Managing Up: The Unspoken Skill No One Teaches

Every formal management training I am aware of focuses on the same direction: how to lead the people below you. How to give feedback, set goals, have difficult conversations, develop your team. These are important skills. But they leave out something that affects almost everyone who has ever worked in an organisation: how to navigate upward.

Managing up, the ability to work effectively with your own manager, to influence without authority, to communicate your needs and contributions in ways that land, is one of the most consequential professional skills, and one of the least formally taught.

What Managing Up Is Not

Managing up is sometimes confused with flattery, political manoeuvring, or telling powerful people what they want to hear. That version exists, and it is not what I am describing.

What I mean is something more grounded: the capacity to understand how your manager thinks, what they prioritise, and what would constitute a useful contribution in their frame, not so you can manipulate them, but so you can communicate in a way that actually works.

A manager who does not understand your work cannot advocate for you, protect you when budgets are cut, or sponsor you when opportunities arise. Building that understanding is not playing politics. It is professional self-interest, and it is entirely legitimate.

Understanding Your Manager

The first step in managing up well is genuinely understanding the person you work for. What are the pressures on them that you may not see? What does success look like for them this quarter? What communication style do they respond to, detail and data, or headline and implication?

Most people have never explicitly asked their manager these questions, and most managers have never explicitly answered them. This is an unusually high-yield conversation to have, and it is available to almost everyone, if they can get past the unfamiliarity of asking.

Making Your Work Visible

One of the most common frustrations I encounter in people who are early to mid-career is the sense that their work is not being seen. And in many cases, they are right, but not because their manager is blind or indifferent. Simply because visibility is not automatic. It is built.

Making your work visible does not require self-promotion in the uncomfortable sense. It requires keeping your manager informed in ways that are genuinely useful: “Here is where we are on the project, here is what I’ve resolved, here is where I need input.” This is not boasting. It is information that connects your contribution to the outcomes your manager cares about.

When Things Are Difficult

Managing up becomes most important (and hardest) when the relationship with your manager is genuinely difficult. A manager who is disorganised, avoidant, or inconsistent requires a different kind of navigation than one who is simply busy.

The situations that cannot be managed upward, a manager who is actively undermining you, discriminatory, or abusive, deserve a different response entirely. HR, a trusted senior colleague, or a formal process. Managing up has limits, and knowing where those limits are is part of the skill.