Working with your manager

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This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

As with the rest of this site, the following points are all focused on trust fundraising issues, rather than general ones, in this case as regards your manager. If you are having issues that aren’t about our unique situations as trust fundraisers, but more general employee-manager issues, then the resources referenced at the end may help.

Why do many managers struggle to support trust fundraisers?

As a trust fundraiser, you might not be able to expect too much of your manager. In the 30-odd charities I’ve worked at, I can count maybe half a dozen skilled trust fundraisers I’ve had as a manager. I have possibly had more useful professional support from people I’ve managed than from people I was managing. (As I’m confident and knowledgeable and carry a lot of authority, it’s easy for me to ask people who work for me for advice. They seem to enjoy it.)

Management theorist John Kotter argues there is no such thing as an effective generalist manager. That’s because managers are there to produce change and to do that, you have to (1) know what you’re doing and (2) know the different people involved in the process. However, fundraising managers don’t necessarily know either. Much of our knowledge base and most of the people we work with are not within the fundraising functions, but within the Services functions. On the other hand, our Managers have often got where they are due to breadth of fundraising knowledge and the number of people they’ve managed, but all managers have gaps and a great deal of trusts-relevant experience rarely appears. A lot of my managers have been basically corporate or occasionally community or major donor fundraisers, who’ve done a year of trusts at some point.

That doesn’t stop them being good people, bright and with good people skills and your best interests at heart. It just limits the range of ways they can help. 

If you find the same situation with your own manager, it honestly doesn’t normally make your job unmanageable. It’s normal – there are many hundreds of us getting on with things on that basis. Most trust fundraisers deal with it and still normally have rewarding work lives, normally meeting their targets. Clearly it’s not ideal, but I do think it’s a significantly bigger problem for you if you view it as an unmanageable situation, instead of being positive, problem solving it and finding ways to build a good partnership with your manager that plays to both of your strengths.

How you might reasonably expect a generalist manager to help you

Any decent manager ought to be able to help you by:

• Providing a critical eye as regards applications
• Ensuring you’re focused on both the big and small pictures
• Being a listening ear while you think through the answers to your problems – ideally asking good questions, though they don’t all have the skills to do that
• They usually have some sense of good stewardship
• They’ll have some skills regarding reforecasting income
• Keeping you up to the mark by asking you to tell them how you’re getting on in areas where you’ve asked for more attention. In the past, I’ve been given lists of questions to ask regularly by reports and that has helped them maintain that bit more focus and motivation by being held to account. (No, I didn’t arm twist them into this!)
• If you need to pull rank / bring in another person, a good generalist manager can follow a brief to talk to Services or Finance, being in your corner, if you give them the materials
• Supporting you where the issues are more about people, e.g., a colleague is unprofessional
• Integrate what you’re doing into the overall fundraising strategy in the way that restricts and inconveniences you the least
• Ask questions regarding strategy and how you’re handling the individuals you work with
• Say “well done” and “thank you” every so often (though it’s a bit more difficult if you don’t really know what you’re recognizing them for)

Where generalist managers often aren’t fully equipped to help

Many hard issues come where the manager needs knowledge and skills that might not come from their experience:

• Advocating in difficult situations
• Making a strategic case for what you want
• They suspect there’s something wrong with your performance
• They’re being asked to agree something that affects you (e.g., to commit to fundraising for something, to agree a change in working method, to agree a target for your post)

Developing a positive relationship

I’d say that some keys are:

• Ensure they trust you. Trust is earnt and comes especially from delivering what they most value.
• Develop open communication. That means saying what you mean, making disclosures and showing you’re on the same side. If you can sometimes spot things they’re holding back, that can encourage them to be straightforward as well.
• Market yourself to them a bit. It doesn’t need to be something that’s wasting your time in your 1:1s, but “I’ve met my target twice in the last three years”, for example, shows you’re the genuine article. I tell people early on that I’ve been doing this for 25 years, for example and as a result managers rarely try and tell me what to do (something which happened a lot more in the early days).

You need to ensure that, as well as trusting you, your manager is onside. At the end of the day, they’re in charge and their decisions can affect you. Tempting though it might be to sideline someone who can’t really help you, they can still start committing you to do things differently, in your absence. 

Another example of what happens if you take your manager for granted… At one charity where I worked, I felt my Department was led by someone mainly from a retail background, they knew little and seemed wedded to dangerous approaches. My actual manager was from a corporate FR background and seemed fine to just let me get on with things as I had for three years. I made no effort to win either my manager or my Director over. I sidelined them both so completely that if they tried to get involved, they’d have had no place to even start. One day, my Director created a Trusts Team Manager post. I applied for the role and was basically ambushed at interview: almost all the questions focused on our points of difference. I was completely unprepared (having prepared standard answers). They appointed someone else, whom I thought very unimpressive, but whose views more closely reflected their own.

Working round their lack of understanding

If they’re having to represent you on something, it can be useful to both write them a brief and run them through the key points in person. Both are useful – the in-person bit they’re most likely to remember, but because it’s outside their experience it won’t be easy to hold it all, so a written brief is useful, too. The more senior they are, the more likely that they absorb most information through oral briefings, anyway. If Services or whoever are likely to come back with a particular point, brief them on how to handle it.

Quite a few people I’ve mentored over time have had problems with their manager. Normally, this is because they haven’t been able to get them to do things and occasionally because the manager has wanted my mentee to do stupid things. To take those issues in turn:

1. “I can’t get my manager to do something I need from them”

I usually find, talking it through with them, that there’s a solution:

Getting more from the manager

It can help to put yourself in your manager’s shoes as the person they really are, with the priorities they have, the knowledge and confidence levels they have. What might they need to understand better so they can really help? What do they want to achieve that you can use to persuade them? What might make it easy for them?

A common issue with mentees has been that when our manager lets us down, difficult emotions come up. Talking it through with a friend or writing it all out are two strategies that help me develop more objectivity. From the manager’s perspective, they’re very likely trying their best and trying to get the best result.

Occasionally you can go to your manager’s manager, if they could be seen as the key person. As a manager myself, I’m aware that having someone go over my head can feel a little undermining. When someone hasn’t really tried to sort things out with me first, it can be annoying. For those reasons, my advice would be to do it only in the right context and when there isn’t a better option. I personally would mention it to my own manager, as a matter of courtesy.

Other options

However, a lot of the time you can get a long way with Services, or whoever, yourself without using the hierarchy above you, at all. If you watch how your manager actually helps you – yes, their position of authority can help, but often it’s actually their different problem solving, people skills and communication skills that will do the trick. I’ve written pages and pages of ideas to help in these regards, in the Work with Services and Problem Solving sections of this web site. If you can get your knowledge and skills to a high level, you may even be able to do better on your own than if your manager helped. For example, your manager may not have the creativity and understanding you have being so immersed in things. 

Management studies have found that, if people at lower levels can work things out between themselves, they usually come up with better solutions than are produced by kicking issues up the ranks.

Even with problems with stuff higher in the hierarchy you can usually find a way round problems, if you plan it. I was at a hugely hierarchical charity, with managers who just weren’t fighting my corner. One day, I managed to get the lift down with the Director of Services and because I was prepared, I’d talked out enough of a solution with them in the minute or so it took us to reach the ground floor. The webpage about managing senior managers is full of ideas about how to work with senior staff in, say, Services and some material also is integrated into the webpages on problem solving.

2. “My manager is sabotaging my work”

This hasn’t happened to me that often, but when it has done it can be particularly difficult, emotionally. What we do is defined by the charity but it’s also very personal to us. Trust fundraisers do occasionally have challenges: people unreasonably constraining what you can do; other people around the charity doing your bids; people insisting you write things that are obviously stupid; Services changing everything without telling you / refusing to do essential tasks, so you can’t work – and your management backing them; people asking you to spend a lot of time on tasks that are a low priority for you.

It’s particularly a problem if you’re really, really giving your all and going above and beyond expectations. I remember at one charity seeing a hugely dedicated day centre manager suddenly resign because her manager did something which she saw as sabotaging her work. I recognized her feelings.

 If you do find it happens to you:

• Recognize there’s a specific emotional process happening. But – it’s finally just that. When you’re derailed by the powers that be, it can release strong emotions. 
• Take time to cool off. It’s easy to act rashly and/or misjudge things. The best way is usually to take some time if you can and only act when you’re really ready. Crusades you launch into at that moment could be a bit disastrous – and not really in your/everyone’s best interests, seen from a distance. 
• Be patient and kind to yourself. You deserve it.
• Once you’ve cooled down: try and change what you can (no one should be a doormat) but accept what you can’t.
• Try to see the “big picture” (because it’s very easy to focus too much on one or two issues when big emotions are flying around): what you can achieve; where you need relationships to be; your personal needs. The long-term relationships are often important but easily neglected. So, check you’ve given them the required weight.
• Try and be fair to the others: however misguided they were and however stupid the consequences, they thought they were acting for the best
• It’s easy to justify things out of anger – but don’t!
• Have a good fall-back reason for coming into work, during harder times when your normal motivations don’t kick in. For example, sometimes I personally work because it feels a little bit more like a vocation, sometimes I work because it’s interesting. However, I also have a fall-back mode where I just recognize I’m get paid to turn up and make a decent effort between 9-5. It can take a while to really “go again” (if you still think in your guts that keeping going at the charity is the best thing) but you do need a way to keep going, while you regroup

Escalating issues intelligently

As Weiss and Hughes (2006) argue in a Harvard Business Review article on managing conflict, unilaterally escalating an issue through your manager can risk entrenching your one-sided take on the situation. It’s easy to get sucked into just presenting your view of the world and saying “Please take this up”. If they do so, they may not have all the facts. Worse, they may just say, “You’re right – go for it. Do it yourself.” In that case, you’ve gained almost little and sacrificed your freedom to manoeuvre. If your opposite number in Services has done the same thing, all you’ve both done is entrenched the problem.

Weiss and Hughes suggest that issues should be escalated jointly, by both staff (yourself and your Services opposite number) in a joint presentation that outlines:

• The issues
• What you’ve tried
• The different options that the two of you see

That gives a much more rounded and helpful briefing for the two managers to bring their skills and authority to bear on.

How to impress your manager

Ask your manager what are the most important one or two things you need to do in your job – and ensure you do them, whatever else happens. It may not be what you’d think of as the top priority, so you need to know. 

The most important one or two things may seem obvious to you, but you don’t fully know the “view from upstairs” at your charity and you have to remember they might not understand your work that well. 

Even if they don’t support you, you don’t like them, or you don’t agree with their priority, they’re in charge. If you don’t do everything they want you should be fine, but if you don’t do the top one or two things, you’ll be in trouble.

Read any book on “managing your manager”. The above seems to be the key point.

If what they most want is something that you can’t guarantee – e.g., delivery of a particular income target – then it’s better to have a line of regular communication where you can educate them, but you should probably keep an eye on whether this is someone you can definitely work with. However, it’s not THAT often you get someone who isn’t fundamentally reasonable.

Judging how you’re doing is partly subjective. In my experience, managers who don’t know the work well are impressed by knowledge, ideas, hard work and positive feedback from trusts. Those are all good things to share with them.

They also won’t know the numbers well. So, if you’ve doubled the amount you’ve raised from a trust or secured a significant new donor, tell them.

Resources for general issues with any line manager

Mind Tools have a terrific one hour “Bitesize Training” workbook-style course. It will ask you a lot of sensible, reasonably searching questions about your relationship with your manager and it includes some sage advice.

There are lots of books on the subject, if you search online for manage your manager. They have quite different coverages (from how to get on to how to deal with difficult personalities). So, you’ll need to dig around a bit.