YNPN 2009 Guest Blog: Meredith MacMillan, Learning How to Work For Anyone

by Meredith MacMillan, YNPN 2009 Guest Blogger
Meredith shares her great notes from the YNPN 2009 Professional Development Workshop: Managing Up– What Every Nonprofit Employee Needs to Know about Working Effectively with their Supervisors

Managing Up to Improve Your Relationships (or Learning How to Work For Anyone)

Managing up isn’t being fake, kissing up, or being someone you’re not. What is managing up? According to presenter Dan Poux, managing up is developing a pattern of interaction between you and your supervisor that delivers the best possible results for your organization and yourself.

In the presentation “Managing Up – What Every Nonprofit Employee Needs to Know about Working Effectively with their Supervisors,” YNPN conference attendees learned that managing up is important for several reasons:

• Your supervisor can serve as your advocate and connect you with other areas of the organization.
• You and your supervisor are critically interdependent.
• Managing up will help you to maintain control over your career.

In a fast-paced, funny, and insightful presentation, Poux (who is the Associate Director for Outreach, Operations and Leadership, Science and Technology Policy Fellowships at the American Association for the Advancement of Science – try saying that 3 times fast!) led our group of young nonprofit professionals through a “quick and dirty” process to help us identify our own and our supervisor’s social style: amiable, expressive, analytical, or driver. Now that we have this knowledge, Poux stressed, we need to “flex” our own personal style to better match that of our supervisor.For some, flexing may involve reigning ourselves in by restraining our talkativeness or impulsiveness. For others, flexing can mean pushing ourselves to step out of our comfort zones by being more assertive. The goal of managing up, Poux says, is not to change who we are or to change our boss, but to learn to manage our working relationship in a proactive way. And by doing that, Poux says, we will ultimately be able to learn how to work for (just about) anyone.