Managing up: The most important skill for Anyone who has a manager
Managing up is one of the most powerful skill sets that any leader or employee can develop. It’s also an often-overlooked skill, but can make a huge difference in how you experience your work and how your work is perceived by the leaders around you. Whether you're just starting your career or you're a seasoned leader, this guide is designed to help you navigate your relationship with your manager in a way that benefits both parties. This guide is for anyone who has a manager or boss—and if you’re a leader yourself, it’s also for you! Ready to get started?
In this article, you’ll find a full guide to
what managing up means,
why it’s important,
signs that you should spend more time on it,
how to get better at it, as well as
common challenges and how to address them.
I just want to get started Now!
If you want to try something out quickly, here's your quick-start guide to mastering the art of managing up:
Lena’s quick-start guide to managing up
I’ve worked on managing up with many leaders and bosses, and if you’re looking for an easy way to get started and see first improvements quickly, I recommend the following steps to get going. They’re marked with the rocket emoji 🚀 below in the how-to section (click this link to jump there), where you will also find more details on each:
Don’t make your boss chase information
Understand what your boss cares about and speak to it
Give your boss a written update every week
Communication practices:
Get better at communicating options and ideas
Share data AND context
Ask for feedback
What does “managing up” mean, and who is it for?
Managing up means taking an intentional approach to how you work with your boss. It’s about cultivating a proactive, constructive relationship. While many of the skills you’ll use for managing up overlap with those you use to manage down (with your direct reports) or across (with peers and stakeholders), there’s one key difference: you’re managing someone who has institutional authority over you.
At its core, managing up is about owning your work and building a productive relationship with your boss. It's about meeting them halfway—just as you would with your own team.
Your manager isn’t solely responsible for building this relationship. You must also contribute by aligning with them, keeping them in the loop, and fostering a working environment that’s based on mutual trust and respect.
Remember: You’re a leader. You’re expected to own your work.
Anyone who has a boss can benefit from managing up. This article is focused on you (as an engineer or a people/technical leader or manager) managing up to your own boss. Pro tip: Share this with your direct reports to help them manage up to you!
Core Skills for Managing Up
Communication: Sharing the right information at the right level and the right time
Building trust: Create a trusting relationship through consistent, reliable action and information flow
Conveying ownership: Helping your boss get a sense that “you’ve got this”, you’re on top of your role, actively addressing issues when they arise, and keeping them in the loop
Stakeholder management: Understanding the concerns and needs of the people you work with (including your boss!), and addressing them in a way that resonates with them and their priorities
Example
In a 1:1 with their manager, a lead engineer complains about another lead on a partner team who made a decision they disagree with and that they think is harmful to the organization. When the manager asks them what they’d like to do about the situation, they respond, “it’s fine, there’s nothing to do, I just wanted to you to know.”
Why this is not ideal: While occasional venting can be fine, the lead is putting the ball in the manager’s court now, passing the problem off, instead of taking ownership and responsibility for raising and resolving the issue directly.
why you should invest in managing up
Managing up isn’t just a nice-to-have skill; it’s essential for anyone who wants to grow in their career:
It’s (going to be) your job. The more senior you become, the more your job is to handle complex problems independently, without much oversight. Your boss will rely on you to take ownership of your work, making it crucial for you to manage up effectively. As you take on more responsibility, this ability to work autonomously and keep your boss informed becomes critical. By managing up, you help your manager stay in the loop, allowing them to support you when needed, without micromanaging. This builds trust and shows that you can handle challenges independently.
Your manager won’t always “manage” you. While many managers are very invested in developing their teams and direct reports, deliberately set clear expectations and support career growth, it’s a) not the norm in all companies, and b) less and less the case, the more senior your role becomes.
It’s a big part of managing perception: Speaking about your work and its impact in ways that resonate with your boss and colleagues, so your work is seen and understood. “Good work will be noticed and rewarded” is a lie that many of us were raised on. Good work doesn’t always speak for itself, and people quickly form perceptions on their own, which may or more often may not be accurate. Make it part of your job to manage how your work is perceived: Communicate your progress and achievements clearly, especially in ways that align with your boss’s priorities. This can be crucial when it comes to performance reviews or growth opportunities.
It will help you balance team and organizational view: Some leaders can become too closely associated with their direct reports, focusing more on their team than on partnering with peers and managing across the organization. This can create silos and limit your broader organizational impact. Balancing your relationships and managing both up and across ensures you're contributing effectively to the company’s overall goals.
Learning to manage up is a powerful way to lighten your own workload. When you coach your direct reports to manage you effectively, they’ll need less of your time and attention, freeing you to focus on bigger priorities.
When you manage up effectively, you set a strong example for your own team. Encouraging your direct reports to do the same helps them take ownership of their work, reduces back-and-forth, and fosters a more efficient, autonomous team.
All of this makes managing up a critical skill for growing your skills and career.
Case Study: A CTO has to chase the status of deliverables
As their CEO complained about missing a sense of progress in the company’s delivery, a CTO spends 2-3 hours per week counting how many tickets in a project were delivered. — Each project in their teams has an owner responsible for scoping the project (i.e., knows the total number of tickets), and oversees delivery (i.e., knows what got done in the previous week).
This is a case where the CTO has an opportunity to coach their reports to manage up better: Project owners should give a weekly progress update or use other ways like shared dashboards or documents to make sure the CTO knows where things are at.
Signs that You need to work on how you manage up
You often feel out of sync with your boss.
Your boss often asks you for updates about your work, team, and projects.
Your boss is frequently surprised by updates you give.
Your boss hears about issues in your team(s) through third parties instead of from you.
You feel micromanaged. -
A note on micromanagement
There can be a multitude of reasons for micromanagement, and some leaders just operate this way, and there’s not much that can be done to change that. I don’t want to defend it as a practice, especially when it’s done without making the intentions clear. But as the focus of this article is managing up, I want to encourage you to take feeling micromanaged as an opportunity to get curious. That’s because in my experience, micromanagement quite often isn’t something that your boss does because they just like to be in the details of your and your team’s work. Many leaders even dislike doing it, or feel they don’t have the time to do it, but continue doing it anyway.
And that’s because micromanagement often is a reaction: It can be a reaction to your boss not feeling confident that things will go or be done the way that you’ve agreed on, concerns about a project where the stakes are high, the deadlines are tight, and the pressure is huge, or uncertainty based on the way deliverables have gone in the past. It also tends to happen a lot to less experienced leaders, even first-time startup co-founders or C-level executives, who haven’t learned or practiced other and more sustainable ways to identify and convey their expectations in a way that people understand.
Managing up in a more structured way can be a very useful strategy to find out if there are better ways for partnering with your boss. They may even learn a thing or two in the process!
Other signs that you may benefit from investing in how you manage up:
Your boss frequently seems to get into the details of what you’re working on, asking questions or even taking on tasks themselves.
It seems like your boss doesn’t trust you.
You don’t have as much autonomy in your role as you’d like to have.
You don’t have a good sense of your boss’s priorities and topics that are on their mind.
You often spend a lot of your 1:1 time with your boss on status updates and discussing project/initiative details.
If one or more of these points sounds familiar, it’s time to reevaluate your communication and alignment with them.
How to get started with managing up
Below, you’ll find several tips for managing up well. Pick what works for you, and try 1-2 things at a time to see what also resonates with your boss. Experiment!
Good to know: Expect some trial and error
Like most skills, managing up is something that you’ll get better at over time through experience. You may not get it perfect right away—and that’s okay. What’s important is that you’re intentional about it, and open to adjusting your approach based on feedback.
Foundational Practices
Do Your Job—and share with your boss that you’ve got this
One of the fundamental rules of managing up is simply doing your job without needing your boss to chase you. Deliver on your commitments and follow through on your tasks. If something gets delayed, or if you run into challenges, be the one to raise it first. You don’t want your boss to have to ask you for updates—they should already know where things stand because you’ve kept them in the loop.
🚀 Don’t Make your boss Chase Information
If you’re hitting roadblocks or waiting on other teams for data or decisions, communicate that upfront. For example, instead of saying, “I haven’t made progress because I’m waiting on data from $team,” take ownership. You could say, “I’m still waiting on data from $team, but in the meantime, I’ve drafted the structure for you to review to make sure we’re aligned.” Always look for ways to keep things moving forward, despite blockers: For example, can your stakeholders review a draft structure while you wait for the content? Can you continue your work with synthetic or sample data?
Don’t just do the work to unblock things, but make sure that your boss knows that you’re on it.
🚀 Understand What Your Boss Cares About Most
Take time to understand what really matters to your boss. For most managers, it’s a mix of progress and goal achievement, customer impact, risk management or mitigation, and organizational well-being. Many also have “passion” or “pet” projects that hold extra importance, or simply really care about specific areas. Examples could be:
Incident response and follow-up, finding root causes and making sure they don’t lead to further problems
Hiring strategy and building out the team
Something the CEO cares deeply about
Being aware of these helps you align your work with what they care about most, making your contributions more visible and impactful. Regularly check in with your boss about their current priorities. These questions show that you’re proactive about supporting them and staying aligned with their goals.
What are they focused on in the coming weeks or months?
What can you do to help them succeed?
Make your boss not look like an idiot
Bad news travels fast. Managing up also means ensuring that your boss isn’t blindsided by bad news. If you see a problem or politically sensitive issues ahead, bring them up early and share how you plan to mitigate/avoid them or decrease the risks around them. Similarly, if a project is going sideways or there’s a professional conflict brewing, warn them before it escalates. This helps your boss maintain control and stay informed, which is more important than you might realize. Put another way: Having your boss be questioned by their boss or another senior leader about issues on your team that they were not aware of is never a good time for anyone involved.
If an incident like this happens (and it probably will one day), use it as a nudge to reflect: When and how could you have shared information with your boss to prevent it?
Ask for help if you need it
If you need help, don’t hesitate to flag the issue. Yes, your boss is certainly busy, but it’s also their job and most bosses want to help if needed.
Know How Your Boss Likes to Work
Over time, you’ll learn how your boss prefers to stay informed and how involved they want to be in decisions: Some bosses want to be deeply involved, while others prefer to give you autonomy. It’s crucial to understand where your boss falls on this spectrum. Do they rather want you to ask for forgiveness or to ask permission? If your boss is hands-off, they may appreciate it when you take the initiative and make decisions independently. This shows that you can handle responsibility without needing constant approval. On the other hand, if they prefer more oversight, it’s better to check in with them before taking action. It’s okay to ask them flat out: “Would you prefer I check in before moving forward on X, or is it okay if I proceed and update you later?” This clarifies expectations and avoids potential misalignment. Remember that this can also change over time or with specific initiatives, so check in again from time to time!
Additionally, understand how your boss consumes information: Do they prefer emails, Slack messages, or verbal updates? To find out, you can, again, simply ask them directly: “What’s the best way for me to keep you in the loop?”
Regular habits & practices
🚀 Give your boss a written update every week
Keep Updates Out of Your 1:1s. Your 1:1 meetings are better suited for strategic discussions and career development, rather than status updates. Use other methods—weekly emails, dedicated meetings, Slack updates, or dashboards—to keep your boss informed on the day-to-day progress of projects. This keeps your 1:1s focused on higher-level conversations.
A template for sharing weekly updates with your boss
I’ve used this template for weekly updates (you can find an entire article about it here) many times myself, and dozens of leaders have made great progress by implementing it in their teams.
The template contains topics that most bosses care about. Adjust it to topics that are important to you and your boss, or just get started with what’s in it and iterate over time based on feedback from your boss.
Communication tips
🚀 Get better at communicating options and ideas
This three-step way will help you a ton in communicating more clearly with your boss about ideas or recommendations. It can all be done in the same proposal or message:
Sketch out options: Don’t just show one path forward but at least one or two more options that you’ve considered: If you need support or a decision from your boss, sketching out different options will make it easier for your manager to make a decision quickly. It also conveys that you have a nuanced understanding of the issue at hand: “In order to achieve goal G, our options are A, B, and C.” Or you might say, “I’ve been unable to get the data for X, and the team hasn’t provided a timeline yet. Should I continue to follow up, or would it help if you checked in with their manager to move things along?”
Share your assumptions. This is a really good way to help your boss understand how you think and make sure you’re on the same page. For example, “My assumptions are X, Y, and Z, and our goal is G. Does that align with your expectations?” The assumptions might be, “the feature is due on $date, we want to build it in a ways that allows us to scale later on for bigger customers, and our goal is to get 3 new customers signed up in the first week after delivery.” Highlight any trade-offs or risks and offer alternative solutions where possible.
Don’t be afraid to share your opinion: This is something I have to say more often to leaders than I’d expected: Your job is not just to aggregate opinions from your teammates or other experts, but also to have an opinion and share it! As a lead or manager, a big part of your job is to bring experience, insight, and data to your job, and use it to make decisions or provide recommendations to your boss. Sketch out options (see above), and add something like, “I recommend doing B based on… .”
Confirm that you actually understand
When interacting with your boss, approach them as you would any important stakeholder. Aim to build understanding by confirming their message: “What I’m hearing you say is…”. Focus on shared goals and understanding the problem you’re both trying to solve. Get explicit clarity on what success looks like. Define the target audience: Who are the stakeholders? What are their priorities?
In these interactions, try to anticipate the questions your boss typically asks and come prepared with answers.
For example, you might agree on priorities, only for your boss to request a different project unexpectedly. When this happens, make sure to ask clarifying questions to ensure you're still aligned and working towards shared goals.
🚀 Share data AND context
It’s important that you not just share facts, but also context: What do things mean, what are you doing about it, what are the risks, what are the unknowns, and how are you handling them? For example: Instead of just reporting data, “We’ve completed 3 out of 15 tickets in the project,” add context: “We’ve completed the three riskiest and biggest tickets. The remaining ones are straightforward and we believe we have all the information we need, so we expect to meet the release deadline as planned.”
Be Clear About What You Need
When communicating (not just) with your boss, clarity is key, so apply the same communication etiquette that you would with your direct reports:
Your request: Are you looking for advice, feedback, or just a space to vent? No matter what it is, make it explicit. For example, “I’d like your perspective on this,” or “I need help deciding between these two options.”
Urgency: Add if your request is urgent or if it’s something that’s only for their information or that you’d like to discuss in a 1:1.
Use executive summaries in your messages and documents
Executive summaries have their name for a reason (and I use them for my articles for the same reason too!). Put them at the top of your messages and documents, and encourage your teams to do the same; it’s not just a good practice to help busy readers understand the key messages, but also really useful for the person writing it to make sure they got the essence of what they’re saying.
🚀 Ask for feedback
Managing up is an ongoing process, and feedback is key to improving. Regularly ask your boss how they feel about your approach—whether it’s the level of communication or the decisions you’re making. This helps ensure that you’re meeting their expectations and allows you to course-correct if needed.
Many leaders and bosses I’ve worked with found it useful to put weekly updates (see above) into a shared document where the boss adds comments about what they found helpful information, or things they have more questions about. In addition, if your boss receives surprise information through unexpected ways (likely: From anyone but you), use it as a prompt to check in with each other about how to avoid such surprises in the future.
Common mistakes in managing up
Not doing it: One of the most common mistakes people make with managing up is simply not doing it. Many leaders assume that their work will speak for itself, but in reality, you must actively manage how your boss sees and understands your efforts. Failing to communicate regularly, or not at all, often leaves managers out of the loop, causing misunderstandings or misalignment. How to fix it: Do it.
Not wanting to overwhelm your boss: Another frequent error is the fear of overwhelming your boss with too much information. It’s easy to assume that constant updates are a waste of their time, but in reality, over-communication is a safeguard against miscommunication. How to fix it: Understand how your boss likes to receive information, try out different levels of detail in communicating, and ask them for feedback on what’s working.
Not asking your direct reports to manage up: Leaders also often hesitate to ask their own direct reports to manage up, worrying it might feel overbearing, micromanage-y, or introduce unnecessary overhead. In my experience, the opposite is usually true: It will help them grow and develop critical leadership skills, and will not only make your life easier, but, by extension, also theirs: It helps a ton with building alignment, accountability, and, through those, trust. How to fix it: Encourage your team members to take ownership of their work and keep you informed.
Expecting your boss to be good at expressing their expectations: Many leaders make the mistake of expecting their boss to be always clear about their expectations. While all of us should work to get good at that, the truth is, not all managers are great at this (yet!). How to fix it: Ask questions and seek clarity when needed.
Assuming that what you’ve shared has been understood: Another misstep is assuming that once you've communicated something, it has been fully understood. Just because you’ve mentioned something once doesn’t mean your boss has absorbed or remembered it. How to fix it: Clarifying meaning and reinforcing important points ensures that everyone is on the same page.
Beware of conflating information dumps with communication. Providing a lot of data isn’t the same as ensuring your boss understands the bigger picture. Too much detail can obscure your message, making it harder for them to grasp what’s important. That’s a common pitfall of automated dashboards, project boards, and other auto-generated views: Oftentimes, what’s important goes beyond charts and metrics, which are great at conveying a status, but can’t answer important questions like, “what does this mean?”, “is this good, bad, or neutral?”, “what risks are involved?”, “what’s our projection for the next days/weeks/months?” How to fix it: Context matters, and it’s your job to frame the information in a way that speaks to your boss’s concerns and priorities.
Assuming that your boss is looking out for your career development: Your boss might advocate for you, but you can’t rely on that, even if only because your boss might change at some point. Managing up helps ensure that you remain visible in your work and aligned with your boss's objectives. Similarly, if you assume your work will be noticed without actively managing perceptions, you will likely be disappointed. How to fix it: Owning the narrative for your work, i.e., talking about it intentionally and building a positive perception, is part of managing up—it's about doing what you can to make your contributions and impact clearly visible.
“Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions”-attitudes: Many bosses like to say something along the lines of “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.” I’m not a big fan of it, as, in my experience, all it does is make the person on the receiving end of this expression feel like they can’t share concerns or problems with their boss, and need to figure out everything on their own. It can also lead to bosses missing critical context or other information about their organization. I’ve also experienced bosses who use it as a shorthand when they feel that their reports aren’t owning their work enough (i.e., coming up with ideas or staying on top of things), or use too much time in 1:1s to vent/complain. How to fix it: If you work for a boss who aks you to “not bring them problems, bring them solutions”, it can be worth trying to understand a bit better what your boss means with it, and if they’re still open to you asking for help if needed. You may also want to try some of the communication approaches outlined above, especially making some changes to how you communicate options and how you convey requests. Depending on how you like to work, you may also need to reflect at some point whether your and your boss’s preferred ways of working and values are aligned enough for you to continue working with them.
Like any work with humans, managing up requires some experimentation and iteration over time, and will be different with everyone you work with. But rest assured: Even small things that you try can already make a difference, and even if not everything leads to the results you’d hoped for, anything you invest will help you grow your skills. Managing up is one of the most useful skills you can develop as a person who has a manager, and will be beneficial no matter where you take your career.
You’ve got this!
