How Do I Lead Up?

I was recently asked this question by a coaching client of mine. Like so many of us, she had a boss, and that boss needed her leadership.

Although this may seem like a contradiction at first, it’s actually a very common situation. Remember that leadership is not actually about your title or your boss’s and it’s not about your relative position on the organizational chart. Leadership is about solving problems and changing the order of things for the better and isn’t defined by either title or position.

Her question reminded me of a similar situation in my career. I had just achieved the lowest rung of middle management. I was responsible for a group of sales and services teams that worked with a particular customer. Very soon after I arrived, the customer announced they were putting all of their communications services out for bid. The contract would be worth $25 Billion. It was a very, very big deal and way over my head. I needed help and lots of it.

My boss had just become a Vice President and an officer of the company. This was a position he had been working toward for a very long time. He was now part of “the club,” could eat in the “officers’ dining room” and spent a lot of time at corporate headquarters with his superiors.

I knew a lot more about this customer and their requirements than he did because I was closer to the ground. I talked to my boss about the risks of losing our current business. I explained how intense the competition would be. I painted a picture of the resources we would need and how difficult they would be to commandeer. None of it worked. He would not engage in the way that was necessary.

So I took a step back and considered the problem from a different angle. What did my boss need? He needed a win in his new job. He didn’t need a long, grinding, risky proposition with no clear strategy for success. In order to engage him, we had to find some common ground on where we were (Current State) and a shared vision of where we wanted to go (Future State). And then we had to build a program together of how to go from where we were to where we needed to be.

We could both agree that losing all our current business would be a big failure for the company and for both of us. We also agreed our current business wasn’t sufficiently profitable to justify the kinds of resources required to win the new business. The only Future State worth striving for involved building new capabilities for this customer that would also position us more competitively with other customers. We didn’t just need to save our current business. We needed to win the contract through innovation and then leverage that innovation throughout the company. This was ambitious but possible. It was worth the company’s investment of time and resources. And my boss would be a hero.

We won the contract. He was a hero. I got promoted.

How do you lead up? Stop thinking about your boss’s title. Consider him or her a colleague with pressures and conflicts and needs of their own. Apply all the lessons of leadership you’ve learned in the same way with your boss as you would in any other situation with anyone else. This isn’t disrespectful. This is problem-solving.