This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Managing up is usually mistaken for getting along with your boss. It is actually four separate skills, and none of them is charm.

Why good proposals die

You bring something well thought through. It gets a polite response and no decision. What went wrong is almost never the idea. It is that the proposal arrived in the wrong week, framed around your problem rather than theirs, in a format that took eleven minutes to read, without the one number that would have made the answer obvious. I have watched better ideas than mine lose to worse ones presented properly, and it took an embarrassingly long time to stop calling that unfair and start calling it a skill I did not have.

What this course actually covers

Five blocks. First, the professional version of this work — the chief of staff role: managing an executive's focus and calendar, synthesising information into briefs they act on, working with the hidden power structure, getting agreement from senior people without authority, and supporting a leader through a crisis. Second, their agenda: ten lessons on what a chief executive actually decides across direction, team, product, growth, money, crisis, technology and operations. Third, being worth listening to — a personal audit, working with your own manager, overdelivering visibly, and communicating so you are understood the first time. Fourth, their language: market structure, competition, economics, regulation, risk and the three financial statements, so a proposal can be argued in numbers. Fifth, being heard beyond one room — audiences, channels, delivering bad news, and measuring whether the message landed.

A note on two of the blocks

The business and communication blocks were recorded inside a people-function frame, and the last lesson of the finance block is explicitly about justifying a function's initiatives financially. The material itself is not domain-specific: STEEPLE, Porter's five forces, the Boston matrix, the three financial statements and audience segmentation do not change depending on whose proposal is being defended.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, reporting into and arguing with founders through that entire period, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 41 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the executive brief structure, prioritisation with Eisenhower and ICE, the personal audit, Porter's five forces, the three financial statements, audience personas and the channel mix

• Real practice from Google, Netflix and others

Where to start

Take the last written update you sent upward and read it as your manager would, in the ninety seconds they actually had. If the decision they needed to make is not obvious in the first three lines, that is where this course starts. Enrol now and start today.