Design
Patterns for
Managing Up
DOI: 10.1145/3303878

Article development led by queue.acm.org

Four challenging work situations and how to handle them.

BY KATE MATSUDAIRA

HAVE YOU EVER been in a situation where you are presenting to your manager or your manager’s manager and you completely flub the opportunity by saying all the wrong things? Me too. It is from such encounters that I started to put together design patterns for handling these difficult situations. I like

 

to think in systems and patterns, so applying this way of thinking to communication just makes sense. I have also found these rules of thumb are useful to others, so I would like to share them here.

When you can spot the patterns, you can use some of the ideas presented here as guidelines to navigate these tricky, high-stress scenarios. This way you can feel confident and capable as a leader because you will know what to do: how to solve the problem and what steps to follow next.

Here are some of the most common challenging situations you may run into at work and how you can handle them.

1. Someone asks you something
you don’t know.

You are in a meeting (where you know
you are expected to know all the an-
swers) when someone asks a question
of you, and you just aren’t certain of
the answer.

Sure, the obvious answer is to say, “I don’t know.” But what if the person asking you that question is a customer? What if that person is your VP? What if you are interviewing for a new role? Suddenly, the stakes are raised and you just don’t want to say, “I don’t know.” You don’t want to look uninformed or unprofessional. All of a sudden there is social pressure to be the person with the right answer.

In the moment, the desire to say anything but “I don’t know” is so overwhelming that you may end up making up something on the spot, trying to be as vague as possible so you can’t be wrong. But—as you know if someone has done this to you—it’s usually obvious to the other people in the room that you don’t know the answer, and