Managing Up

Ever since my raise back in November and our annual kick-off meeting in January, my boss has been pushing the idea of ‘Managing Up’. Working in a small agency of less than a dozen staff, 6 at full-time status, bottlenecks are often created because everyone has to report to the CEO. She told us, “I can’t manage everything if I’m trying to get us new business. You’ve got to manage up. Tell me when things are due, advise me on the next step for clients, have reports ready and be proactive.”

Managing up is tough and rewarding at the same time because it’s like management training. You get in the mindset of your boss and client delivery is just that much quicker and efficient; both traits needed for agency work. Coming to Australia, my goal has always been to leave at management level, so I can return to the US and apply to be a manager. In 6 months, I’m just that much closer to achieving management status.

This week, the concept of ‘managing up’ turned into reality as I saw my rise at Taurus. With our former marketing manager returning to his homeland of France, we have been left without a marketing head for the past 3 months. During the last three months, most of our work has been dedicated to PR. As an integrated PR, marketing, creative and social media agency, we can tackle on client work of different natures. Also, client demands are cyclical. A client may approach us saying they need PR, but when we actually sit them down to talk through their needs and future goals, it turns out they actually need to work on their key messaging and change their marketing collateral. Later on, we can start doing some PR.

This has been the case in the last few weeks. I came to Taurus wanting very much to work on the PR side. As I was exposed to different projects, I found that I actually enjoy marketing strategies and creating brand collateral. Little by little, I have been able to take on marketing projects through the direction of my CEO and our part-time marketing director/ mum.

This month, much of our PR work has been exchanged for marketing work. I showed keen interest to work with the clients in need of marketing work to my CEO and marketing director, so the new marketing team was formed. My director oversaw projects and mentored me on how to use my marketing hat, a very different hat to the PR one. I’ve learned about the style and language used in marketing – very sales focused as opposed to PR, which only focuses on being newsworthy. This has been a great partnership over the past few weeks. However, she’s only part-time coming in only two half days per week leaving much of our correspondence happening over emails.

This past week, I received news that the marketing director had fallen ill. The already limited time she spent at the office would be turned into annual leave as she would need time to stay home and recuperate – perhaps for weeks. With this news, I took it upon myself to manage all the marketing projects. In addition to copy writing, I would be the contact person for the CEOs I’m dealing with. Talk about pressure! Never being the sole liaison between clients and my CEO, I felt a lot of pressure to deliver and make everyone feel good about the outcomes.

This week, I found myself scheduling in management meetings with my CEO, creating reports and schedules to show project tracking and even creating contracts and invoices – all sensitive stuff reserved usually for management, not me the little Account Executive.

One big feat for this week was writing a client’s company brochure. Knowing all along that this project would happen, we were surprised to know they needed it in a 24 hours! We had scheduled to do this in March sometime, but the client needed to supplement their proposal for tender. So on a Thursday morning, I received an email from the client’s business development manager asking for the 1000 word brochure in 24 hours, I freaked! Our CEO kept me calm and drew out plan that including messaging from previously drafted fact sheets and reports. All I had to do was pick out the best messaging and format it and edit the content to sound more salesy. With the help of an intern to gather all the information, I turned it around in 2.5 hours! Pat on the back.

Although I’m high stressed lately, this has been an awesome experience to really manage my own clients. I’ve found myself on top of things and necessarily organised. I’ve even taught the interns about ‘managing up’. Thankfully, my efforts have been recognised through approval of the marketing director verbalised to my CEO. Hopefully in May when my appraisal is on the table, I’ll reap monetary rewards and a new title.