these counterpoints into your pitch before your boss even brings it up.

Bonus Tips on How to Manage Upward

Now a few bonus tips on this before we wrap up.

When you're making a pitch, something that helps is making it sound revokable. People fear permanent change. They fear big changes. So you want to try to make it sound like your ask doesn't have to be permanent. This'll help them feel more comfortable with letting their guard down and trying something new, which gives you the opportunity to get their approval and demonstrate how your ask will benefit them in the company. It'll also help them get more comfortable with saying yes to you again, when you propose other changes.

Another thing you want to do is you want to make sure you're using clear and concise communication. A lot of people make the mistake of overexplaining and you ended up losing them in the details through paralysis analysis. So it makes sure to present your ideas, your updates, and your proposals in a clear and concise manner. Let them ask questions or let them follow up with more questions, because that gives you the opening to provide more details with them. Don't info, overload them right away. You're just going to lose them.

The last tip on this is you want to make sure you're providing solutions, not just problems. A lot of times when we're trying to influence upward, we're coming from a place of, hey, this problem is happening and we need to fix this, but you're going to lose your manager's attention if you're not bringing up solutions.

So when you're presenting the challenges. Focus on offering potential solutions rather than just highlighting and overemphasizing the problems. You want to showcase your problem solving skills and your initiative by finding constructive and creative resolutions. Ideally in a perfect world, you want to showcase how your idea or your suggestion is the perfect solution to the challenge we're pointing out as well.

Remember that effective management is about building a collaborative and mutually beneficial relationship with your superiors. But understanding their needs, communicating effectively and demonstrating initiative, you can contribute to a positive work environment, while also enhancing your career prospects in the short and longterm. If you want to learn more ways to level up your influence skills, check out my episode called The Most Important Skill You Need For Persuading And Influencing People.

check out my FREE pdf download - “OPTIMIZE ENGINEERING
TEAM EFFICIENCY”

Strategies to Dominate Productivity in Today's Shifting Landscape

Your company is tasking your team to produce more, with less - and you're struggling to figure out how to get it done.

Download this FREE handbook to gain insights into the 5
essential strategies engineering leaders and companies need to catapult your team's efficiency - even with limited resources!