Founder's Story - The Real Reason You’re Not Getting Promoted | Ep. 201 with Melody Wilding Author of Managing Up

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Melody Wilding is a professor of human behavior at Hunter College, a licensed therapist, an executive coach, and the author of Managing Up. She was named one of Insider’s Most Innovative Career Coaches and has been praised by thought leaders like Daniel Pink. Through her research and coaching, Melody has helped thousands of high-achievers navigate the complex relationships and unspoken rules that define career success.💬 In This Episode:Melody Wilding joins Founder's Story to unpack the real reason many talented professionals get stuck in their careers—it’s not about skill, it’s about mastering the psychology of the people around you. From decoding power dynamics to influencing with integrity, Melody explains how to “manage up” to leaders, navigate workplace politics, and take ownership of your career trajectory.Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder or building your own business, this conversation is packed with actionable tools to help you lead, influence, and grow.🧠 Topics We Cover:Why your biggest workplace challenges aren’t technical—they’re psychologicalThe 10 Conversations that unlock influence, visibility, and career growthHow to master both your inner psychology and the psychology of othersThe difference between managing up at junior vs. senior levelsWhy avoiding workplace politics is a dangerous mistakeHow to communicate with different leadership styles and power personalitiesThe “ownership conversation” and how to act like a business owner in your jobHow small, strategic asks (aka “foot in the door” technique) create big changeHow to build internal visibility without being self-promotional💡 Key Quote:“Politics are going to happen whether you like it or not. If you opt out, you do so at your own peril.”📘 Grab the book → ManagingUp.com 🎁 Bonus templates & scripts included with sign-up!Connect with Melody: 🌐 ManagingUp.com 📚 Author of Managing UpOur Sponsors:* Check out Avocado Green Mattress: https://www.avocadogreenmattress.com* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com* Check out Northwest Registered Agent and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://northwestregisteredagent.com* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at NorthwestRegisteredagent.com slash founders. Hey everyone, welcome back to Founder's Story. Today we have Melody Wilding, the author of Managing Up, How to Get What You Need from the People in Charge. And Melody is a professor of human behavior at Hunter College. And you were recently named one of Insider's

most innovative career coaches. And I have to say human behavior is probably the most interesting topic that I like to discuss. And I was mentioning before that you have you know you've been quoted by Daniel Pink as being an incredible individual and he is one of my favorite speakers. So I'm honored to have you here. Let's just dive into first what made you get into this path in life and why this industry. Well I think we teach what we most need to learn and that's very true in my case. And my background is as a therapist and so I thought early on in my career, I've always been fascinated by human behavior, why people do what they do and the nuances of their behavior.

And I've always been someone who was a bit of a people pleaser, being very vigilant of what was happening around me. So those things brought together, pursued a path in psychology, became a therapist. But I very quickly realized that what my clients wanted was not traditional therapy, like let's unpack your childhood. They really wanted something that was much more tactical and practical for their careers because we spend 70, 80% of our time working. And often where we have the biggest problems or face the most challenges is with the different personalities we encounter

or the power dynamics. Sometimes the technical skills are the easy part. It's the invisible people dynamics that can be the hard part. And so that's what I've really spent the last 10 plus years doing is helping people find what I call your professional power position, which is mastering your own inner psychology.

So your own confidence, getting over your own insecurities and doubts, but also influencing other people's psychology. So how do you build trust, relationships, persuade others? When those two things come together, that's when your success is really supercharged. I really like how you say, you know, mastering psychology both their own and that of others, and I think back to the most successful people that I can think of, and they have really mastered

psychology. It might be one of the most important degrees that I think someone can get in whether it's business or leadership Just my personal opinion. So let's let's go into how does somebody even master? Psychology. Yeah, I think so much of it is Deceptively simple so much of it comes down to reading the room right having what in the book I call Organizational awareness right so many of us, we're caught in the minutia, the weeds of our work that we really don't pick up our heads to look at what's happening around us.

Or actually what I see more common is people will say, well, I don't wanna play politics. I don't wanna be that kind of person. But the truth is that politics are going to happen around you whether you like it or not. Do you want to choose to be involved with it? That doesn't have to mean you play mind games or that you're Machiavellian. You can navigate them in a way that has a lot of integrity. But if you opt out, you do so at your peril. And that's where we see or where I see people really become sidelined or they're passed over for a promotion because they hadn't built relationships, they

hadn't marketed themselves, really convinced people the value of their ideas or their worth. And so that's a huge part of it is, yes, we have to have the inner confidence to have some of these 10 conversations that I talk about in the book, but also decoding some of the behavior of the people around us. What's important to our manager, our leader, even other people that may hold power, whether it's clients or certain vendors, we have to understand what makes them tick, what are their priorities and pressures so that when we are framing our messages, we're doing that in a way that's actually going to land with them, that's actually going to get them to take action. All the things on your website that you say not to do is all the things that I did in my corporate experience,

which for sure held me back. The person that you're talking about was me and now that you know I've been able to read your book and read all the things that you're doing, I realized I was doing it all wrong. So when you meet somebody like myself, how do I, you know, if I was still in the corporate environment, what could I do to start turning things around. Well, I would start with, the book is based around these 10 conversations to manage up. And I intentionally frame them in a way so that they build on one another. So the first ones are the most foundational and then we get to more advanced ones.

And one of those first conversations is called the styles conversation. It's probably one of my favorite chapters because it's just so useful across every single relationship you have. And the styles conversation is about being able to decode what is the communication style, the preferences, the work approach of the people around me

and how do I assert my own? And so if I was working with someone like yourself, that's where I would say to start because we can break it down based on two dimensions, someone's level of dominance, higher, low, and someone's level of sociability, higher, low. And when you do that, you get four different general styles.

And this is huge. This is huge for short-cutting, for eliminating so much stress and frustration. Because if you can realize, oh, I'm actually working with a leader who wants the bottom line, does not want a lot of context up front, gets really frustrated if I'm talking about, you know, how do people feel about the situation? They just want to know what's the outcome, what's the result, right? That if you can make some of those subtle tweaks,

not totally contorting yourself, but just selective and strategic upgrades to how you are communicating with them and approaching them, it makes getting their buy-in, it makes gaining their trust and rapport vastly, vastly easier. And the opposite, if you're dealing with someone who's a big picture thinker, who cares a lot about the vision, then if you're framing your ideas in terms of that, if instead of saying, well, this is going to help us improve our process in this way, don't say that. Say, this is gonna help us hit that five year vision we have to do X, Y, Z.

Just even that alone is going to change and enhance your perception vastly. This just reminded me when I was in my corporate job, I went from 30 employees to 130 employees, also in a totally different state, managing a different culture of people on and they were Generationally different than the ones before and I made every single mistake that you could probably have in a book So how do how does somebody navigate these as they go up?

Because I'm sure this happens a lot they move people around You go into a different job roles change all all the time, and now things might be completely different. But is it really the same? Are things really the same or do you have to change? Great question. Great question. I'll say two things about this because as you move up the chain of command, yes, largely

the way you're approaching, managing up, influencing others stays the same because human behavior stays the same. But some of the nuances are different, right? When you are maybe a little earlier or more junior in your career, your leaders are people who are still involved in the day-to-day work, right? They still have their hands in a lot of things, versus as you move up, you become more mid and senior level, then the people above you aren't really, they're not executing the day-to-day work. They're much more involved with the strategy.

And so that makes a big difference in terms of how you are managing up. Also again, as you advance, you probably have less interaction with your leaders, because if you are managing up to a board or the C-suite, you're really not getting as much face time with them as you might with someone who's a frontline manager that you're meeting weekly with for 60 minutes. And so your communication needs to be on point. The way you're explaining your accomplishments and what you're getting done, you have to be that much more thoughtful and precise with the time you do have with them.

So those are some of the nuances of what changes. But going back to the fact that the early conversations in the book are the most foundational, actually the first one is the alignment conversation because everything has to start with that. We need to make sure we are clear on what success looks like, what's the most meaningful, important work that I could be doing, what is the promotable work? So I make sure that I'm positioning myself

for some of the later conversations, which are about visibility and advancement, but alignment makes sure that we're not spinning our wheels, that we're not spending time going in one direction only to bring a deliverable back and our boss says, well, that isn't what we wanted or we're not focusing on that anymore. And so, as you're, you know, a lot of people are working in very project-based or matrix-based organizations where different work groups are coming together, committees are,

every day is changing. And so you have to be having that alignment conversation more explicitly and more frequently to be understanding from your leaders, all right, what are the metrics you are discussing with your boss? What sort of trends that you are seeing in the next three or six months should we be keeping our eye on and acting on?

Those types of questions, make sure you have your finger on the pulse instead of just assuming you're doing the right things only later to find out you weren't. Wow, this reminds me, the further up I went, the more it became more important and imperative to, it became more important to me that I needed to manage up because my job wasn't so much managing all the people underneath it was really managing you know the c-suite of the organization or the president or vice president I did

not do a good job of that which is why I never move past that point. So looking back, I'm wondering, what could I have done differently or what strategies or tips or even traits that people should have when they're at maybe like a senior manager level and they want to manage up to get beyond that. Yes, yes. Let's talk about eliminating cognitive load for your leaders, because this is a big part of managing up well, right? The people above you at, when you're operating at that mid to senior level, they're even busier. And they also want to see you know how to think for yourself, because we've been mentioning this word visibility, right?

And visibility is getting recognition for your accomplishments, for the great progress you're making. But visibility is not just about what you accomplish. It's also how you think about things, giving people visibility into your rationale, your thought process, problem solving. And so at this level, that's really important, but you have to strike a balance to not overload your leader because when you are able to be concise and you come with ideas or solutions to the table, you've made their job easier. And they're going to say, okay, I'm glad I hired this person because they know how to step up in

this role. And so, for example, it may be, let's say you're trying to manage up to your VP and you need buy-in for some sort of initiative you're doing at your level. Well, what you might do is give them some ready-made slides or an FAQ document so that they can go into their senior leadership meetings or the board meeting and advocate on your behalf. And the beauty of that is you've made their job easy. It's plug and play for them, but also you're driving the narrative of the story you want told about that work. So it's really a win-win in that respect. And even when you do need to ask for help

or you do have a problem, you know, there's that old adage come with solutions, not problems, which yes is good, but even better is to show how are you thinking through trade-offs to say, let me give you the headline here. What I need is a final call from you on this decision. And I can also give you a little bit of background. Here's what we tried so far. Here's the factors

we weighed. So you're showing, you're giving some transparency into that, how you thought about it. So your leader knows, well, did you consider this? Did you think about that? Did you consult that person? Because they always want to be mitigating risk and uncertainty, right? That's what higher level senior leaders are thinking about. How can we optimize for speed, minimize risk, get the maximum results? So show them you have thought about those things that are important to them at their level. I wish I read your book 10 years ago. I could have kept going. I am curious, though, as I

transition from corporate to entrepreneurship, we've had some other guests talking about the same thing, but I think there's actually an alignment of how you can act as like an entrepreneur at your job. As I'm listening to what you're saying, it's like building up your personal brand within your work, you know, doing certain things things that almost are those two are kind of aligned at the same time. We think of them as always like two different things. I know you had said something about entrepreneurship. I believe that's what you called it when we were speaking earlier. Can you what are your thoughts on this in terms of, you know, being like a business owner, but also, you know, being the corporate job. I think it's such a fantastic mentality.

And definitely when I was in corporate, I think some of my entrepreneur side was showing because that's how I thought about it. That's what I thought about. How do I be a business owner and fully own my area of whatever I'm working on? And this really comes down to, there's the third conversation in the book is the ownership conversation. Because acting like an owner,

that's a value for many companies. People wanna see you know how to take initiative. And when we talk about advancement, right? Usually you have to show, I'm already operating at a higher level in order to be officially promoted to that level. So the ownership conversation is thinking about, okay, how do I gain buy-in or pitch

my ideas in a way where I can step outside my current job description? And when you are acting like an owner, you are not just running into the situation and saying, well, here's what I want to change and I'm just going to run with this. Right? You're incrementally, you're planting seeds because especially when you are still internal in an organization, people, if you try to change things overnight in a big way, they're going to throw their defenses up. And so if you plant seeds, you know, have we thought about maybe how we could streamline this process? Or have we thought about maybe opening it up to different markets? One of the best things I've ever done for my personal growth was picking up

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Not all applicants will qualify. Plus 500, it's trading with a plus. So you're kind of testing your ideas to take the temperature of the people around you, surface objections that may be there so that you can basically bring data or you can put together a plan. And also framing things as an experiment. Going back to that idea of how do we minimize the sense of risk or level of commitment upfront,

you can use what's called the foot in the door technique, which is let me make a small ask that could lead to a bigger ask later. So if you're trying to pitch something and you say, what if we just roll this out to a segment of maybe 25 customers to start, we can pilot it, see how it goes, and then we can, if it works, great,

we can consider rolling it out further. If it doesn't, then we just cap it there and call we can if it works great we can consider rolling it out further if it doesn't then we just cap it there and call it a day but that can that's a great way to act like uh act like a business owner within your current organization. Melody this has been amazing um I really wish I had read your book 10 years ago it could have changed my life at that moment So I hope everybody goes out there and reads the book So many lessons strategies tips. I love when you can walk away with something tangible and it's not just a theory So this has been a great conversation if you want to get the book they want to find out more information about you How can they do so just had to managing up?

out more information about you, how can they do so? Just head to managingup.com. All the details about the book are there. And if you enter your information, you can also get access. We have a bonus vault of different templates and scripts from the book because yes, I care a lot about making sure this is tactical and actionable for people. The best book website I've ever seen. And I signed up and I got the information too. But Melody, thank you so much for being here and we appreciate you on Founder's Story.

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