Issue #9

Managing up, high agency, and keeping up with TikTok trends

Author

Stride Team 🐶
November 15, 2022

business executive with colorful background, high resolution, digital art

This week's AI prompt: business executive with colourful background, high resolution, digital art

Welcome to Issue #9. What a week in the crypto world! Our votes are for Jonah Hill and Maisie Williams to star in the inevitable docuseries.

On a more serious note, our thoughts are with the thousands of people who’ve lost hard-earned savings in FTX. If you feel troubled, please reach out to friends, family, and helplines in your cities for emotional and mental support.

WHAT'S INSIDE

  • 🌟 Use subtle influence by managing up to make sure you and your manager are always in sync

  • 🦸‍♀️ Are you ready to save the day? How to become a high agency individual who never folds in the face of a problem

  • ❤️ Fascinating story of how Matthew Shifrin partnered with Lego to create building instructions for the blind

  • 💃🏽 Scroll down to the bottom for a site that helps you keep up with TikTok trends

A DEEPER DIVE: MANAGING UP

Let’s face it, at various times in our careers, we’ve all had difficult bosses. But even if your boss isn’t a real life version of Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada or Bill Lumbergh from Office Space, understanding your manager’s personality and style is important for your career.

As long as you have someone you report to (so this basically applies to everyone without the title of ‘CEO’ — and even then, there are analogous techniques guiding your relationship with investors and shareholders), managing up is critical for setting yourself up for upward mobility within the organization.

‘Managing up’ is the process of taking steps to improve your boss’s efficiency and effectiveness. This process looks a bit different depending on the manager, but the principles stay the same and will help you to be more in control of both how you work and the type of relationship you have with your manager.

Managing Up When Leadership Is Stuck in the Weeds

Many of us have been in situations where we’re managing a project or advancing a new initiative at work and the leaders supervising the work get lost in unnecessary details. How do you manage up so the project doesn’t lose momentum? Using a real-life scenario of how a director at a tech company built a propensity model to streamline sales and presented it to his leaders as well as the salespeople using it, the authors present three strategies to get leaders out of the weeds on a project: 1) Work with your “users,” 2) sell the big picture, and 3) create self-service content.

What it's about: Ian Gross and Samir Ranavat, senior sales and go-to-market leaders at UI Path, discuss ways to use managing up to eliminate roadblocks when management gets stuck on unnecessary details.

TLDR / Key Takeaways

Individuals at all levels in organizations will encounter situations where leaders lose the big picture, and instead nit-pick details that detract from the overarching objective. A three-pronged approach can help reset the conversation and drive your initiative forward.

1. Take a user-centric view. Regardless of your job title, think of yourself as a product manager, with your work being the ‘product’, and use that thinking to identify your ‘users’. The leaders who get stuck in the details are rarely the ultimate users of the work. Continue to work with your true users, understanding their requirements, make iterations based on feedback, and win their trust. The senior leaders that you will eventually need to convince will be more supportive when there is already strong enthusiasm from the actual users.

2. Sell the big picture. Don’t assume buy-in and jump to quickly into the execution details. Use the Minto Pyramid (discussed in Issue #1) to communicate the big picture and what is being solved by your initiative, tying your work to leadership’s priorities. This may mean creating a separate presentation depending on your audience (e.g. your ‘users’ or senior leadership) so that you can craft an appropriate narrative.

3. Create self-service content. If certain questions come up repeatedly, create FAQ, descriptions in the appendix of your presentation, or video tutorials to help make answers more accessible. It’s also good practice to socialize your deck with individuals for a test-run before an important presentation, and use that feedback to inform the structure and content in your deck.

A Tactical Guide to Managing Up: 30 Tips from the Smartest People We Know

Top startup leaders share their best tips for managing up, including communication tactics, building trust, and goal setting with your manager.

What it's about: VC firm First Round Capital compiled a list of 30 tactical steps you can take to successfully manage up

TLDR / Key Takeaways

  • Define success. Have a strong understanding of two questions: 1) What is success for me personally? 2) What is success for my manager’s team?If you aren’t sure your manager knows what you care about, or you don’t know what your manager cares about, ask in your next 1:1. Also make an effort to understand what evidence is required to show this success, whether it’s metrics, milestones, progress reports, testimonials from your cross-functional partners, etc.

  • Share your user guide. Consider creating a ‘user guide’ outlining what your long-term goals are, preferred communication channels, working schedule, etc. Schedule a meeting to discuss these with your manager, to help re-align and illuminate any misconceptions that may have snuck into your day-to-day interactions

  • Align your work with company strategy. Use organizational-level targets as your north star. Demonstrate how the work you’re doing ties to company and team OKRs, since these are already agreed-upon goals. Framing your work in this way will give you more freedom in terms of how you define your own tactical approach for executing.

  • Use a slow-drip to build buy-in. Just like the rule of marketing says that most customers need multiple exposures to a product before they make a purchasing decision, a complex or big initiative internally also benefits from multiple interaction points in order to gain buy-in. Consider dropping an idea casually first to gauge receptiveness, then follow up with a more thorough conversation or presentation.

  • Set the tone in your 1:1s. Take the lead in your 1:1s, including sending an agenda in advance, and calling out where you need support or a decision.

  • Build alliances across the organization. Your manager sees the good, but also the bad and the ugly in your career growth. In the case that the relationship with your manager hits a rough patch, it’s important to also have sponsors who see your potential and help share your wins. Sponsors who are in the room where decisions are made that affect your career can sway a manager that is less engaged.

💡Additional tip: If you want to build relationships with skip-level managers at your organization, consider sending a biweekly or monthly market, BU, or product update.

MENTAL MODEL OF THE WEEK: HIGH-AGENCY

Sometimes our internal narratives can get in our own way and we end up adopting self-limiting (or worse, self-sabotaging) beliefs. The stories we tell ourselves, regardless of whether they originated in our own minds or were imposed by society, have a profound impact on our quality of life and our ability to achieve our goals. Today, we will explore what it means to have ‘high agency’.

To be clear, the concept of agency doesn’t ignore discrimination or other systemic barriers that persist for many people in many parts of the world. Rather, it’s simply a mental model that can help you unlock opportunities if and when the raw ingredients lie before you.

High Agency 1

For: Achieving goals

What is it: People with high agency feel a sense of control over their lives, and they can make decisions about what they want or need and act to meet those needs

When it’s used: Circumventing barriers and achieving goals

When it’s NOT used: While resourcefulness is good, it goes without saying that you should never let it lead you down an unethical or immoral path

High Agency 2

‘High Agency’ can be described as the ability to take confident action while showing good judgment. Having good judgment but not acting on it leads to philosophizing, and being quick to act but showing bad judgment can result in costly errors. So how can we cultivate the quality of high agency?

There are three components that drive a high agency thinker:

1. Internal locus of control - Your hero story is one for you to write, not someone else. By cultivating an internal locus of control, in other words believing that you have control over what happens in your life rather than external forces, you’re able to influence those external forces to achieve your objectives

2. Resourcefulness - It’s important to have the ability to assemble what you need to accomplish your goals. This might mean leveraging your network, doing research or learning a new skill, or considering alternative paths to the goal. A great example of resourcefulness is how the founders of Airbnb sold election-themed cereal during the 2008 US presidential election to make enough money to keep their dream of starting their tech startup alive

3. Questioning the status quo - If you are told something is impossible or has never been done before, do you simply accept it? By cultivating your inner skeptic in the face of obstacles, you’re able to unlock new ways of thinking about the problem at hand. Steve Jobs’s iconic iPhone launch cemented Apple's company culture of questioning the status quo

You can take simple steps to continue to improve how you embody high agency thinking:

1. As we mentioned in Issue #5, language matters. Give careful thought to the language you and your team use at work, and even the language you use in your personal life. Do you comment on the ‘bad’ weather as small talk when it’s rainy outside? Do you tell friends that you ‘hate’ a movie or an actor? Consider adding depth to your descriptions, or reframing them so that next time you can spot the silver lining in the rain cloud 🌈

2. Identify areas where you feel you lack control. Whether that’s feeling like you have an oppressive boss, a lack of personal time due to family or work demands, or a lack of control over your current financial situation. Identify what steps you’ve taken to change these circumstances, and if you can set incremental goals to improve things in the near future

3. Find support. Depending on the situation, mentors, supportive family members, friends, and qualified health professionals can also help you develop into a high agency person by giving an outside-in view on challenges and supporting you while you take steps to achieve your goals

YOUR NEXT STRIDE

Here are our 5 top jobs of the week! If you want to share an open role, please use this form

OFF HOURS

Wellness 🏅

Best sleeping positions for neck pain relief. Waking up with a sore / stiff neck? Here’s some tips to start you in the right sleeping position, and to hold your spine in a better position. I don’t think any of us hold the same position throughout the night but this is a good start for the first few hours of your sleep before you start to toss and turn 😴

Watch 🍿

My Octopus Teacher. This Oscar-winning documentary follows Craig Foster, a filmmaker who forges an unlikely friendship with an octopus 🐙 in the cold water kelp forest, off the coast of Cape Town’s peninsula. Loads of feels in this documentary 🥺

Read 📚

Shoe Dog: A memoir by the creator of Nike by Phil Knight. It’s hard to put this book down. Phil Knight writes a riveting memoir on his journey to building Nike

Listen 🎧

Blind Guy Travels: Brick by Brick. How would you navigate a world you’ve never seen? In this episode, Host Matthew Shifrin shares how he collaborated with a friend and LEGO to develop instructions for blind builders

Doing Good ❤️

We're adding a new section - every week, we'll share one cause to learn about and support. If there are any causes that you're involved with, let us know and we'll feature it!

There’s a humanitarian crisis going on in Iran. If you’d like to learn more, check out United for Iran - a coalition of technologists working to support the people of Iran through technology and online advocacy

RANDOM BUT INTERESTING

This section is going to feature one material a week that we found interesting - but couldn’t really fit it in anywhere else 🤷🏽‍♀️

Looking for some TikTok inspo? It might feel like there’s a new TikTok trend every other day, and it’s hard to keep up. This website lists the most recent TikTok trends so that you can keep up - whether you’re making TikToks for your company or your personal brand.

SHARE THE LOVE

That’s all for this week. Have a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ week ahead!

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