Most people think of “managing up” as navigating the relationship you have with your boss. It is seen as an inherently personal relationship, and one that benefits you: the employee, the one doing the managing up.
Managing up within an international education framework can be broader, and can benefit not only you personally but also the internationalization goals you have for your employer. The target of your managing up is not only your immediate boss, but various stakeholders on the rungs above you in your organization (and even outside it – more on that below). In fact, managing up is crucial in almost all international education offices at universities, as the work we do is not understood well by many of those who lead institutions.
Knowing the goals, and challenges to achieving those goals, of your boss, and of the institution at large, is critical to framing your goals and tailoring your requests for support in terms that will resonate. For example, at a previous institution where I was the SIO, I reported directly to the provost. And that particular provost was not shy about letting me know that she did not value study abroad, that she felt it was just a frilly, and expensive, add-on to an undergraduate education.
Managing up in this case meant I paid attention to what she talked about most, what institutional problems she was trying to address. An overriding theme for her was student retention and graduation rates. It wasn’t hard to put together a report, with solid data and research, to demonstrate that having an education abroad experience as an undergraduate had significant positive impact on both retention and graduation rates. For my boss, education abroad became a tool to achieve her goals, while increased support for our EA efforts helped me achieve my broader internationalization goals.
Managing up can go beyond your immediate boss. At another institution where I was the SIO, an institution located in a politically conservative state, there was little support among state lawmakers for public universities to increase their numbers of international students. My own boss was supportive of such efforts, but felt his hands were tied by the governing board and state politicians. The most common arguments these stakeholders made against having more international students at the university were 1) they took seats away from state residents, and 2) they were a drain on institutional and state resources.
We in the field know that neither of those arguments is accurate. And we also know that increasing the international student enrollment at a university can lead to greater internationalization and global engagement opportunities for the entire campus community. But I knew this latter argument would hold zero sway with this particular group of stakeholders.
Instead, careful presentation of relevant facts was the solution to managing up to this group. Showing the data on how many graduate departments in the College of Engineering would not be able to exist (in order to educate our state residents) without the enrollment of significant numbers of international students, caught their attention. NAFSA’s data on the economic contribution of international students in the U.S. (and to our state), also caught their attention.
Though I find it misguided to think that international students are only a means to keeping departments alive for domestic students, or to increase revenue to an institution, “managing up” in this case meant making those arguments, managing up to the state lawmakers, in order to get the support needed to make progress on the university’s greater internationalization goals.
Some would call these curated arguments and data sets selling out. Others might contend I’m arguing that the ends justify the means. I call it managing up. And I do it every day.
