Tell us what the four C's are and how can an EA tell which one their executive is?

Yeah.

It might be helpful to back up and explain how the book is structured around these 10 conversations for managing up.

Because what I was also finding is that people had these vague one-liners and ideas like, oh, I know I need to be proactive.

I know I need to understand my executive's priorities.

I know I need to make myself visible.

But how does that all come together in a methodology? Yeah.

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Can you define what the honor roll hangover is, what it is and how we know if we have it.

Yes.

So the honor roll hangover is that achievement addiction that follows us into our adulthood.

So if anyone here is that classic A plus gold star, tick all the boxes sort of kid, then you may have an honor roll hangover as an adult.

It is that striving for the perfect grade and And feeling like anything less than that is a failure.

So a lot of times I hear this with clients.

If they don't get exceeds expectations across everything on their performance review, they feel like, what am I doing at this job? I'm a complete failure.

This was really helpful for me and I was hoping you could share it with our amazing audience.

Right

...

since it requires more listening and asking questions than almost any of the other ones do.

The other ones require a bit more assertiveness behind them and kind of putting forth your own ideas and advocacy.

But the alignment conversation and, and looping back to what we were just talking about, having this ecosystem of people you need to manage up to, uh, uh, I can get into some specific alignment questions to ask, but there's a model, I call it power mapping, that I share inside of that chapter that's very useful if you are the person that feels like, "I, I don't even understand how to analyze the dynamics that are going on around me.

It feels like I have so many people I need to influence, and I don't have enough hours in the day to do that, so what do I do?" So power mapping is a way to very quickly sketch out and visualize where to put your maximum effort.

And so it's really ranking your stakeholders based on their level of influence, so their actual sway and positional power, and their level of interest in whatever project, idea, initiative you are working on at that stage, because this can change, right? And their level of interest is, what is their personal investment or stake in this? Now, as you can imagine, people who are high influence and high interest are where you want to place your most focus, the people you want to be in touch with the most, send updates to, involve in, you know, uh, surveys in advance, and loop in on every meeting.

Mm

Only on Netflix.

I think in many ways we are all prone to overthinking, now more than ever, where we have so much more information coming at us, and our brains weren't built for this.

When there is ambiguity, when there are problems happening, our mind wants to solve that, and that's where overthinking comes in.

So there are three general types of overthinking.

I discuss all of this in my HBR article.

The first is rumination, when you are stuck in the past and you're replaying situations.

You may be replaying that conversation you had at work or that slip-up you made in a meeting.

So how do you do that? How do you get access? What are the right questions to ask? How much time do you spend on that?

Yeah.

Let's start with access first, because I think that can be a hidden area where people first trip themselves up, because you are very aptly pointing out that the person we may be dealing with day to day is not the only person that we need to influence.

And so there is a process I take my clients through when I'm working with teams on trainings that we will work on, which is called power mapping.

And that is really being able to identify the ecosystem of players and prioritize who you need to connect with and how.

Because you have limited time, you have limited bandwidth, you can't just indiscriminately try to build the same strength of relationship or spend the same time with everyone.

And so on power mapping, we're looking at a two by two.

make sense?

So how do you do that? How do you get access? What are the right questions to ask? How much time do you spend on that?

Yeah.

Let's start with access first, because I think that can be a hidden area where people first trip themselves up, because you are very aptly pointing out that the person we may be dealing with day to day is not the only person that we need to influence.

And so there is a process I take my clients through when I'm working with teams on trainings that we will work on, which is called power mapping.

And that is really being able to identify the ecosystem of players and prioritize who you need to connect with and how.

Because you have limited time, you have limited bandwidth, you can't just indiscriminately try to build the same strength of relationship or spend the same time with everyone.

And so on power mapping, we're looking at a two-by-two.

makes sense.

Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.

The more senior you become, the harder it gets to talk about your own impact, and if you get it wrong, it can stall your career.

See, at junior levels, it's simple.

You built the model.

You closed the deal.

You wrote the code.

But as a senior leader, your team does the execution.

So I love Aaron's question about, you know, how can you use emotional intelligence or how can you use problem solving templates or strategies so that you can resolve workplace conflicts, you know, and then hopefully they don't end up in your boss's lap because you've kind of, you've solved them where they started.

Yeah.

Like you were saying, I wish everything was sunshine and rainbows.

Unfortunately, you know, also the higher you rise, the more complex things get and often the bigger the personalities get.

And so this this happens more and more competing demands and people want things their way.

There are clashes.

And so a couple of things come to mind here.

So can you talk about that a little bit for us?

Mm-hmm

...

but I don't wanna be a pushover, and how do I say no to someone that literally has authority over my work and can actually tell me what to do? But at the same time, I have my team that I need to protect, and I need to be a good leader to them, and I wanna deliver good...

There's all these tensions happening here which makes it just so loaded.

And as I said, it, no is not a complete sentence.

If you just say, "No, I'm not doing that," you're b- that, that is a violation of the power dynamics here, right? It is not enough to say, "No, I'm not doing that." So when it comes to boundaries, I always say start with questions, right? This goes along with our whole conversation of you may not know the full story.

You may also be making assumptions about what is being asked of you.

And I know this is something you spend a lot of time on in terms of your writing as well as in your work with clients, but I'm wondering, what do you e- what do you think most people get wrong or maybe mix up when it comes to this idea of wanting to be influential, let's just say, inside of your organization?

So what do you do with someone like me?

Well, first we need to prioritize because this is the most common experience of a sensitive striver is this feeling of it's almost like a rubber band ball or a ball of yarn.

If you've ever had that and it's all tangled up and it can feel like, well, I take things personally.

I overthink.

I'm a people pleaser.

It's this whole mess of struggles.

How do you know what thread to pull on to actually start unraveling it? And that's why in my first book, Trust Yourself, What I set out to do was dimensionalize what it means to be a sensitive striver so you can start to create some prioritization around that.

How do we deduce what personality type someone is, especially if we haven't met them yet, if that's even possible? Are the frameworks out there either yours or longstanding ones that you use that you recommend people try and fill out questionnaires to plan this kind of stuff out?

And then you'll say an off-the-cuff remark that wasn't in your script and people are stand up and applaud and you think wow yeah and that's how we refine even these you know any kind of pitch or presentation i think so let's talk about seniority so your book managing up talks a lot about this but i want to talk about it in the setting of a pitch because often we walk into a room and even if we're quite senior we're not as senior as the ceo for example of the company we're pitching to give me your thoughts on on this and how we can manage

What you just said there is the entire reason why I wrote this book.

Because after Trust Yourself came out, the number one thing I heard from people in my audience was, I feel confident in myself now.

I know I have value to bring to the table.

All of that goes out the window when I get in this room.

I'm a VP.

I'm an SVP.

How do we deduce what personality type someone is, especially if we haven't met them yet, if that's even possible? Are there frameworks out there, either yours or longstanding ones that you use that you recommend people try and fill out questionnaires to plan this kind of stuff out?

Um, let's talk about somebody that you've worked with who has applied this where in the past they might have struggled, but after using the techniques everything changed.

There was a really profound situation around this that I actually chose to open the book with because it was one of the biggest transformations I've seen in my career.

This client, she reported directly to the CEO.

She was in a, a C-suite position, so you know, by, by all intents and purposes someone very accomplished, very high achieving in her career.

Yet now as she was reporting to the CEO, there was a lot of friction between them where she felt like he was cutting her off all the time.

She would feel understood.

He was getting frustrated with her performance to the point where they kind of had this come to Jesus conversation where he said, "I don't know if you're in over your head, incompetent, or both." And that was just like a punch in the gut for her.

Since he has less power at work, how can he negotiate this?

Yes.

which is understandable because we are all operating in this world where we do have to be team players, but you don't want to be a pushover.

And for the vast majority of people who are listening to this, you're not only setting boundaries for yourself, but you're probably setting boundaries for your entire team or your business unit.

So there's a bit more stakes behind it.

And I think the good news is, and actually something a lot of people overlook when we talk about boundaries, is gauging what I call your pushback power.

Because there's all these invisible dynamics that go into how often and how forcefully you can push back and say no.

Everything from your tenure in the organization, because obviously someone who's been there six months has very different leverage to push back than someone that's been there six years, for example.

Can you explain a little bit about these four personas? Because it's important to understand who you're speaking with and what pushes their buttons, what motivates them and what potentially can create an uncomfortable conversation.

You also recommend that as part of this alignment that you meet with your skip-level boss, right? Your boss's boss.

Yes.

Managing up has to extend beyond your boss.

You wanna make sure you have the bigger picture, right? And your skip level operates at a higher level than your manager, so they are in different conversations.

They may have information or line of sight that your manager doesn't have that can inform what you're doing day to day.

Also, from a career growth standpoint, you want to make sure that person knows who you are, they know your name, they know the types of things that you work on, because your advancement in the organization, even project assignments, may involve and typically will involve other people besides your manager.

Meeting with your skip level can be a little tricky because you don't want your boss to feel like you're going around them, you're cutting them out.

There's a lot out there and we've got a lot of episodes about this too, but how would your advice for that differ from, you know, what people have maybe already heard or know how to, how to advocate for yourself or getting a raise or getting a promotion?

Yes, well, let's,

if I may just back up a little bit because this is important.

So you said the word conversations and that's a very important element to this book and this approach because it's based around these 10 key conversations to have to manage up effectively and to influence without authority.

And I chose to frame it that way because I think when many of us are told you need to manage up more effectively, we need to see you influencing your stakeholders better, we think, well, how? How do I do that? What does that mean? Or we get very piecemeal tips about being proactive and taking initiative and know their priorities but none of that is very in-depth it usually breaks down when we actually hit the complexities of these situations and so the 10 conversations framework is an idea to help you or methodology rather to make managing up more graspable, something you can actually wrap your head around, but it's also sequential.

And so before we even get to the boundaries conversation is one of them, and we can absolutely talk about tactics from that, But there's several conversations that precede that, that have to come before that.

And it's things like alignment.

How are you getting on? I mentioned, how are you getting on the same page and you understanding what's the most meaningful, high value work I can be doing? What are the priorities that are important to my boss, the organization? Because if you're not aware of that, you're rowing in the wrong direction.

But it's like, how can somebody do that when they really feel like they don't have the ability or even option to the option to say no

Mm-hmm

... picture, especially someone who is opering at, operating at the C-suite level.

They may not necessarily want to know all the minutiae, the ins and outs, the process, the tools you used.

They want to know, what's the bottom line here, and why does this matter to me in the big picture? And so you almost have to practice some upward empathy to put yourself in their shoes, to think about from a strategic perspective, how might the CEO use what you're going to give them to report up to the board, and how can you give it to them in a format that makes it easy to share? So much of successfully managing up comes down to saving the people around you cognitive energy.

And so if you're presenting something to the CEO, it should be in a format that they could turn around and share with their executive team or the board.

The same goes if you have a performance review.

You know, we- we're coming out of or coming into, depending on a c- a company's cycle, performance review season.

Mm.