The art of managing up (without the cringe)

Hi {{first_name|there}},

Most weeks in this newsletter we talk about managing the people reporting to you. This week I want to turn it the other way and look at managing the relationship above you. Managing your own boss well is one of the least discussed parts of the job, and one of the most useful, because your boss controls a lot of what your team needs to do good work.

Managing up does not generally have a good name.

How many times have you asked about somebody who got a surprise promotion (especially when you know they are not a great leader) and heard the quietly disparaging response: ‘oh, yes, they're good at managing up’?

When you see these situations, it is hard not to feel like you need to make a choice between acting in accordance with your personal values and selling your soul to get on; at least that is how I have sometimes felt in the past.

But managing up is both essential and empowering. And it definitely can be done effectively in a way that decent people feel comfortable with. In fact, a useful starting point can be to reframe it as something closer to translation. Your job is to translate what you and your team do into language that your boss or bosses care about.

And why is this necessary? Because it is quite likely that the people above you only have a rough idea of what your team actually does from day to day.

So in these hierarchical relationships, it is easy for the things you do to get missed and for the things you need to get deprioritised; not because your boss disagrees with you, but because from their perspective, the value of what your team does is not fully visible.

And if this value is not visible, it can cost you resources or support when things go wrong, and, importantly, it can cost you and your team the credit you have all earned.

Researchers Dutton and Ashford (1993) call the central element of managing up ‘issue selling’: the work of directing a senior person's limited time and attention towards the things that matter. Their point is that attention at the top of an organisation is scarce, and what gets that attention is not always what deserves it. It is what gets sold well.

Here is what the research tells us about how we can do this effectively. And by focusing on these approaches, we can also do it authentically.

1. See the work the way your manager sees it. The skill underneath all of this is perspective taking, and it is worth being precise about what that means, because it is easy to confuse with empathy. Empathy is feeling what the other person feels. Perspective taking is the cognitive work of understanding how a situation looks from where the other person stands. This means being aware of the pressures they carry and the outcomes they are judged on.

The distinction matters, as the research shows. Galinsky and colleagues (2008) found that in negotiations, perspective takers were far better at uncovering hidden interests and reaching agreements, while people high in empathy often did worse. A later review of work across 304 studies found that perspective taking is most valuable precisely when there is a power gap between the two people (Longmire and Harrison, 2018).

And that power gap is your relationship with your manager exactly. I have written before about perspective taking as one of the core qualities modern leaders need, drawing on Michael Cavanagh's work, and it applies just as much looking up as looking down.

In practice this means doing some homework before you ask for anything. What is your manager worried about this quarter? What does their boss push them on? Use your 1 to 1s and leadership team meetings to get the information you need to really understand these things. Then, if you can frame your team's work as part of the solution to the problems they are already trying to solve, you are halfway there.

2. Translate the work into their terms. Once you understand what they care about, the task is to package what your team does so it connects to it. Dutton and her colleagues (2001) studied dozens of real accounts of managers getting issues onto the agenda, and found that the framing did much of the work. How you bundle an issue, what you attach it to, and how you present it shaped whether it registered at all.

So a report that lists what your team did is a wasted opportunity. A report that shows how that work moved something your manager is accountable for is communicating in the right language. You could take one thing your team delivered this month and, instead of describing the task, describe the outcome it achieved, and show how that outcome advances broader departmental or organisational objectives and strategies.

3. Use research-backed strategies. Not all influencing approaches work in every direction, and this is where people go wrong. In a well-known field study, Yukl and Tracey (1992) looked at how nine different influence tactics worked with subordinates, peers and the boss. Upward, the tactics that worked were rational persuasion, consultation, and inspirational appeal. The ones that failed were pressure, forming coalitions, and leaning on your formal position. Ingratiation and trading favours worked sideways and downward, but not on a boss.

So it is worth giving some careful thought to the case you want to make. You might assume the right move is always to argue in terms of money and efficiency. But Mayer and colleagues (2019) found that when people sold issues to management, language tied to the organisation's values and mission was often more persuasive than a purely economic case, especially when it fits in with what the organisation has already said it stands for.

4. Know when to speak and when to keep it quiet. Timing is part of the skill. Dutton and her colleagues (1997) described how effective managers "read the wind" before selling an issue: they judged whether the context was favourable, whether their boss was in a position to listen, and, importantly, whether raising it would make them look political.

That last point is critical. Done well, none of this looks like that cringeworthy version of managing up. And nor is it. It shows a manager who is on top of their work, knows what matters and is easy to support.

Ashford and Detert (2015), writing up years of this research in the Harvard Business Review, summarise this all quite simply: pick your timing, manage your own emotions and your manager's, and frame the issue to match how they see the world.

If you can learn to do this consistently, you stop being the invisible team whose value gets discounted, and become the leader whose team reliably gets what it needs to do the work and whose contributions towards the wider objectives of the organisation are properly recognised.

It also shows your maturing leadership. Part of your development path as a leader is learning to place your attention beyond the tasks in front of you and upward and outward, connecting your team to the wider system it sits in.

Making those connections effectively with those above you is a big part of the job of leading a team.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

Coaching - I have a few spots available for 1 to 1 coaching. If your team is doing better work than your manager can see, or you need to work out how to manage up without it feeling like a performance, that is exactly the kind of thing we can work on together. There are more details here.