The Strategic Skill of Managing Up with Melody Wilding

Welcome to the Edge of Work podcast. I'm your host, Al D. This is a podcast for leaders who want to make sense of workplace trends and are looking for new ideas about how to lead people and grow their business in a changing world of work. During each episode, I'll bring you the latest experts, researchers, founders and leaders to share new and unique ideas, as well as actionable advice around attracting and retaining talent, developing people, and building healthy and sustainable organizations. Welcome to the Edge of Work. Today's guest is Melody Wilding, who is the author of Managing up how to get what yout need from the People In Charge, as well as the host of the podcast Psychology at Work. Melody, thank you so much for being here today. There's a lot we have to talk about and that I'd love to talk to you about, but before we go any further, just would love to have you just to do a quick background. I know you do a lot of different things, but yeah, just love to hear a little bit more about you and what you're up to. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. Excited to be here with you. And yes, I started out my career as a therapist. That's how I got into this work over 15, 20 years ago now. And what I very quickly realized was that the people who were attracted to working with me in my practice were folks who really needed help navigating the mental and emotional side of work. And that has since owned evolve to today. What I really specialize in is helping people find their professional power position, which I define as it's two sides of a coin that equals success. One side is you have to be able to manage yourself. My first book, Trust Yourself, is all about that. How do you manage and navigate your own doubts, your insecurities, your own tendencies. But the other half of that is how do you manage other people's psychology? And that's really what managing up influence, building persuasion, trust with other people. That's really what Managing up is about. I would love to talk about all of that, but I think before we get started, I would just love to just have you talk about some of what you're observing or noticing even from the work you do with clients today. I know there's a lot obviously going on in the workplace at any given time, but we're recording this towards the beginning of the summer of 2026. And so just love to know from you any themes or conversations coming up repeatedly or over and over that are worth mentioning. Yeah, it's a. It is an interesting and a tough time And a couple of things that I'm hearing again and again, number one is that people are realizing they have to think beyond their boss. And this is something that always happens with managing up right is we equate it with have a good relationship with your direct manager. But there is no such thing as a traditional organization anymore. You may have a project lead, you may have two bosses, you may have someone in legal or business development or engineering who also has power over your outcomes. You may have an important customer or an external stakeholder. Those are all people you have to manage up to. And so what I notice is people really leaning in to this complexity and realizing that influence is not this unidirectional, just directly up my chain of command. It has to be so much more broad and nuanced. Now that is one thing. And then second, and I'm sure you have seen this in some of the headlines that have come out, is the focus on outcomes and results that it is not enough to talk about. I worked really hard. I put in a lot of effort. Our team has been burning the midnight oil. It matters. What did you produce at the end of the day? And are you arming your leaders with a strong enough narrative about how your tasks, your responsibilities, actually ladder up into that business impact so that they can make a case for you? They have things to report to their own superiors or the board, for example. And a lot of people struggle with getting themselves out of the weeds, really lifting their heads up enough to define what that impact is. Because it can be hard to see when you're in the day to day. I'm just hearing you talk out loud and I wanted to offer up something as almost a connection between those two thoughts. And I'd love to hear if this lands for you at all. But to the connection there is, as you mentioned, outcomes really matter. And most of us, to the point of point number one, would be hard pressed to be able to deliver on any outcome without being able to do that in connection with other people. Work is not something that you do in a silo, but it rather is a shared endeavor, if you will. And if anything, that maybe leads to this idea of why managing up is so important. Just any thoughts or reflections just off that, just off the top of my head, oh, 100%. That you reach this inflection point in your career, usually mid level, is when you start to really feel the pain of it. That your success is now dependent on managing the politics, the personalities, the perception that other people have of you. So yes, I couldn't Agree more that leaning into those relationships, having that capital that you can draw on as you need it, that you can cash in from other people, that is everything. And I would also argue it makes work more enjoyable. The funny thing about the book is when I first started writing it, I did interviews with dozens and dozens of readers in my audience. And I thought for sure when I asked people, why do you want to manage up? What's in it for you? That they would say, I want a promotion. I don't think I'm being paid enough. I think maybe two people out of 50 said that. The vast majority of people said, I just want to feel more satisfied. I don't want to stress as much. I want to enjoy going to work and who I work with. I really care about pushing big things through. And I know the only way I can do that is through my relationship. So I think that speaks to exactly what you're saying. Yeah, also too, I think, for that matter, I know this is going to sound simple, but I still think it's true. Work in general is a collective endeavor and I know this to be true because if it weren't, people would just do what you and I do, which is start our own businesses. Right. But they choose to go and work for an organization. And I don't think that means that everyone wants to necessarily be best friends with every single person that they work with. But I think there is a, to a certain degree for anyone that works in a company, a level of desire to. To do this in collection with others because if they didn't, again, they would just be like you and me. But I think you actually teed this up perfectly. Because I do want to get to the book and I think in the beginning, I want to say it's in the introduction, but one of the things that you do is you offer up a different frame around this topic of managing up. I think you even alluded to the fact that sometimes people often think about managing up as, quote, unquote, pleasing your boss. But I think you have a more much different and more nuanced perspective on this. Could you share what frame you offer up instead? And why is this a better approach? Yeah, the. Our traditional view of managing up, I think even if you go back 20, 30 years and you watch movies or see cartoons about this, it's that person who's running behind their boss with their coffee order and boss says jump. And you ask how high no one wants to be, that no one wants to subjugate themselves and to feel like they are being A suck up. They are being a manipulative ladder climber. No one wants to do that. So that is why managing up, I think has gotten this bad rap as it's a necessary evil that you have to do and that it's something you do only when you have a bad boss. That is the, that's the main time you need managing up. And both could not be further from the truth. What I argue in the book is that managing up is not something you do for your leader. It is something you do for yourself. It is something you do to be proactive about getting the clarity, the balance, the autonomy, the authority that you need to feel more in control of your work every day. Because since the pandemic, I would argue that's what all of us want. We want to feel a sense of certainty and control because that has just been stripped away from us. So instead of feeling like you're being jerked around by the whims of your boss, changing priorities every day and this new mandate coming down from your skip level and do they like me or do they hate me? You can feel so much more in the driver's seat because you have this skill set and this is something you should just be doing as regular hygiene as just part of how you approach your day to day work. If you have a difficult boss, it's almost a little. I don't want to say it's too late, but you needed these skills a while ago. I've seen so many times how just these insights can prevent something from getting to that place or completely turn a relationship around to be workable for someone. Which in this economy it's easy to go on LinkedIn and say oh, you hate your boss, quit your job. But that's not the reality for most people. We have to work within some of the constraints we have. So I think to be able to to work with is within these constraints. You do a good job in the book pinning out 10 conversations I believe that can really help someone really embrace this idea of managing up in an effective way. Again, knowing fully that you can't just fire your boss or just automatically get a new job. And I think the first conversation that you offer some prescription around is this idea of alignment. Can you talk a bit more about what alignment means and what a flavor of this could look like for someone? Yes. And let's talk about just to step back for a minute, the idea of conversations. Because something else I noticed with managing up was a lot of people would get pithy phrases here and there. Be proactive, make sure, your boss likes you, go above and beyond, but there wasn't really a systematic way to go about acquiring and really understanding this very broad strategic skill set, which is why I grouped it into these 10 conversations. And as you said, everything starts with alignment, making sure that you and your leader are rowing in the same direction. Because if you're not, I don't know if you've ever been in a canoe. You're rowing one way, your partner is rowing the opposite way. You just spin in circles. And so that's what the alignment conversation gets us. It ensures that at the end of the day we can say, I know I was working on the most important priorities, the needle movers, the things that are going to three, six months from now, make sure I am moving my career forward, that I don't feel like I'm wasting my time or I pick my head up in a couple of weeks and my boss says, why were you working on that? That stopped being priority weeks ago. That's what alignment is about. We have to start there. I think that this one gets overlooked sometimes because in some respects it almost feels like it is. It's a given. Right. Or you just, you should have it because you know your manager, you've worked with them. And I'm glad you started with it because I, I think that so much of what you working on with your manager, when that relationship is underpinned by what are those fundamental either clear or unclear expectations about what I'm supposed to do as individual contributor reporting into a manager, or for that matter, what I can expect out of a leader that I report to. And so I think it more than anything, for me at least this one is just more of an affirmation that if you don't have an answer to this one, that is your starting point because no matter what you try to do after this, if that is not right, everything else is going to be really challenging. Exactly. It's like the lead domino. Yes. That everything else is built on. Yeah. Okay. I think that the other one that really stuck out to me, one of the other conversations that really stuck out to me is the ownership conversation. Right. And I love that you use conversations because I think you're right. You often hear this one come up quite a bit too, of act like an owner or take ownership. And it's one of those things where it's, yes, 100%, that sounds great. And what does that even mean? So could you enlighten us in terms of your prescription around what does it mean to take ownership and what does that conversation maybe look like. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that is we. I think corporate culture has oversimplified. Yes. What we mean by ownership. Yeah. You see a problem, run with it. And it's not always that easy. Again, because we're managing up within a broader ecosystem where there are people with certain incentives who may feel like you have stepped on their toes because you just ran with something. And you don't understand the history here, why we weren't doing it. So we have to tread a little more carefully than that. We have layers of approval now. One method I teach that can be really useful for this is really defining what is actually a problem worth solving. Because not all problems are created equal and you really want to look for things that are neglected needs. So are you hearing patterns in. There's something in a meeting that just keeps getting pushed aside time after get time again and nobody is really picking it up. For example, are there feedback patterns that are coming from the team, coming from clients that you would really be a hero if you were the one to find something to solve it around? I think another one is looking ahead. So many of us are focused on reacting to the fires that are here. Instead of thinking about three to six months from now, we need to be doing xyz. So how can I be laying the groundwork for that? Can I be building community partnerships or putting together some sort of a policy or even a. A dashboard that we can hit the ground running and use? So again, you become someone who is seen as strategic, a leader, you have vision. And so I think even learning to spot those ownership opportunities can go a very long way. Hi everyone, Al D here. Thanks so much for listening to the Edge of Work podcast. I hope you're enjoying today's conversation. In addition to hosting the show, I spend my time advising, coaching and partnering with leaders and organizations who are navigating a rapidly changing workplace. If you or your organization are focused on helping your employees and leaders lead through change, strengthening their human skills in an increasingly technology driven world, build greater adaptability or navigate the AI change management challenges, I'd love to connect. Whether you're looking for a keynote speaker for an upcoming leadership event, a leadership program, or just want more hands on support through workshops or coaching, I'd be excited to learn about you and your goals and explore how I can help. You can find my contact information in the show notes. I'd love to hear from you. Now let's get back to the show. I actually want to. I want to share a story that maybe combines a little Bit of ownership and as well as the account of the alignment conversation from my own lived experience and see where this lands for you. But early on in my career I remember working for a manager who I definitely had a lot of drive and a lot of aptitude and desire to, to demonstrate ownership. And I was probably lacking a little bit in capability to actually deliver upon it. And I think what this manager was really good at for me was helping me understand what ownership could look like for me or in what specific areas was she okay with me really taking ownership. Whereas other ones, a la the ones where maybe I didn't have as much capability, she really wanted me to maybe lean a little bit back or maybe ask a little bit first before really diving into that. And I think though what it speaks to is something of which I love the whole idea of conversations around which is this is a two way dialogue, right? It's not just me saying here's how I'm going to be an owner and I'm going to take this off of you. And it's not just my manager telling me, hey, this is what I want you to do and you don't have a say in it. And I think in this case why it was so helpful was because we were actually able to get to a place where I could flex that ownership, but she could still provide that expertise and that judgment that a good manager should do. Because before, without it, I probably would have gone off to try to take ownership into things that probably would not have been helpful to me or to her. And so that's just one, I think example where this idea of ownership but also paired with alignment actually proved to be pretty helpful. I love that. To build on that further, I think that is such an important insight, right? You need to do some of that groundwork. And in that ownership chapter, something else I talk about is this idea of pre sueding, which is not my idea. It comes from Robert Cialdini. Many people have heard or read his book Influence. He has another book in concept called Pre Suasion, which essentially is the psychological concept of priming. How do you. It gradually incrementally warms someone up to an idea so that when you present it, it doesn't feel like a shock. It doesn't feel out of the blue, it feels familiar, more like an evolution, more like a natural next step. And that sort of gets at what you're saying. It's a version of alignment because you're testing the waters, you're seeing what if we tried X, Y, Z, would you be Open to that. How would you feel about that? Has this been tried before? You're gathering that intel so you know how to calibrate or frame the eventual proposal you do come to the table with. Yeah, maybe one last thing on this ownership one and just curious to get your perspective on this because this is something I've seen come up over the past couple of years. I hear a lot of times some version of leaders, a lot of times saying, I really want people to come to me not with problems but with solutions. And I love the spirit of that, particularly in terms of having employee be proactive. And I've actually started to push back a little bit with some of my clients on this who are leaders to have them be a little bit more expansive on this. And this is the reason why. The reason why is because while I do love to see ownership on the level of any individual employee, I think taken to an extreme, what that sets the stage for is that it absolves the manager from taking responsibility as well as for that matter, takes them away from having the ability to offer their perspective, their insight and a two, again, that two way dialogue of offering up their own insight into what that solution could be. If your employees are just solving all these problems with you and you're not as the leader contributing to them, what are you doing? Right. And so anyway, I'm just curious. Again, everything is going to vary organizational organization, but I'm just in this conversation around ownership, just fleshing it out a little bit more. I'm curious if any of this lands at all or if you've seen this at all or what perspective you have on this topic. It does. It does. That is one of those managing up truisms that again. Yes. Yeah. I think now has actually become more controversial to. To your point that. Yeah. Are you. A couple of things. Are you not participating in the process and abdicating your authority, but also are you depriving your people of saying, hey, I need help here and being able to raise a bit of a flag where you may be putting pressure on them to have this front of having to have everything solved before it comes to you. So I've heard both sides of that and I think really all of this comes down to situational awareness. Right. There is a time and a place and certain situations where it is okay to go slower and say, all right, before we rush into solutions here, what are you thinking? I have some ideas I can share. I want to hear from you first. We can arrive and find a workable compromise between both of us where there are other times where speed, for whatever reason, we have to act with urgency and decisiveness, something is at risk, there's little margin for error. Whatever it is, where we have to say, listen, come to me with a solution in mind, I will execute on that or I will give you a no, no on this because. And I think that context is important. Yeah, we people need to understand a justification for the behavior and we'll get into the boundaries conversation. But one of my controversial opinions is no is not a complete sentence. And it's because of this, right? If people lack insight into why you are saying something, they will make up their own reasons for why you are doing that behavior. So we don't have to over explain ourselves. But if we say, hey, the CEO needs to get this to the board by tomorrow, so come with your solution, it's okay if it's not perfectly buttoned up, we'll go from there. It just instantly clarifies why are we doing this and in this way, in this approach. So I think that situational awareness is key. And that's why again, I love all the conversations, but also why I feel the conversation framing is so powerful. Because if you don't know the answer to what ownership means, I think it should be okay to ask and that should just be just something naturally that you do because it's hard to get it right off the bat, particularly if you're working with someone before you don't really know, or if you've never just even had that conversation. But even just to be able to articulate and say, hey, if I see a problem, is this something that you want me to just go and tackle on my own and to come to you to let you know when I've got it 80% done and just need maybe 20% of the feedback or sign off, or, or maybe this is something where you've worked together a while, where you can actually just for the most part just solve it and then come back later once you've done. But that should be a hallmark that, that, that ability to conversate. I think I made up that word. But ability to have that conversation should just be part of a healthy, I think, highly functioning manager, employee relationship where you are actively managing up and using the conversation as a vehicle to be able to drive results. Yeah, yeah, couldn't agree more. Putting some of those boundaries, for lack of a better word, constraints on it makes all of the difference in helping people know where do I stand and what are my boundaries. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's actually go to the boundaries one, because I think it's a natural follow on for in terms of the different conversations in the book. So could you hear a little bit more about the boundaries conversation? What does that look or feel like? This one, I feel like every time I talk about it, I need like a sound effect that says like dun, dun, dun, boundaries conversation. Da, da da. This is one people fear a lot because there is that thin line we need to walk of. I want to be a team player, but I don't want to be a pushover. And how do I say no to someone that literally has authority over my work and can actually tell me what to do? But at the same time, I have my team that I need to protect and I need to be a good leader to them and I want to deliver good. There's all these tensions happening here, which makes it just so loaded. And as I said it, no is not a complete sentence. If you just say no, I'm not doing that. You're. That is a violation of the power dynamics here, right? It is not enough to say, no, I'm not doing that. So when it comes to boundaries, I always say start with questions. Right? This goes along with our whole conversation of you may not know the full story. You may also be making assumptions about what is being asked of you. I can't tell you how many times I have done that where someone comes to me with a request. I think they're asking me for this gigantic thing when really it's just a little slice of that. So if you someone comes to you with a request and you can say what made myself or my team come to mind for this? Do you see this being a one off or anticipate this would become an ongoing request? What piece of this specifically do you need our help with? In the next week or month you can get a lot of valuable intel where you may be able to push back to say actually sales is better contact for this. I can introduce you to someone there, they can get you what you need faster. Or it gives you more information that then you can push back on. Or you can also make a judgment about do I want to push back on this? Do I want to say yes? Because maybe it's a great visibility opportunity. Maybe being asked to sit in on this meeting exposes you to a whole new part of the business and people you've wanted to meet. So before you just shut that down, it's to your benefit to evaluate the request. So that's the first thing is to ask questions and then second, if you do have to push back. There are a few ways you can do that. Two of my favorites. Number one is the trade off approach. The classic, okay, if we add X, we have to subtract something else. What would you like to deprioritize? Or better yet, I would suggest we temporarily pause on, deprioritize, slow down on this. Does that sound good? I can put that in place. You make a recommendation on that. But that can work because you're approaching it more as a problem solving exercise rather than this one way. No, I'm not doing this. And it puts the end authority back in the hands of the person who has the positional power. You make the final call, he here, your boss. But here's what my suggestion would be as the person who is on the ground. So as a trade off approach. And then you can also use the conditional yes. The conditional yes is great because again, because of the power dynamics, we may want to save face. We need to be mindful of our social capital and how we're spending it. And so you may want to say, I'm happy to do this time. However, please keep in mind we can't always accommodate a 24 hour turnaround time in the future or after we're through this busy period. Let's sit down. Let's figure out a process to get ahead of requests like this so you can get this done in a more timely manner instead of us being rushed at the end. So with a conditional yes, you're saying yes now with the anticipation of a boundary in the future. I want to switch gears for a second because I want people to dig into the other conversations by checking out the book. And so the gears I maybe want to switch. I want to talk more broadly just about this idea of becoming influential or being influential. And I know this is something you spend a lot of time on in terms of your writing as well as in your work with clients. But I'm wondering, what do you, what do you think most people get wrong or maybe mix up when it comes to this idea of wanting to be influential? Let's just say inside of your organization. Yeah. Oh, oh my gosh. How much time do we have? I think one thing people get wrong is that influence is equivalent to executive presence, is equivalent to bravado. It's equivalent to being the person who stands at the front of the room, who has this confident viewpoint, who is never thrown off guard, who always has the perfect thing to say. And what I would argue is that influence is actually built in the moments of imperfection in the moments of spontaneity where you do have to speak off the cuff and you don't know the answer, how do you handle yourself when that happens? That's when I find that my clients actually build the most credibility. So I'll give you an example of this. We're recording this a little ahead of mid year time but a lot of my clients are getting decisions down from on high about bonuses for the rest of the year and project assignments and things like that. And it's not great news. It's not news their team or other people necessarily want to hear. And they are. We're doing a lot of coaching around how do you deliver that message and what has been most effective is to say right up front this isn't going to be news you necessarily want to hear, but I want to be straight up with you. The bonus structure for this year is not going to be what we have would have hoped or anticipated. Here is what I can tell you. I know so far there, there are some things I still don't know and some things that I am not at liberty to disclose. And what I can promise you is that as things develop, I will keep you in the loop as I am able to with the information I'm able to share. That is a very influential response. You're not over promising, you're not being Pollyanna saying look on the bright side, we're working for such a great team and double down. You're being honest with people. It's building credibility by having the appropriate transparency around. This is what I can share with you. This is the limit of my commitment to what I can share for you. And that has built so much more trust. People have said thank you. I just appreciate that you were straightforward around that. And I get it. I get that there are things happening at your level that you can't tell us about. I think that's really what influence is. It's not in those over manufactured moments that we tend to think of. Yeah, it's less about the big ones and to your point, you know, more of the smaller every everyday ones for that matter and so forth. I want to go back to something we talked about a little bit earlier in our conversation and it relates to this idea that that work really is a shared endeavor or a team sport. And I want to talk about managing up in the context of working on a cross functional team of some kind where you could be an individual contributor or in some cases you might actually even be a people leader. But you've got to drive Some result of some kind where you have to work, not only work with other people, but in many respects you do have to influence them or to get them to do the thing you want them to do. And that could be saying yes, it could be making a decision, it could mean giving you resources or support, whatever it is. But you don't have that formal quote unquote power to get them to just do the thing you want them to do. And I'm just wondering from an application perspective, how might someone, or how might you help someone think about how they could apply some of these conversations or principles of managing up in that context of that cross functional work? Yeah. So much of this comes down to human psychology. And you've been saying all along, right? This is a joint endeavor, it's a shared endeavor. And I, I would argue that all of it all comes down to human behavior psychology. We are people working with other people regardless of what culture, workplace culture we come from and corporate structure and all of that. And so I think when we think about persuasion and getting buy in from people, a few things are very important. Number one is the translation layer of what is in it for them. Right. We may be saying this is going to be good for the company, but what does that mean for me and my team tomorrow, next month? What changes for us? Are you removing a bottleneck for us? Do we no longer have to go through this really tedious process that we hated and waste us hours? Make it relevant to me in my day to day? What does this mean for me? I'm so much more likely to feel compelled by that. So that's one thing is always be asking yourself, not what do I need to communicate, but what does the other person need to hear? Those are two totally different questions. And second, I would say is involving people early. This gets back to pre suasion, right? There's this. You have probably heard of the IKEA effect, which is when people are involved in building something, putting it together from the early stages, they feel more satisfied, they feel more invested in it. And so this may be previewing a decision, right, that you're going to present in a meeting, but making sure you know who your high influence, high interest stakeholders are. And you say, hey, I wanted to touch base with you in advance, just give you a snapshot of what I'm planning to put in front of the group. Any questions or anything you wanted to add to this? Is there a nuance that I'm missing? They are going to be far more likely to speak highly of that because you have given them an active chance to participate and shape it. I love all of that. There's two things in there that really resonate with me. I think the point you made about really thinking through what the other person needs to hear before you really communicating the message and just some respect is certainly a form of just empathy and just being intentional about your planning. But I think about this a lot of the. There's a difference between what. What a person wants to say and what the other person is capable of hearing. And I think that sometimes we confuse the two with one another or more likely than not over index on the former and not spend enough time on the latter. And obviously the former matters. Right. There's something you need to say. But really being intentional and thoughtful about what's on the other side and where that person is. And in some cases that might mean you may need to take a beat. Maybe you don't deliver the message that day. Maybe you wait for a little bit, or in some cases it might just mean actually just having that conversation of where are you at right now? I remember this story that I believe you've been on JP Elliott's podcast previously, but I remember him telling the story about how he had a conversation once where, when he was in a talent leader role, where he had a stakeholder who had objected to something that JP was about to do. And the guy said to him, hey, change my mind on this. And so JP said back to him, you actually had a place where you want me to actually change your mind? And then the guy laughed at him and the guy was like, touche. Fair point. But the point of it was is that in that moment, you could have easy JP could have easily launched into. It's because of this and because of that and because of this business case and because of that ROI that you care about. And instead he just asked the question of, hey, are you even at a place where this is actually what you want? And I think at the end they finally got to a point where they wanted to land. But I just love that story because it's so easy sometimes to want to lean into that message. And in that example, JP did a really good job of just even just being like, actually, where are you at? Because. And it ended up being a lot more effective. What a great question. I have to remember that one. Yeah. The other thing, though, that you mentioned in there that I think is so key and just so critical is just when. When you are working with other people is just that opportunity that people appreciate, which is to be invited to contribute. Right? People appreciate invitations, right? Don't always love being told what to do, but people do like being invited or being asked. And so it's a small flip, but I think it can really go a long way. And I think it maps really nicely to this idea of being proactive about how you are managing up, or in this case maybe perhaps across, of wanting to be someone that is inclusive and that is making invitations. One because I think it's the right thing to do, but two because it will probably get you better results because of the Ikea effect when you do make an invitation in advance to allow people to contribute. Love that. Love that flip from asking to inviting. That's a critical distinction. Okay, so I know this is going to be similar to a question around asking a parent with multiple children of who's your favorite child? But I'm going to ask it anyways. Out of the 10 conversations, if you could only recommend that our listeners focus on one of those conversations, what would be, in your view, the best conversation to start it is like picking your favorite child. I would say the visibility conversation is such a crucial one right now. It goes back to what we were talking about at the very beginning, bringing attention to your outcomes and your results, not just your effort, which is more important than ever. So there's a lot I talk about in that chapter in terms of being able to capture that for yourself, distill it, make sure it's in front of the right decision makers, presenting it. So it is not just you tooting your own horn, but you're giving other people credit where credit is due. I think that is such a Swiss army knife skill that everyone needs. Melody Wilding thank you so much for coming on the Edge of Work podcast and for sharing some of your insights from your book. Managing up how to get what you need from the people in charge. If people want to find out more about your work or follow you along, where can we point them towards? Best place is managingup.com you can find the book there. You can get a whole book bonus vault with lots of scripts and templates and you can connect with me at the rest of my website there. Hi everyone, Al D here. Thank you so much for listening to the Edge of Work podcast. 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