Level-appropriate communication: your team is copying you

Everything you say gets multiplied by your level. Before it lands, a suggestion from a peer is merely a suggestion, but the same words from a VP are a mandate, and the same words from a CEO are a policy. Much of the time, leaders don't adjust for that multiplier, and the damage shows up as work nobody asked for. Managers who stop managing.

This is a story about how not to "reach down" into your organization.

This is also a story about how to "manage up" effectively.

Managing up is not a bad thing

There seems to be some kind of colloquial opposition to the term "managing up." Managing up is not about ass-kissing. It's about making sure that you and your team get credit for the work that they do.

We live in an era of rampant layoffs, where a combination of AI and leadership perception dictates whether entire teams survive reductions in force. This is why it's more important than ever to manage up effectively.

But managing up is communication. When you talk to a senior leader, you need the vocabulary, urgency, and tone that they expect.

If you are an individual contributor who has identified, say, a problem in your application or process, then you need to communicate in very specific ways to the people above you.

• The tech lead gets: the root cause, the fix, how it was validated in staging, the risks, and a specific ask for help
• The director gets: the same problem sized in support tickets and abandoned pages, plus a question about whether it outranks the feature work already scheduled
• The CTO gets: the problem as a symptom and systematic approaches to catching this class of problem before production
• The CEO gets: the problem, impact, timeline, and a heads-up about the metrics they might see. No indexes, no jargon.

In each of these, you are framing the problem in a way that the individual can both understand it and put it in the context of the problems they're currently facing. And inherent in this explanation is the fact that not all levels of your management need to know about a given problem. If you cannot frame it in a way that that individual needs it to be framed, then it doesn't get on their desk.

Let's talk about the other direction: when leadership needs to communicate to everyone else.

The culture I learned leadership from was bad

I spent the late 1990s and early 2000s at Microsoft. The culture was rough.

VPs shouted at their directs in meetings. Not behind closed doors. In front of everyone. SVPs ran their organizations like personal fiefdoms, dressing down people in hallways and conference rooms, in front of whoever happened to be standing there. I watched senior executives chew out people two and three levels below them for the crime of presenting data the executive didn't want to hear. I watched grown adults get publicly humiliated because an SVP was having a bad Tuesday.

If an executive tried that today, there would be a lawsuit on their desk by lunch. Back then, we didn't know any different. We went along with it.

The behavior was bad enough. But what stayed with me was what happened next.

Everyone else started copying it.

Leads who had been at the company for eighteen months started barking at their reports. Directors who managed six people adopted the swagger of SVPs who managed six thousand. People with a tiny fraction of the authority performed the same theatrics because they believed that's what leadership looked like. That's what getting ahead required.

They were wrong. But they didn't know that yet.

Your words got heavier and nobody told you

Here's a true story from my past. A CEO casually ran into one of my employees at lunch. He mentioned something offhand about a feature that the employee was considering doing. By Monday, that employee started implementing that feature and was off on their own instead of doing the work that I thought he was going to do. When I asked the employee why he was working on that, he mentioned that the CEO had asked for it. When I asked the CEO, the CEO didn't even remember the conversation.

You don't get to think out loud anymore, or at least not the way you used to. You have to be deeply considered about every word that you use with the employees below you.

Go through the chain

Why is this important? When the CEO in this story talked to that employee, he cut me out of managing that employee. The employee got different priorities from a more senior individual.

It's important to go through the chain of command. A CEO should come to leadership before talking directly to the employee.

It's true that the CEO may be correct that the CEO's musings are actually what should be the mandate and should be the policy. In order not to take away the manager's ability to task their people with projects, the CEO should go to the leadership team first and let the command filter down.

At the same time, the CEO may be unaware of certain things. They may be unaware that the employee has performance issues. The CEO may be unaware of aspects of the project that are unfeasible or that conflict with other priorities.

Praise is the one that trips people up

Praise feels harmless. It's the one that does the most quiet damage, however. Everyone involved loves to give praise. CEOs love to praise employees for the work they do. Management loves to hand out recognition, and of course, employees love the attention and the adulation.

But as a noted management consultant once said, "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Once again, the CEO may be unaware of things related to the employee. They may be unaware that the employee wasn't the only one that worked on a given project. They may be unaware that what seems praiseworthy to a CEO is actually incredibly frustrating for management. The work may have been done in a haphazard or inconsiderate manner. The work may have been sloppy, even though the results were good.

Again, the chain of command knows these things.

So far, we've only spoken about the CEO, but even you, as a marketing leader, have these responsibilities. For example, you may want to praise someone on another team for helping you on a project. You may not know the same qualities about that other person: performance issues, work quality, work style, team efforts, and so on. This is one of the reasons product marketing works the way it does, pulling on people across every function without owning any of them.

The frozen middle

Ultimately, what you're trying to do is ensure that your middle management team doesn't get paralyzed, that their authority is respected, and that they can carry out the orders of senior leaders effectively. A standing operating rhythm helps here, because a weekly business review puts every manager in the same room hearing the same priorities at the same time, which leaves far less room for a stray hallway comment to reset somebody's week.

When you go around them, you effectively neuter them by undermining their authority.

Skip-levels are still good

On the surface, it may seem like I'm saying, "Never talk to anyone below your directs," but that is exactly the wrong lesson. It is essential that you continue to hold skip-level interviews. Skip-levels give you a pulse on the team, the same way customer meetings give you a pulse on the market. You have to do them. When you do skip-levels, make sure you:

• Get briefed by the direct manager first.
• Know the performance picture going in.
• Know about subtle things that are going on with that individual and the broader team.
• Know about the team's priorities.

This is all just good management hygiene, and you're doing things in the proper order, the proper sequence, so that you don't get yourself in trouble and you don't undercut your middle management.

What actually changes a culture

The only thing that changes a culture is behavior. The behavior that matters most is the behavior at the top because it's the template that everyone else copies. I've watched senior leaders hollow out their middle management and, in doing so, wreck their own effectiveness at running the team. It's essential that you have the discipline as a leader to go through the management chain to effect change. This is the part of the job that survives everything else changing, and it's why I've argued that the essence of product marketing is leadership rather than the artifacts.

For leaders, this means building very strong relationships across the organization at a peer and above peer level. This enables you to have frank and honest conversations with people, which will enable you to head off communication snafus such as reaching down. I apply the same rule to the bots that now do work for me in Bots.