Source: http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Business-Intelligence/Rules-You-Never-Learned-in-School-311425/
Time spent trying to please your boss is processing waste and provides no value to your customers. Leaders and staff need to recognize this as a major cultural problem because it will negatively affect the long-term success for your organization.
Mark Lovas, one of the best leaders I have ever worked with, blogged in “Being on purpose and off self“:
Leadership: how much time do your people spend trying to please you versus getting the desired results? Are they experts at managing their leaders and mediocre at doing the actual thing? Are they getting good at the job or managing up? I’ve found a tremendous amount of time can be wasted by approval seeking within a company. Powerpoint, meetings, and calls devoted to finding a sense of confidence in the organization, not doing the actual thing.
In my experience, most leaders are not people who consciously demand this sort of activity, but it often persists because those that manage up often receive public praise and promotions. You would be surprised how much time is spent when staff feel the need to game the system to look good for the boss. Think about how that time could be better spent doing Kaizen!
Spend time assessing for “managing up” behavior. It will be a challenging improvement because the causes will be deeply embedded in the system. The benefit will be a clearer focus on the customer, freed up time to use in creating value, and capacity for future improvements.
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I thought the phrase “managing up” referred to an employee trying to influence their manager (trying to change their view or trying to get the manager to do things that benefit you and your work). I don’t think “managing up” means brown nosing or other negative things like that.
When I worked at Dell Computer in 1999-2000, my manager (a director) said clearly one day (referring to himself), “My job is to make my boss look good.” That was one of the key days that made me realize I needed to leave that company. That was definitely part of the culture there. I thought it was about customers!!! Silly me.
Crazy Dell story! I am glad you left and ended up in the Lean Hospitals world!
I was on the fence of calling it “managing up” since it does include the more positive influencing aspect. I still would wonder why leaders and staff are not aligned to need influencing. If someone is not focused on the customer or the needs of the business to be able to serve customers, processing waste is generated by requiring influence. Maybe this waste is needed to better ensure the system has a clear aim.
I also think a lot of the “trying to look good” actions are not always brown-nosing but just attempts to ensure non-gemba-visiting leaders have visibility of the good work people are doing. They aren’t gaming the system but trying to show their value.
At Dell, it was about looking good rather than being good. At least in that local culture and environment.