There are shelves of management books about how to manage people that work for you. I don’t know of any management books about another very important skill: how to manage your boss. Or, if you are CEO, how to manage your board.
Instead of thinking of your boss as someone who tells you what to do (they’ll obviously do some of that) think of them as someone that you are going to tell what you are doing and how they can help you accomplish your goals.
This is not about sucking up to your boss and being a yes-man. You boss is probably not so vain and stupid as to regard that as A-team behavior. You can’t always get what you want using your own personal charisma, sometimes you actually need your boss to do some tackling for you to leave the field clear.
One rule I’ve always tried to follow is not to produce big surprises. Of course things can go wrong and, say, schedules can slip. But they don’t go from being on time to being 6 months late overnight, without the slightest earlier hint of trouble. It is better to produce a small surprise and warn your boss that things might be getting off track (and have a reputation for being honest) than to maintain the image of perfection until the disaster can no longer be hidden. Just like the salesman’s mantra of “underpromise and overdeliver” your boss is a sort of customer of yours and should be treated the same way.
Lawyers are advised never to ask a witness a question that they don’t already know the answer to. Getting decisions that cut across multiple parts of a company can be a bit like that too. Never ask for a decision when you don’t already know exactly what everyone on the decision making panel thinks. Ideally they all buy into your decision, but in the middle of a meeting is not the time to find out who is on your side and who isn’t. Your boss can be invaluable in helping to get his peers on-board and finding out what they think in a way that you, being more junior, perhaps cannot.
In some ways this sounds like office politics, but actually I’m talking getting the company to make the correct decision. Often someone junior is the best-placed person to know the right technical solution, but they are not senior enough to drive the implementation if it requires other groups to co-operate. That’s when managing your boss comes into the picture.
If you are CEO you have some of the same issues managing your board. But your board is not one person and they all have different capabilities that you can take advantage of. But, just as in the decision committee scenario above, if you need a decision from the board make sure that everyone is bought into it already, or at least have some of the board ready to counterbalance any skeptics.