Managing up, team guidelines, and reading strategies for leaders

Executive overview

Leaders are struggling with two recurring challenges: influencing upward without authority, and rebuilding team cohesion in disrupted work environments. A third thread covers practical reading tactics.

Managing up starts with acknowledging disappointment and anger toward bosses — then reframing requests around the organisation's nobler motive rather than personal frustration. Team dysfunction during upheaval calls for decisive temporary systems, co-created expectations, and situational leadership awareness. Reading improves when treated as curiosity-driven rather than obligation-driven.

The most durable influence happens when you frame the conversation around what the organisation needs, not what you want.

Managing up

• Expect disappointment from any boss — this is universal, not exceptional.
• Peter Block's The Empowered Manager frames the ideal as an interdependent relationship, not a dependent one.
• Acknowledge the resentment privately; suppressing it doesn't resolve it.
• Extend compassion: bosses are people with strengths and weaknesses, often promoted for reasons unrelated to what their reports need.
• Appeal to the nobler motive (Dale Carnegie) — frame conversations around shared organisational goals, not personal grievances.
• Tom Henshaw's "learning conversation" structure: make an observation, offer a suggestion, ask a genuine learning question.
• Enter the conversation from the business case; set emotions aside for the moment.

Building team expectations

• Acknowledge the ambient chaos — most people are not behaving at their best, and that is a context problem, not a character problem.
• During crisis, decisiveness reduces anxiety even when it feels counterintuitive — make a decision, communicate it, correct later if needed.
• Situational leadership (Blanchard) shifts in a crisis: directive authority matters more when stability is absent.
• Set up temporary systems (William Bridges, Managing Transitions) to fill the gap while permanent processes are rebuilt.
• Team guidelines fail when written in first-person singular — "I expect" signals that the team had no ownership.
• Shift pronouns from I/my to we/us by involving the team in co-creating expectations.
• Susan Gerke's Go Team programme (ep. 192) provides a practical process for establishing shared guidelines with new or existing teams.
• Unclear expectations are the root of most team conflict; explicit shared norms make directive moments easier when they arise.

Reading well

• Format (Kindle, audiobook, print) is secondary — use whatever sustains the habit.
• Kindle plus Readwise creates a highlight database surfaced daily, useful for interview prep and retention.
• Audiobooks work well for fiction or casual reading; less useful when you need to capture and retrieve specific ideas.
• Read non-sequentially: start with introduction and chapter one, then jump to what is most relevant.
• Scan the table of contents and find external interviews or talks before going deep into a book.
• Drop books that stop being useful — finishing mediocre books is a poor use of limited time.
• Track by curiosity and joy, not page count or annual targets.
• If goals help, calibrate them to your personality — a realistic stretch goal (e.g. 24 books/year) beats an aspirational one you abandon.
• Book clubs and interview commitments create accountability that sustains the habit.