Creating a culture where employees feel safe to give direct and honest feedback is crucial for effective leadership. This episode explores the concept of managing up, which is not about brown-nosing or manipulation, but rather fostering open communication and mutual respect. The guest emphasizes the importance of empowerment, proactiveness, and bi-directional feedback in building a managing up culture. They also highlight the role of trust in creating a strong communication culture within the organization. Ultimately, managing up is a key pillar of building a high-performance team and becoming an elite organization.
Key Takeaways:
Creating a culture of open communication and mutual respect is essential for effective leadership.
Empowerment is crucial in allowing employees to make decisions and take ownership of their roles.
Building a proactive culture helps identify and address issues before they become major problems.
Bi-directional feedback, including self-evaluation, is a foundation for high performance.
Trust is a key element in building a strong communication culture within the organization.
Timestamp
[0:00:00] Importance of creating a culture of open communication and feedback
[0:01:23] Empowering the team and fostering a proactive culture
[0:02:57] Building a bi-directional feedback culture
[0:04:14] Creating an environment of trust
[0:05:32] Managing up as a key pillar of high performance teams
Transcripts
How to Create a Managing Up Culture
Dr. Jim: [:
That is performing at its highest levels. But if your employees aren't willing to give you the feedback that you need to be more effective as a leader, that is a big failure of leadership. So when you think about creating an engaged workforce or productive work environment a key pillar of that sort of culture has to be managing up.
Let's set aside a misconception really quickly. Managing up isn't about creating an environment where it creates the impression that your employees are brown nosing or manipulating you into any number of outcomes. It's about fostering a culture of open communication and mutual respect.
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So one of the first. things that you need to do is really be focused on empowerment. And what that means is that you're equipping the team with the right tools and training, you're stepping up to responsibilities, you're creating a space where they can own their roles and not just wait for instructions.
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This is what gets you out of those operational fire drills that you often end up in. And oftentimes those operational fire drills are happening because you haven't built a proactive culture. You haven't. built a feedback culture, and certainly you haven't built a culture where your employees feel open and safe enough to give feedback and line of sight into the work and what's on track, what's going well, what isn't, so that you can actually help fix some of those problems before they actually become massive headaches.
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This actually gives you visibility into the areas that you need to work on as a leader and how you accept that feedback and more importantly, act on on that feedback is going to be a big indicator on how effective your organization is in building that managing up culture. All of this relies on the organization and leaders within the organization and managers working on creating an environment of trust.
So if you want to create a culture where communication is really strong and your people are giving you actionable feedback and giving you line of sight into their projects and their tasks and what. Going well or not, you need to start with building relationships that are heavy on building and expanding trust with you and within the team, that's going to one of the key elements that's going to help you build this culture.
team, managing up has got to [:
And this is where often organizations and individuals within organizations, the frontline feels that the work that they do isn't connected to any big. picture because they're not in an environment that has a good communication culture that allows them to communicate up and manage up on the things that they need so that they actually can be effective in what they do.
Make sure you are taking the necessary steps to create that type of culture, because that is going to be a critical step to you becoming an elite organization.
