How to push information to your boss (with a free template!)
One of the best things you can do to manage up and actively manage your boss is to push information to them. Instead of relying on your boss “pulling” information from you, you provide regular updates to them: you “push” information and take ownership of giving them context.
I found that providing regular updates to your boss is an incredibly powerful tool. It gives your boss context, helps them make decisions, helps shape their impressions and perception of your work, and, over time, builds trust. In addition, it helps you manage expectations, and provides visibility into your and your teams' work. It also means that you're taking ownership, signals that you're on top of things, and is a really powerful tool for managing alignment.
In this post, I provide considerations for managing up through status updates, and provide a template that you can use to get started with sharing information more regularly with your boss.
Consider this for getting started:
Optimise for higher-frequency and quick iterations, over extensive and irregular updates. I regularly hear from leaders who struggle with sharing regular updates because there's so much that they want to say, and so little time. I understand that! Resist the urge to share all the things, and instead focus on sharing a few things more regularly.
Know your audience and tailor what you share to their interests. What do they care about? What motivates them? What are their pain points? You can ask your boss, or just test some things out.
When in doubt, keep it short.
Convey what's between the lines, focus on context and painting a picture, not just sharing information. Don't reiterate information that's already available elsewhere. For example: It may be visible from your company's goal tracking system where your teams are at on goal accomplishment. What's likely not visible there is:
What risks are entailed?
How confident are you that you'll hit those goals?
What's your projection?
And what makes you think that way?
Ask for feedback regularly. What could make this more useful? Is there anything that happened in the last week that you wish you'd known sooner? Was this worth your reading time? What information did they have to chase last week that they wish you'd provided directly to them?
Just try it! Your boss may be very busy or struggle with conveying clear expectations (after all, they don't know what they don't know either!), so try it out, ask for feedback, and iterate from there.
A super simple template to get you started
Below is a super simple structure to get you started. Ultimately, the main goal of this should be to convey context (and not reiterate information or data that’s already available elsewhere).
Accomplishment of business goals:
Your projection on expected attainment of most important goals
Risks
Unknown unknowns
How confident are you in your statements here? You may be dealing with a lot of unknowns, or actually feel quite certain. Stating this can help your boss contextualise.
Teams/staff and culture:
Risks
Frequently-asked questions or concerns on the teams
Your focus areas: The purpose of this part is mostly to support alignment and visibility
Your 2-3 main priorities for the week
Anything that's worth calling out for your own goals
Bright spots: What's going well in your team/organisation that others may benefit from adopting?
Anything else that feels worth sharing: I like to call this the “spidey sense” section, places where there’s just a hunch of something that might be going wrong or might come up soon. Listen to your leadership instincts and add what you're noticing or observing here.
By the way: You can also use this approach to make sure that you are getting better information. You can share this template for weekly updates with your direct reports to help them manage up more effectively!
I have also worked with senior technical leaders, e.g. staff engineers, who use a structure like the one above to share regular updates with the teams in their domain and other technical leaders. For them, it helps them share context across groups of people and ensure visibility into far-reaching technical initiatives.
Remember, just get started, get feedback, and iterate from there!
Getting weekly updates from managers: Case study
Update, December 15, 2022. I’ve been getting many questions about what this approach could look like in practice. One of my coaching clients, Stefan Kamphausen, runs an engineering department and has successfully implemented this structure. It’s greatly helped him and his teams. In this case study, you’ll hear from him how he does it.
Stefan Kamphausen is a seasoned engineering leader currently working as SVP Engineering at Acrolinx. A Linux-wielding manager deeply rooted in tech with 20+ years of experience, he maintains a grounded relationship with software engineering on all levels.
My Background
In the early 2000s I was forced to track my time as a developer. This was a rather atrocious experience, shaping my perception of tracking work for years. The experience held me back for too long. It took this blog post and some nudging (aka coaching) from Lena to finally address this in my role as SVP.
My Role and Needs
At Acrolinx, I’m responsible for a 50+ team of engineers, UX writers, testers, and people leaders. Acrolinx surpassed the 200 employee mark in December 2022 and is on a very solid growth path. So far, I’ve had team leads as line managers reporting to me; we’re now adding Director roles, which will report to me in the future. With that in place, we’ll have three career levels for individual contributors and three levels for leadership, both technical and people-focused.
Getting visibility: As the SVP, I report to the Executive Board. Therefore, I need insight into my teams' activities and pain points. At the same time, my role is to focus on our strategy. For many years, the trusty walk-by style of management and just keeping my antennas on active receive mode in the office worked well for me. But this management style became obsolete when Acrolinx started its journey to more remote work (pre pandemic!). In addition, you can only maintain a few close relationships at work (Dunbar’s Number). As soon as our team passed the 30-people mark, I had to develop new systems for visibility into my team’s work. Weekly status meetings just didn’t cut it.
Goals for Regular Updates: Visibility, Ownership, Reflection
I came up with a set of goals I want to achieve through reporting:
I understand what’s going on in our engineering teams. This helps with planning for the next year, aligning with our product strategy, helping with blockers, and starting cross-company initiatives.
Team leads own the communication about their teams. If they don’t actively shape this communication, it will be driven by whoever asked for something from the team. That’s a much more reactive mode and typically becomes more about the bugs, missed deadlines, and poor user experience.
The team leads reflect on their and their team’s work. By asking for the right questions, this gives me an instrument to gently nudge toward topics that I find important.
Getting Started
I started by adapting Lena’s template to fit my and my teams’ needs. I also added phrases that are in my own style and that I feel comfortable using.
This is my template:
2023 - Week 2 (2023-01-13)
Product Strategy and Execution
Your projection on achieving important goals
Risks you see
Distractions
Give your level of confidence for the above.
Team Health
Conflicts and risks inside your team
Frequently asked questions or concerns in your team
Hiring/leaving news
Great developments
Personal Focus
What are your personal priorities for this week? Top 5 maximum.
What personal growth goals did you work on? What would you like to share?
Celebration
What brightened your and/or your team’s workweek?
What's going well in your team that others may benefit from adopting?
The Flurfunk (German for “office grapevine”)
Anything else you feel like sharing? Listen to your Team Lead instincts here. They tell you what’s important.
Making It Happen
Communicating the new updates to my direct reports: I had to share this with my team leads. I dreaded this conversation because of my personal history. I wrote a document explaining the new format, which also helped me crystallize the goals and feel that this was the right thing to do. This part was essential to me, even if it may seem obvious to others or in hindsight. It took me several weeks to get that guidance document into a state I felt comfortable sharing.
Rollout: I created a shared folder in GDrive, and made a document for each team lead. I linked to the guidance and added the template. From there on, it was just one email and one 1:1 with each team member. We also set up a reminder in our joint Slack channel.
Giving feedback: Once we started filling the documents with content, I gave my team leads feedback in comments. It’s crucial here not to fall into the trap of discussing the actual content but focus on the form instead. My comments lead to the format of the weekly report improving.
How It’s Been Going So Far
We’re now a few weeks in, and the feedback has been positive. Those who hadn’t done something like this before felt how good it is to reflect on their team’s work; folks who already knew weekly reports weren’t surprised. Previously, I used to compile a list of things I had randomly picked up on Slack, Jira, and email for our CTO/COO. Now, I can pass on the information that matters and that my teams want to share.
This is a handy way to manage up. It helps make sure our executives know our successes and understand our pain. Writing things down is a vital instrument for many people.
Try it out for yourself!
