 Managing upwards well is so important. Having a good relationship with your boss improves your happiness at work, your engagement, increases what you learn and speeds up your career progress. I mean who doesn't want these outcomes? The one on one meeting with your manager is likely to be your most important meeting whether you have it each week or once a month. One-on-one meetings with your manager are full time in which you can build relationships and trust, create good communication channels and share information, solve problems and make decisions. One-on-one meetings with your boss are also vital to increase in the mentoring and coaching you get from your manager. To help you improve your managing upwards and what you get from your one-on-one meetings with your manager I'm sharing six tips that have helped me massively in building good relationships with lots of my managers. After we've discussed these six tips I share seven suggestions of what to include in your one-on-one meetings with your manager so do stay for this. My name is Jess Coles and if you're new here enhance.training shares people management expertise resources and courses for you to manage your team with integrity and fairness and get outstanding results. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below as well as a video timestamp so do take a look at these and if you like this video please give a thumbs up and subscribe. Persuading your manager to have one-on-one meetings with you is the first challenge. Many managers see them as a chore rather than being a super useful session to them personally. Let's focus on how you make your one-on-one meetings with your manager useful to them. For your manager to continue having one-on-one meetings with you they must feel the meetings are useful to them and help meet their goals. The more senior staff members get the more demands on their time. Your manager will be busy with plenty of pressure on them to perform and deliver. So when thinking about what to cover in one-on-one meetings with your manager always position the meetings as how having one-on-one meetings will help them. Sharing information and updates is a key part of one-on-one meetings. The key is not to share everything but to update on what is important to the manager and team and do this in a concise way. For example rather than giving a blow-by-blow account of all the activities and challenges that you faced in the last week on an important project you might simply state that everything is on schedule and next week you'll need some help overcoming an anticipated bottleneck. Assuming these are the key bits of information to convey of course. Remind your boss of the benefits to the team and then personally of the work that you do. Talk to how you are impacting any of these eight key areas that all bosses and companies need. Firstly increase revenues. Secondly save costs. Saved time. Improved processes. Fifth increase efficiency. Sixth reduce risk. Seventh achieve business targets and eight pleased customers. Link how your work is helping the team hit their goals which typically are also the managers goals. The more you show your manager you are helping them hit their personal goals the more your manager will like you and help you achieve your goals. To understand what your manager wants and needs is the next tip to manage upwards brilliantly. It is super hard to wow your manager if you don't know what they care about. Once you understand their personal goals pressures and priorities creating a wow factor is a lot lot easier. Ask questions to find out what your manager is working on and find out why it is important to them. The goals the manager has personally are likely to be closely linked to the team priorities. Your example questions might include. First you know can you share the team priorities or the key goals the next three months so that I can make sure that I'm supporting the team reaching those goals. Or it might be are you able to share the key priorities that you would like me to work on so I know I am working on the most important areas to help reach the team goals. Or it might be what are the key projects that you're working on and how can I help support you in delivering them. Once you understand what your manager wants and needs you can start anticipating what would be useful for you to deliver to help them achieve their goals. Use your one-on-one meetings with your manager to proactively check what your planning helps them by running your ideas past your boss. When in your one-on-one meetings with your manager and more generally try to use the language your boss uses. Use the phrases they say, the abbreviations and mirror their talking style. You are likely to do a lot of this already. It is part of the communication skills we all learn. Being more conscious of it and making more effort to align without becoming unnatural will help build rapport and connection with your boss. Work at managing your boss's expectations. Be as flexible as you can and do your best to deliver against your boss's expectations. An essential part of managing up as brilliantly is to do a good job and deliver what your boss wants and needs. Focus on the personal as well as the professional in your one-on-one meetings with your manager. Many professionals and managers focus too much on the professional side of the relationship with their bosses and don't do enough to build a personal side. Having a personal connection and at least appreciating your manager, preferably liking them as a person, is really important. If you like your boss then your boss is much more likely to like you in return. Find areas of common interest with your boss and ask them questions and get them talking about what they like doing and also share some of your life outside of work with your boss too. Example questions might include what do you like doing outside of work? Secondly, a different group, do you like playing any sports? Or do you like watching sports? Or what level do you play at? A third group might be, do you have a family? What age are your kids? What do your kids like doing after school? And a fourth group might be, what music do you listen to? Or what concerts would you recommend that you have been to recently? Do a bit of homework on social media and asking your colleagues and you can create a list of relevant and interesting questions fairly quickly. Build a personal relationship with your boss alongside a professional one. Get your proactive communication right is the next tip to manage upwards brilliantly. Most managers love team members proactively keeping them informed about the key actions, activities and results being delivered. Yeah, I certainly do. It is one less thing I need to keep on top of plus being proactively communicated to in an open way gives me a loss of confidence in the team member. Make the time to understand what your manager cares about, work out what you're going to communicate and then proactively communicated in a way that your manager appreciates. Your boss is time poor. So be concise and get to the key points quickly, sharing the minimal background or context needed. Your boss will ask for more details in the areas they want to understand. Give them the headlines. Work out through trial and error or by discussing with your boss how they like to be communicated with. Is it an email each day or each week or is it a one on one meeting each week plus ad hoc meetings as needed, which for instance was my personal preference. Find out how your boss likes to be communicated to and adjust your preferences to fit theirs. And don't leave it more than a week to have some form of communication with your boss. You're ideally you'll be proactively in contact most days. Bring solutions with the problems in your one on one meetings with your manager. When you discuss solutions with the problems you bring up in your one on one meetings with your manager, you are effectively trying to take work away from your manager while leaving them the opportunity to input and make the final decisions. If you're only bring the problem, you are effectively adding more work to your manager, which is never a good thing. Without a solution, you are saying, I found a problem, and it is your job to solve it and tell me what to do. Would you like team members to create extra work for you in this way? Always make the effort to think of a viable solution when you spot a problem. Help your manager and take ownership. This is a brilliant way of managing upwards that will earn you a lot of brownie points. In your one on one meetings with your manager, make a bit of time to go through the problems that you are encountering or issues that you've spotted and ask your manager to input into your suggested solution. When you have an agreed solution, ask your manager if you can implement it or organise for it to be implemented. When you're able to implement these solutions largely on your own, you make yourself a very valuable team member to your manager. Talk about the positives in your one on one meetings with your manager. Everyone likes getting useful and positive feedback. The further you progress your career, the harder it is to get any feedback. Your boss will want some feedback. Start with sharing positive feedback. It could be simple. An example might be, I really liked how you explained the team goals in our team meeting. Your explanation was really clear, memorable and made lots of sense. Thank you. Give positive praise when you feel they deserve it. Being selective will avoid your manager thinking that you're trying to suck up to them. The more you and other team members complement what you like your manager doing, the more they will do of that. You can influence behaviour without needing to be negative. Try to avoid giving negative feedback until you have a strong and established relationship. Make sure your negative feedback is specific and useful and that you give positive feedback at least three times more than negative feedback to keep your manager happy. Positive reinforcement is a great technique to develop and practice with honesty. Here are ideas of topics to discuss in your one on one meetings with your manager. I found the best use of the one on one meetings with your manager are two. Firstly, build professional and personal relationships with your manager. Secondly, to share information about what you're working on and what ideas, plans and solutions you'd like to implement. Third, to get or clarify direction. I usually propose direction. I think I should be going in and explain why and then allow my boss to input. Fourth, solve problems. The one on one meetings with your manager is a great opportunity to work together to solve problems. Bring a solution of your own and work with your manager to refine it. Fifth, suggest decisions or help your manager make decisions so your work and projects can move forward quickly. Sixth, receive mentoring and coaching. Asimov asked questions of your manager. For instance, if you were in X situation, what would you do? Get them helping you improve. And seventh, ask for feedback from your manager about what you're doing well and what steps you can take to improve your stronger and weaker areas. Give feedback to your manager when you feel comfortable doing so. You don't have to cover each of these areas in every one on one meeting with your manager. More likely, you'll spend a lot of time on one or two of areas in each meeting. Do your best over time to get a good balance across all these areas. So in summary, there is loads you can and should be doing to ensure you are managing upwards brilliantly. Your relationship with your boss is the most important one for you to have at work for your personal happiness and career progress. Be proactive and try to make it easy for your boss to manage you. Ideally, you will also be an above average performer compared to your peers. With a little extra work and by implementing some of the ideas we've gone through, you absolutely should be able to achieve this. Perception is reality for many managers and making your boss's life easy goes a long way to building great relationships. And as a reminder, we've gone through. Firstly, make your one-on-one meetings with your manager useful to them. Secondly, understand what your manager needs and wants. Third, focus on the personal as well as the professional. Fourth, get your proactive communication right. Fifth, bring solutions with the problems. And sixth, talk about the positives. If you have any questions on managing upwards brilliantly, six tips for one-on-one meetings with your manager, please leave them in the comments section below and I'll get back to you. Don't forget to take a look at the additional videos and resources available in the description below. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.