Notes on the art of managing up

“Managing up” is the idea that we should all do whatever we can to make our boss’s job easier. Much (much!) has been written about how to do this, including how to engage with challenging bosses. In a set of Harvard Business Review articles on the subject, Dana Rousmaniere writes “Having a healthy, positive relationship with your boss makes your work life much easier — it’s also good for your job satisfaction and your career.”

The need for better communication

I thought a lot about managing up as we interviewed 11 healthcare executives and 14 chaplaincy managers across the country in the months before the pandemic. In this pilot study, about half of the healthcare executives understood the work of spiritual care. The other half did not, even though they were charged with making resource decisions about spiritual care staff and departments. Some chaplaincy managers were aware of the challenges and problems their bosses engaged with daily while others seemed less clear. Very few – managers or executives – consistently used data to make decisions and improve the work of spiritual care.

How to manage up

Managing up is important not just for professional relationships, job satisfaction and career development but because the work of spiritual care providers is centrally connected to the mission of many of the healthcare organizations where they work. Chaplaincy managers need to be in conversation with their supervisors about the mission of their work and its centrality to the mission of their organizations. Based on our interviews, below are some suggestions for chaplaincy managers about managing up.

• Make sure you know not just the big picture pressures your healthcare organization faces but the daily pressures and problems your specific boss is trying to solve. Some of the issues chaplains can’t help with, but some – nursing turnover, staff morale, ethical issues – they can.
• Learn to code switch so you can talk, in language familiar to administrators, about what chaplains might contribute to the problems that keep your supervisors up at night. Too many executives do not see the breadth of work spiritual care providers do and the ways chaplains might be repurposed to help solve problems.
• Use the tools of reflective listening, naming, and long term or big picture perspective in conversations with your supervisors with an eye to how you and your department can help solve institutional problems. At some hospitals, chaplains have taken on responsibilities around advanced care directives, liaison work with funeral homes, and addressing overcrowding in waiting rooms in some units.

Similarities and differences

Managing up is especially important for chaplains and chaplaincy managers because of broad diversity in their work across institutions. While most healthcare executives have a sense of what intensive care nurses do, for example – which has a lot of consistency across hospitals – this is not the case for chaplains. We learned about wonderful initiatives chaplains lead but they all have different names in different hospitals: Tea for the Soul, bereavement rounds, end-of-life companion programs, peer-to-peer programs for physicians, passage quilt programs, and Schwartz Rounds, to name a few. The lack of standardization in the names of the efforts and programs chaplains lead make it harder for non-chaplains to see and understand their work.

Most people trained as chaplains are good at managing up once they turn their reflective listening and empathetic connection upward in their organizational hierarchies. This turn is essential for executives who, without understanding chaplains’ mission connection to their organizations, may be less likely to allocate support in their direction.

Wendy Cadge is a Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University and founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab.