Managing up is as much a human science as a process one, but here are a few things I’ve learned over the years that have emerged from a bit of trial and error, and have proven helpful. I hope you’ll share yours in the comments.

1. Communicate Frequently

This seems simple, but its rarely done well (and I am continually trying things and improving how and when I communicate and via what channels). I like digest updates via email that are succinct: What are we doing, what’s the status, what challenges are we facing if any, what’s our estimated next step. Ultimately, you need to use the medium that’s comfortable for the person to whom you’re reporting. If they’re a phone person, update calls might work best.

Know when you need to take a conversation to a more private channel, too. In general, I’m not a big fan of disagreeing over email (and NEVER put someone in a difficult position by copying their colleagues or team members on an email of that nature). Instead, I use email to say “I’d like to talk with you about this issue because I feel/think X, Y, and Z. Can we have a phone call to discuss?” It sets the stage for the topic of conversation, but says very clearly that this is a conversation that requires higher touch than an electronic channel.

2. Celebrate Success

Little victories are quite important, as they can illustrate indicators toward the bigger goal, and make the huge objectives seem much more attainable on a day to day basis.

This isn’t to say you shout from the rooftops about everything you did that was awesome. Instead, take opportunities to point out the great work that your team or colleagues are doing, and specifically point toward small milestones that represent progress toward your goals. If your team has done a great job of laying bricks, be sure you demonstrate and highlight how those bricks will create the bigger, more beautiful wall.

3. Hypothesize Failures

Stumbling blocks happen. They’re healthy, in fact. The key to making sure they serve you instead of hinder you is to understand a bit about why they happened, and what the alternative is. The best way to communicate these up the ladder is to say “this didn’t go the way we planned. Here’s why I think that happened, and what we can do to change our approach moving forward.”

If you communicate calm and control in the face of failures, it’s easier for your manager to have faith that when something goes awry, you’ll handle it with a level head. Failures are scariest when they’re unanticipated and when they’re met with reactionary, panicky people. If the project is burning, what you want is someone with a hose, not a can of gasoline.

4. Illustrate Guiderails

This comes with having a well-outlined plan. Plans don’t have to be complicated to be good, but they need to articulate what your main goals are, and then the projects underneath them that will help drive them forward along with who is responsible for and participating in each.

That framework will always give you a place to go back to and say hey, we agreed on this plan of attack. If we want to take on this new thing or shift the course, we have to revisit these priorities and our workloads and make decisions accordingly. It helps keep things on track without having to be the stick in the mud to throw cold water on every new initiative OR say yes to and take on a bunch of stuff that’s just not workable.

5. Create an Idea Parking Lot

When you embark on new territory, small successes tend to breed lots of “you know what we could do?” ideas from the enthusiasts on your management team that aren’t trying to herd the cats of the day-to-day. Some of them are easy to implement and do, but others are loftier, harder, or downright impossible.

Instead of stifling creativity, create an idea parking lot where you can house all of those ideas, and revisit them as a team on a regular basis to see which could move from the parking lot to the actual roadmap. It keeps the ideas alive somewhere, makes the idea folks feel as though they’re being heard, and gives all of you a place to go when you’re seeking inspiration for what’s next on your path.

6. Use Their Language, Not Yours

If you’re speaking to management, you need to spend a great deal of time listening to them and asking questions in order to understand what’s important to them. Then, when you’re discussing your social media strategy, everything you present should be in the context of those things and how they relate. Speaking about social media using jargon, buzzwords, and unfamiliar language can undermine the credibility of your program. Use clear words, and always point to the what, so what, and how of what you’re doing (hat tip to the brilliant Tamsen McMahon for labeling those elements so well).

But be wary of condescension. No one likes to feel like an idiot, and it can be easy to slip into that mode if you’re the expert in a subject and you’re trying to explain it to someone who isn’t as experienced. This goes for down the ladder as well as up, but it’s particularly sensitive when talking to someone who technically outranks you. When in doubt, ask a colleague or a friend to listen to you first to see how you might be perceived.

7. Pick Your Battles

Not everything is worth resistance, even if it’s frustrating or annoying. Ask yourself if the battle you’re about to wage is actually an issue that’s going to fully derail your projects or plans, or if it’s a minor inconvenience or a style/taste issue that you can work around in favor of keeping the larger project on track.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself when you’re wondering whether your challenge is worth the fight.

8. Employ Empathy

Managing up requires being mature enough to put yourself in someone else’s position. Remember that your boss has people that she’s answering to, too, and they might be asking tough questions. As a matter of fact, you might even consider asking management what *they* are being charged and challenged with, so you can understand how what you’re doing impacts upper levels of the business.

Social media can be intimidating for some folks. It’s easy to just spout off and say that they “don’t get it”, but there’s often a deeper reason for resistance, be it a human or business one (and more often than not, the former). If you can be more mindful of reading people, situations, and taking a step back far enough to see the project from a different vantage point, it can help you understand the issues and motivations that might be in play, even if they’re not articulated.

So what would you add? These don’t apply to just social media of course, but that’s a simple example of an unfamiliar strategy that many are contending with right now. Have any tips and tricks you can share with folks here?

image by Robert Couse-Baker

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
8 Ways to Manage Up for Social Media Success

But there are some shortcomings to trying to do business in Twitter Direct Messages (DMs), and I think they’re important to consider. I’ve noticed a lot of folks in my stream trying to swap them out for email, and it just doesn’t work as well, at least for me.  I’ll be curious to hear your take. Here’s why:

DMs can get consumed by the stream.

DMs are linear, and if you use a client of some kind (like mine, Seesmic Desktop), the ones on the bottom of the pile just get shoved off the screen. In fact, API call limitations sometimes mean that a DM might never get put into the client at all. If you choose to turn off email notifications for volume’s sake like I do, you don’t get notified of new ones, and even if you do, you have to get into your Twitter client to respond. When you’re mobile? Even worse.

In addition, they’re not threaded, which means that your DMs are interspersed with all the other ones that arrive in the same period, potentially fracturing our conversation even further. And with the volume of junk-clicking DM spam that continues to happen, your message can very easily get lost in the fray.

DMs aren’t annotated, and they don’t wait for you.

Related to the above, DMs don’t easily hang out in an inbox that’s easy to sort or search later. You can’t set up rules or filters or priorities. In order to really take advantage of them and be responsive,  you need to be in front of your Twitter stream as they come in. Otherwise, they’re really easy to lose and forget. This to me is probably the most critical reason why they don’t work well for business dealings that take more than one ping to get done.

DMs are hard to share.

It’s cumbersome to forward a DM string (though some of the mobile clients like Tweetie 2 do it pretty well). You can’t add on, copy, or append other people to the string that might need to be in on the conversation at some point. DMs are definitively one to one, and while that’s great for some things, it’s not so great for others.

You can’t organize or archive DMs, or easily save the information they contain.

Most of us need some way of sorting or organizing the messages we receive in order to act on them. At the very least, it’s ideal to be able to keep or somehow store the information contained in them without taking a pile of extra steps. You can’t do that easily with a DM, and alongside the point above, if you send me your phone number in a DM, I can’t search for it or easily find it if it’s been buried from three days ago.

Some conversations just can’t be conducted effectively in 140 characters.

I’m all for concise, but it’s really hard for me to answer questions comprehensively or provide solid information through a DM. It’s equally hard for me to receive same. And if there’s lots of back and forth or discussion necessary to work something out, 140 character bursts just aren’t sufficient. It’s way too easy to misinterpret tone, abbreviations, or leave critical information out trying to cram it into a character limit.

So, what are they good for?

Direct Messages can be great as a nudge, a heads up, quick call for help, or a door to exchanging contact information like a phone number or email to move the conversation somewhere more elastic. They’re a good short burst private conversation mechanism if you know the other person is on  Twitter at that given moment. They can be a good hello and get acquainted vehicle in a casual, personal way (not a crappy automated one).

But overall, email to me is a much more consistent and universally adopted form of online business communication. It’s been through its paces and has a level of functional maturity and reliability that just isn’t matched by messaging in other platforms (even Facebook or LinkedIn mail, though those are a bit better than DMs).

Not everyone uses Twitter the same way (if at all), and you can’t assume that everyone makes it work the way you do. It’s not consistent enough yet, and it doesn’t work its way into other business functions or applications very well.

The way I use it and the way it’s built, DMs aren’t an effective and robust enough form of communication to conduct meaty pieces of business. Not yet (and maybe not ever). Your mileage might vary, of course, but I’m going to keep pushing the people I work with not to rely on them as a main communication hub.

How about you? What’s been your experience, and how are DMs working for you as a communication tool? Let us hear it.

image by Pink Sherbet Photography

A post from Brass Tack Thinking
Why Not To Do Business in Direct Messages