What’s really fascinating to me about marketing innovation is how much it relies on a certain amount of creative tension. Similarly in upward management, the art of creating a balance between your goals and your boss’ goals, a similar amount of tension is also required.
Let’s be clear; by tension, I mean the pull between competing ideas, competing business objectives, or even between two personalities. What I don’t mean is conflict for the sake of conflict.
For instance, in an organization new to social media, it’s not unusual to see the role of “social media manager” protected by upper management or set aside as a pet project, largely untouched by other departments. However, as we see social media becoming more prevalent in job titles, our roles are going to depend more and more on our ability to manage the same political pressures placed on everyone else.
In fact, it is in that shift that we are going to see the separation between the good and the great social media marketers.
Lately, I’ve been focused a lot on what it takes to be effective in this space and found it fundamentally comes down to three things, inspired from Lonnie Pacelli‘s landmark “Thirteen Tips to Effective Upward Management {PDF}:”
1) Figure Out What Drives The People Above You
The quickest way to push a social media agenda forward is to frame in terms of things your superiors want to accomplish. Stability, advancement, notoriety; there has to be something each individual manager wants more than anything else. Show how a social media success can help them achieve that goal and that’s how you get align your objectives.
2) Partner With Your Boss
The worst pattern you can fall into with upward management is thinking in an “us” vs. “them” mentality. Sure, the people above you may not get social media like you do but that doesn’t mean they’re against you. Forward links, clip articles, engage in small talk; do anything you can do to open the door to a conversation. Ultimaley, having your boss with you in exploring social media is a lot better than leaving them in the dust. In other terms; dance with the one that brought you.
3) Develop An Effective Communications Plan To Promote Your Findings
As interest in social media grows around your office, take a page from Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper’s book, Cool Hunting: gain power by giving it away {PDF}. Realize that as the social media manager your first priority should be to spread your knowledge around. This means both promoting things that you discover along with knowing when to forward your findings upward with the we designation (see above – partnering with your boss).
The stakes are getting higher across the board in marketing and many of us have to determine how we want to compete going forward. To add to the pressures, as managers of a new and emerging medium, we are now some of the lowest “subject matter experts” to ever emerge on the totem pole.
We must realize we are not only responsible for our ideas but also for their successful adoption and implementation. In order to do that, we must take ownership of our upward relationships and not be afraid to engage them like we do our own medium.