How to Be Awesome at Your Job 2025 GREATS: 1038: Getting What You Need from Your Boss through Managing Up with Melody Wilding
12 snips
Dec 18, 2025 
Melody Wilding, a professor of human behavior and executive coach, shares actionable strategies for managing up. She discusses how reframing this concept can enhance your work life rather than serve merely as flattery. Melody highlights ten critical conversations to have with your boss, including alignment, boundaries, and visibility. She emphasizes starting with straightforward wins during one-on-ones and underscores the importance of tackling advancement discussions before performance reviews. Her insights are rooted in evidence-based practices and personal experiences.
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Use The Trade-Off Approach
- Use the trade-off approach when you lack the power to flatly refuse extra work.
- Ask which current priorities to slow down or deprioritize so your manager chooses what to trade off.
Understand Pushback Power
- Pushback power is an invisible spectrum of leverage to say no at work.
- It depends on authority, tenure, performance, relationship strength, and organizational context.
Find Ownership Opportunities
- Take ownership by finding neglected needs, bottlenecks, or repeated feedback patterns to solve.
- Choose problems that create clear value and avoid stepping on other people's toes.
