All managers must manager their careers. Nobody can do it better than they themselves, and an essential step for doing so is to build a great relationship with the boss. Unless the superior can appreciate the subordinates’ talent, character, and contribution, the latter’s career is going nowhere. Managing the boss is necessary for every manager’s advancement.

But for company advancement, a very different skill set is required: leading the boss. That has nothing to do with self preservation or currying favour. It has everything to do with helping a supervisor to see the right goal and find the right path before too late.

Managing the boss must nonetheless be done well, though a recent book title suggests just how multi-faceted the task can be: Managing Up: 59 Ways to Build a Career-Advancing Relationship with Your Boss (Michael and Deborah Dobson, 2000). The title of another confirms how daunting the task can be: I Hate My Boss!: How to Survive and Get Ahead When Your Boss is A Tyrant, Control Freak, or Just Plain Nuts! (Bob Weinstein, 1997).

Done well, however, managing the boss becomes an essential platform for then leading the boss. Once the chief knows that a manager brings judgement and gets results, the way is clear for the manager to help lead the chief. But what that requires is a boss who wants it and a manager who can deliver it. Leading up requires an ability to work in two directions at once, of both stepping into the breach and listening to those below you before you step off a cliff yourself.

Above all, upward leadership requires the conscious subordination of personal gain to organisational purpose. Leadership decisions are defined by their transcendence of parochial concerns, and Jim Collins confirmed from his study of a dozen companies that rose from Good to Great that the most successful business leaders are those who always put enterprise interests ahead of their own.  

The United States Marine Corps makes the same point in its famous dictum, “the office eats last.” Leading the boss is therefore about helping the organisation to achieve its mission regardless of the personal costs or benefits.

Upward leadership is certainly not always welcomed and the costs can be high. Many managers have worked for a supervisor who micromanaged the office or misjudged the future – and discouraged everybody for suggesting otherwise.

To come forward when a superior does not invite it can be risky, especially if the boss embraces what American movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. once said of his own attitude toward bad news. “I don’t want any yes-men around me,” he declared. “I want them to tell me the truth, even if it costs them their jobs.”

Upward leadership requires a driving urge to make things happen on high, an unflinching willingness to take charge when not fully in command. Consider the moment faced by Enron Corporation vice president Sherron Watkins when she met with chief executive Kenneth Lay on August 22, 2001.

She warned him that his company would “implode in a wave of accounting scandals” from the partnerships that the chief financial officer, Andrew Fastow, was using to hide debt and enrich himself.  

The Enron CEO proved unable to correct the ruinous practice to save the company from bankruptcy just three months later. But regardless of the CEO’s decisions, Watkins had courageously acted to avert the impending disaster by thinking as if she were responsible for the company’s fate even when the chief executive was evidently not.

When a subordinate does lead up, it requires equal courage for the boss to listen down, especially in cultures that traditionally eschew voices from below. A case in point is that of British Admiral Clowdisley Shovell as he sailed triumphantly home in 1707 from skirmishes against a French fleet in the Mediterranean. As he neared Great Britain, his ships became enveloped in a dense fog for several days, and he summoned his navigators to pin down his precise location. The navigators concluded that the fleet was safely clear of the Brittany peninsula, but a sailor approached the admiral to report that he had independently tracked the fleet’s location. The Royal Navy forbade navigation by inferiors, but the seaman was so alarmed by his calculations – he placed the fleet on a fatal path toward a string of 150 tiny islands off the tip of England – that he felt compelled to step forward. The admiral hanged the sailor on the spot. Soon thereafter, the fleet’s five warships smashed into the fog-enshrouded shoals, sending 2000 sailors to their grave.

Even short of the loss of life, the cost of failure to encourage upward leadership from below can be huge. Consider the price of such an error for the chairman of Samsung Group, Lee Kun Hee. In 1994, he decreed that Samsung would invest $13 billion to become a car producer, aiming to make 1.5 million vehicles by 2010. Car manufacturing was already a crowded field, but Lee was a powerful chieftain and a passionate car buff, and none of his subordinates were willing to question his strategy at the time. A year after the first cars rolled off the line in 1999, however, Samsung Motors was forced out of the business. Many of Samsung’s top managers had silently opposed the investment and Lee later told them he was puzzled why none had openly expressed their reservations. By then, though, Lee had reached into his own pocket for $2 billion to placate his irate creditors.

A culture that encourages upward leadership is built, not born. For that, senior managers must regularly insist that their junior staff question strategy and challenge error. Asking those of lesser rank to say what they candidly think and complimenting them for doing so are small measures that can make for big improvements.

Once established, a company-wide emphasis on leading upwards serves as a kind of inertial guidance system, continually reminding everybody that they are obliged to lead up without even the need for superiors to ask for them to do so. Had Enron CEO Lay, British Admiral Shovell, and Samsung chairman Lee built a culture in which their subordinates were prepared to speak up and the chiefs ready to listen, Lay might have saved his company, Shovell his fleet, and Lee his fortune.    

Michael Useem is professor of management director of the Leadership Center at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His recent books include The Leadership Moment: Nine True Stories of Triumph and Disaster and Their Lessons for Us All (1998), Leading Up: How to Lead Your Boss So You Both Win (2001), and Upward Bound: Nine Original Accounts of How Business Leaders Reached Their Summits (2003)