Did you ever wish to know certain things that will make you work better with your senior management?
Building a successful relationship with senior management can feel like solving a complex puzzle. Each piece—understanding their goals, adapting to their communication styles, and contributing meaningfully—plays a role in creating a seamless partnership.
By focusing on how your efforts align with the broader organizational vision, you can position yourself as a valuable asset while also gaining opportunities for personal and professional growth.
There are three leading aspects that the senior management cares about. Let’s briefly discuss these three.
1. ROI
Your role (and your own presence) is designed for one of the three purposes: sourcing/closing business, generating work (hours/product) or saving the company from damages.
The better you are in your category, the more your management will value you and will consider you fit the culture of the business.
There are nuances in measuring ROI since you may have some overlap between categories. But, a business relies on generating capital and saving expenses by dodging damages.
2. Communication
Communication is the underlying element of every relationship—including in business.
Crisp communication is invaluable.
Businesses using effective internal communication tools are 3.5 times more likely to yield better results.
Effectively communicating problems and requirements, reporting violations or risks, supporting the business goals, asking clarifying questions, ensuring you’ve got everything needed, doing research and summarizing your lessons can all mean a ton to a business.
Communication overhead can be massively expensive—in fees, fines, recruitment costs, time, energy, and even relationships and trust.
Issues relevant to Communication overhead arise for various reasons, such as:
- Onboarding new team members who need time to catch up
- Inadequate documentation for training
- Ambiguous processes within the organization
- New roles in a department
- Unclear responsibilities in new or separate departments
- Promoting a staff member to another department
- Increasing number of responsibilities
- Dealing with multiple new team members into a project
The company’s workplace communication techniques must consider and address these issues to avoid escalations.
3. Company hierarchy
Understand what defines the company hierarchy. In a typical company hierarchy, you find a top-down structure starting with the Board of Directors at the pinnacle, followed by the C-suite or the executive-level managers such as the CEO, COO, CFO, etc.
These individuals set the strategic direction of the company and make decisions that impact the entire organization. Below are the senior managers or vice presidents who translate the executive-level strategies into actionable plans.
Study your superiors and find out which qualities get appreciated by management.
Operate effectively within your department and other departments. Understand the chain of command and internal workflows, and become efficient in following them.
Following the three paradigms will bring clarity for you as to the operational specifics of the business and your communication will be better aligned with the executive goals and vision.
