Managing Up: How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge
Melody Wilding
Crown Currency (March q2025)

How to turn the way your situation at work is into the way you want it to be 

To what does the title of this book refer?

Melody Wilding: “Managing up isn’t really about making your boss’s life easier. It’s about taking control of your own work experience.” More specifically, it involves becoming someone “who has the power to shape their entire work experience into one that’s more fulfilling, easeful, and on their own terms.”

Wilding focuses on ten “conversations”  over time with your boss and explains HOW TO achieve these objectives:

1. Alignment: Stop spinning your wheels and work on what really matters
2. Styles: Work with different personalities without pulling your hair out
3. Ownership: Seize opportunities without stepping on toes
4. Boundaries: Say no and set limits without being a complete jerk
5. Feedback: Voice your opinion, even if you’re afraid of pushback
6. Networking: Build a bench of valuable connections and advocates
7. Visibility: Showcase your accomplishments — sans slimy self-promotion
8. Advancement: Get ahead without pissing people off
9. Money:  Ask for (and get) the compensation you deserve
10. Quitting: Say goodbye without burning bridges

Wilding devotes a separate chapter to each of these ten conversations. The material will enable you to “strategically navigate relationships with those who have more positional power than you, namely your boss. It’s a critical skill set for maneuvering through the complex web of power dynamics, conversations, and unspoken expectations that shape our daily work lives…The first step is to adopt a strategic, investigative mindset.”

Here are Melody Wilding’s concluding remarks: “Consider me a partner in your professional journey from here on. Find me at my website [identified on Page 279] and share with me what you do with your insights. Thank you for allowing me to be your guide, and here’s to your success!”

The material provided in this book can be of incalculable value IF (huge “if’) you absorb and digest it, then effectively apply whatever is most relevant to your own situation. You’ll need the aforementioned “strategic, investigative mindset” but also a work ethic that is worthy of your goals. Keep Thomas Edison’s assertion clearly in mind: “Vision without execution is hallucination.”

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Here are two other suggestions while you are reading Managing Up:  First, highlight key passages. Also,  perhaps in a notebook kept near-at-hand (e.g. Apica Premium C.D. Notebook A5), record your comments, questions, and action steps (preferably with deadlines). Pay special attention to the zset of suggestions in the” What to Do When…” section toward the end of each chapter. And check out the free supplementary resources at the website identified on Page 10.

These two simple tactics — highlighting and documenting — will expedite frequent reviews of key material later.