Managing Up 101: How to Get More from Your Boss with Melody Wilding

Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel

Careers, Business

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Have you ever felt like you lack agency at work, like your boss doesn’t hear you, or like you need to shift your relationships with the people in charge? Managing up might be the key to creating positive, lasting change. In today’s episode, Jessi Hempel talks with Melody Wilding to give you the roadmap to managing your manager. Melody Wilding is an LMSW, executive coach, and author of the new book Managing Up: How to Get What You Want from The People in Charge. Melody and Jessi discuss: Five conversations you can have with your boss to improve your working relationship How managing up is a skill that anyone can learn Aligning yourself with your manager to ensure you are working on the right work Understanding both your boss’s and your own work style and preferences How to give your boss the right feedback in the right way How and when to set boundaries at work Continue the conversation with us at Hello Monday Office Hours! Join us here, on the LinkedIn News page, this Wednesday at 3 PM EST.

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn News
0:02.1	How do you go from just someone who is an order taker and a subordinate to someone who is more of a partner?
0:13.6	And that's really powerful because when you do that, you're equaling out the power dynamic.
0:18.5	It's no more that this person is above me, which means they're
0:21.9	right about everything. It levels it out a little bit. And that's very empowering for you. And it's
0:28.0	helpful to your manager. It's not how things work. But doesn't mean that it's not actually
0:32.4	very possible no matter what culture you are in.
0:37.3	From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jesse Hempel and this is Hello Monday.
0:41.9	It's our show about work on our own terms.
0:47.9	Okay, controversial hot take.
0:50.2	The most important skill in your career is a skill that no one's going to teach you. It's
0:56.0	managing up. Now I know it gets a bad rap, right? The old school way of thinking about this is
1:01.9	being kind of smarmy, complimenting your boss on what they're wearing even though it's probably
1:07.2	something you hate. That's not what I'm talking about. In 2025, managing up
1:12.4	is managing yourself well, setting your manager up for success and setting yourself up for all the
1:19.2	growth opportunities. Now, I know you look around and you think that there are some people
1:23.3	around you who just seem to know how to do this, that it's intuitive or a talent. Well, it's not.
1:29.9	It's actually a skill. And today we're going to get some coaching so that we can all get better at it.
1:35.5	Our guest is Melody Wilding. She's an executive coach and she is a licensed social worker.
1:40.5	And it's really the combination of those two things that makes her so incredibly
1:46.0	talented at understanding the skills involved in managing up. She has a new book out. It's called
1:52.4	Managing Up, how to get what you need from the people in charge. So what does it mean to manage up,
	...

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