Customer Reviews

Managing Up: 59 Ways to Build a Career-Advancing Relationship with Your Boss

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If your notions of how to get along with your boss stopped at the admiring-the-family-photos-on-the-credenza stage, here's how to move it along. Michael Dobson and Deborah Singer Dobson advance kissing-up to a new, practical level, as they straightforwardly explain their boss-wrangling concepts. You can read the brief chapters in bite-size chunks and each one ends with a worksheet. While these concepts about understanding your boss and playing to the boss's priorities are not particularly innovative, they are useful and accessible. The Dobsons wrote their book as much for the folks in the cubicles as for the fellow in the office with his feet on the desk. Reading this book won't change your boss's personality - but it might blunt his pitchfork. We [...] recommend it to staffers who want to get ahead by getting along with the boss, the gatekeeper to the top. And if that takes a little manipulation, well, hey, it's business.

The basic premise of Managing Up is a good one: yes there are problem bosses, and the best way to deal with them is to be pro-active and not assume that it's up to them to recognize their deficiencies and change on their own. As much as we want our bosses to change spontaneously, we must recognize that we can always do better in our own work. By being a better employee, we can improve our relationships with our bosses. This is absolutely correct.

Unfortunately, Managing Up chooses breadth instead of depth. With 59 tips that range from "do good work" to "deal effectively with stereotypes and prejudices", it provides few concrete details in each of its short chapters. In one chapter, the authors suggest becoming familiar with such thinkers as Blanchard, Drucker, Weisbord, and Hertzberg (surprisingly, they omit Covey), but do not include a single one of their books in the bibliography and suggested reading list. In another they describe four different types of bosses and suggest that you may need to adapt to your boss's style, but leave it to the reader to determine how to do so. Perhaps this would have been less frustrating if they had included a list of suggested further reading at the end of each chapter.

Managing Up does not sugar-coat its advice. It suggests mediation rather than law suits in cases of discrimination, warning that being right isn't always enough (unless you are fighting for others who come after you). Although there is the occasional innovative tip such as writing a brief weekly report of your accomplishments, much of the advice in this book is common sense. While it's not a bad idea to read some common sense advice every once in a while, especially if you are on bad terms with your boss, many people who take the initiative to read Managing Up will already be doing much of what the book suggests. For the rest, reading Managing Up may be a good use of their time.

This book has very good advice that will be most useful to two types of audience. For new graduates, seeking a first professional job it's a quick and useful read. It is also good for the rank and file employee who is too hurried to do in-depth reading, but wants to make some quick and dirty improvements in the way they interact with their boss.

This title is based on sound principles, but it doesn't go into a lot of depth. There are literally 59 different short chapters, each with an often useful worksheet about that area. In a sense, you can use this book to get a 59 point perspective on what you are doing well and where you can make improvements.

For those who are seasoned professionals, a lot of this information will be things they already know. However, quickly and consciously surveying these various performance areas periodically can raise awareness of them.

While I think this book is most useful to the audiences I mentioned, I still think it has merit for everyone. You should just know what you are getting before you buy. Much of this information is repeated in other books, but if you are looking for a quick summary of basics this may be just what you need.

Wasn't preachy and from the writing it's obvious the writer is an old hand at organisational dynamics. It was also written without getting too embroiled in the emotional rambling. I identified with many of the scenarios described, and the advice proved useful. Clear, concise and highly readable.

I didn't finish reading the book because I had lost my interest in it. Notwithstanding, the contents are all good and correct. However, having worked for more than 4 years now, I've already known all the ingredients need to climb up the ladder. The problem to me is how to do it effectively and efficiently without leaving a kiss up perception, which is hardly covered in this book. However, if you're a "rookie", a first year employee, a fresh graduate, then this might be the book to read so that you can gain an impressive "hello" effect to your managers and colleagues. In fact, you could actually just browse the table of contents to get the meat of the book.