Managing Up: Build Effective Relationships With Your Boss
Learn how to build successful, effective relationships with your manager, skip level, and senior peers.
This class contains a systematic, focused process for Managing Up successfully. It covers how to manage up in a variety of situations and to different people such as senior peers and skip level leaders.
Managing up is not just about getting recognition for one's work, but rather about investing in the relationship and understanding what the other person likes and dislikes, just as one would with friends or family.
Building a good relationship with your boss will make everything else easier, including handling conflicts and opportunities.
Your manager relationship is the single most important relationship you have at work; make it count!
Key Skills Covered
Working Well With Your Boss
- Understanding Your Boss
- Effective Communication
Handling Tricky Situations
- Problem Solving and Decision Making
- Conflict Resolution
- Giving Upward Feedback
- Managing Expectations
Driving Your Professional Development
- Ask for Career Support
- Earn and Get Investment From Leaders
Peers, Skip Levels, and Politics
- Peers and Skip Levels
- Politics and Ethics
- Enabling People to Manage Up to You
Ethan Evans is a retired Amazon Vice President, now sharing his leadership expertise.
Starting at Amazon as a Senior Manager, then Director, then Vice President, Ethan has had decades of experience in the skill of managing up. In this course, he shares stories of presenting to executives like Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, and others. In addition, as a senior leader in the company, Ethan saw both effective and ineffective ways that his employees managed up to him.
Ethan spent 12 years in startups (10 in leadership roles) and then had a 15 year career at Amazon. He has led global teams of 800+ and products with annual revenue above $500M. He holds over 70 patents. More about Ethans:
- Reviewed 10,000+ resumes, conducted 2,500+ interviews, and 1,000+ hires.
- Was an Amazon Bar Raiser and Bar Raiser Core Leader, responsible for training and maintaining Amazon's group of interview outcome facilitators.
- Helped advocate for and draft the Amazon Leadership Principle (LP) "Ownership" — the words "They never say ‘that’s not my job." are Ethan's.
These career growth courses are developed from his own knowledge and input from his extensive network of fellow coaches and executives. (See Rahul's interview with Ethan about the top 1% of engineers.)
- Connect with Ethan on LinkedIn
- Taro members get a discount to join Ethan's Level Up community
This course was incredibly insightful by providing concrete, actionable advice from the boss’s perspective on how they expect their reports to navigate tricky situations. I’ve previously thought those were no-win situations when I’ve encountered them in the past.
Glad to hear that there’s actually a way to navigate them successfully! Really appreciated hearing the rationale of why those techniques are effective.
I really liked how Ethan presented ideas and how he also shared an instance/story along with it. It made it easier to correlate and understand the message that he was trying to convey.
This course is proof of why he is one of the top career coaches out there.
I can’t thank you enough - I improved my relationship with my current employer and received an offer as M2 (Senior Manager) at Intuit through this course. Thank you so much. Ethan’s content and style was excellent, I went through the course in detail. I am recommending Taro to everyone now!
Great course with clear and precise delivery
Excellent course. Very helpful to new engineers. The lessons here will help you to build rapport with your manager/skip which are crucial to your growth (especially during promotions).
This course offers a good introduction, but it tends to skim the surface. While the content is solid, it feels somewhat generic, similar to what you might find on platforms like YouTube, Udemy, or even Masterclass. To truly stand out, the course could benefit from including more actionable resources and practical scenarios that allow for hands-on practice. Incorporating these elements would make it more valuable for learners seeking to apply the concepts in real-world situations.
