Most managers get reasonably good at managing down. They invest in their 1:1s, think about motivation, worry about team dynamics. The relationship with their own boss gets whatever time is left over — which is usually very little. The result is a working relationship built entirely on assumptions: the manager assumes the boss knows what they need; the boss assumes everything is under control because nobody said otherwise. Both are wrong, and the gap shows up at the worst possible moments.
Managing up is not about impressing your boss or playing politics. It is about building a working relationship that functions well enough for both of you to do your jobs effectively. Done well, it means your boss knows what you need to succeed, you know what they need from you, and disagreements get resolved rather than quietly compounding into something structural.
What managing up is not
The phrase makes people uncomfortable because it sounds like manipulation — strategic ingratiation, or performing visible effort without substance beneath it. That version of managing up exists and is rightly regarded with suspicion. It is not what this guide is about.
Real managing up is less glamorous: it is the work of making a professional relationship explicit where it would otherwise be assumed. Your boss has constraints, pressures, and priorities that are not necessarily visible to you. You have needs, concerns, and context that are not necessarily visible to them. Managing up is the discipline of surfacing enough of both to make the relationship function.
The opposite of managing up is not independence or authenticity. It is passivity — waiting for your boss to set the terms of the relationship, assuming they know what you need, and discovering only through friction that the assumptions were wrong.
Start by understanding what your boss actually needs
A working relationship built around what you need from your boss, with no corresponding understanding of what they need from you, is a one-way transaction. It also misses the most useful starting point.
Your boss has a job to do that is broader than managing you. They are accountable for outcomes you may only partially see. They are fielding questions from their own boss, managing relationships with peers and stakeholders, and dealing with pressures that may not filter down to you at all. The question “what does my boss most need from me to do their job well?” sounds obvious but most people have never asked it explicitly.
Some things tend to matter to almost every manager:
- No surprises. A boss who finds out about a problem from someone else — or finds out at all when you knew earlier — tends to lose trust sharply and recover it slowly. Bringing bad news promptly, even when it is uncomfortable, is one of the most reliable trust-builders available.
- Signal-to-noise calibration. Bosses who are flooded with updates, queries, and escalations that should have been handled below them become frustrated and start managing more closely. Bosses who never hear anything become anxious. The right cadence is not the same for every boss, or even the same boss in different periods — it is worth making this explicit.
- Clarity about what you need to decide for yourself versus what you need them for. The manager who escalates everything signals a lack of judgement. The one who never escalates signals a lack of self-awareness. Calibrate this early.
Michael Watkins, in The First 90 Days, makes a point that applies well beyond the first 90 days: the most common mistake managers make with their bosses is not having an explicit conversation about what success looks like and how it will be measured. Most managers assume they know. Most are partially wrong. Asking directly — “What would good look like from you in six months, and what would raise a flag?” — is worth the slight awkwardness.
How to communicate upward
The default mode of upward communication for many managers is reactive: answer questions when asked, provide updates when chased, raise problems when they become unavoidable. This is not communication — it is minimum viable compliance.
Proactive upward communication does not have to be elaborate. What it needs to do is give your boss enough context to do their job without requiring them to come looking for it.
Format and frequency are worth agreeing explicitly rather than guessing. Some bosses want a weekly written summary. Some want five minutes in a corridor. Some want nothing unless there is something that requires action. The format you assume is right may be exactly what they find irritating. Ask.
What to include in any update: what is going well (not to self-promote, but because a boss who only hears about problems loses confidence in proportion to the frequency of the problems); what is at risk or uncertain, and what you are doing about it; anything that needs a decision or their awareness before it moves.
The things not to filter out. The natural tendency when communicating upward is to present the best version of events — problems solved, confidence intact, team performing. This is understandable and often exactly wrong. The boss who does not know about the problem cannot help you with it; the boss who finds out about it later wonders what else you are not telling them. Honest upward communication is a risk that compounds positively: the more reliably you bring difficult things to your boss, the more trusted you become with the things that matter.
Disagreeing with your boss
Most managers have a view about decisions their boss has made that they think is wrong. Very few of them say so. The gap between “I disagree” and “I said so” is usually filled by a combination of hierarchy anxiety, conflict avoidance, and a not-quite-honest belief that the boss probably knows best.
The cost of this is considerable. You lose the relationship benefit of being someone your boss can actually think with. The decision goes ahead on incomplete information. And you end up responsible for implementing something you thought was wrong from the start, which is both demoralising and a structural source of resentment.
The alternative is not aggressive challenge or public disagreement. It is the discipline that Kim Scott describes in Radical Candour as “challenging directly while caring personally” — bringing the disagreement into the conversation rather than carrying it privately. This requires a few things:
Timing. Before the decision is made is almost always better than after. Once something is announced, you are no longer offering useful input — you are asking your boss to reverse a decision in front of their own stakeholders. That is a much harder ask.
Framing. “I’m not sure I agree” is a starting position, not an argument. What would change your boss’s mind? What information or consideration are they missing? What would you propose instead? Come with something more than a vague discomfort and you are far more likely to be heard.
Accepting the outcome. You can disagree, make your case well, and lose. A boss who consults people, hears their objections, and still makes the original call has done their job. The appropriate response is to implement the decision well, not to quietly undermine it or say “I told you so” if it goes badly. Managers who reliably do this — who challenge before, then commit after — become people their bosses genuinely trust with hard conversations, because there is no penalty for engaging.
Two kinds of difficult boss
Not all managing up is symmetric. Some bosses are harder to work with than others, for reasons that are structural rather than personal.
The micromanager. The manager who checks your work constantly, involves themselves in decisions that should be yours, and wants to be copied on things they do not need to see is frustrating — but often a symptom of something you can address. Micromanagement is usually driven by one of three things: lack of trust (they have not yet seen enough of your judgement to let go), anxiety (they are under pressure and need to feel in control), or habit (they have always managed this way). The first two respond to deliberate trust-building: deliver consistently, communicate proactively, surface problems early. The third is harder and may require a direct conversation about how you work best together.
The absentee boss. The manager who is never available, who leaves decisions unduly long, or who gives so little direction that you are effectively operating without one creates different problems. The risk here is operating in a vacuum — making calls that your boss would have made differently, and only finding out when something goes wrong. The response is to be more structured about creating the interactions that are not happening organically: a standing 1:1 that has protected time, a written summary that does not wait to be requested, and explicit escalation of decisions that need input, even when the default seems to be “just handle it.”
When the relationship is genuinely broken
Managing up has limits. If the problem is not a communication gap or misaligned expectations but a fundamental incompatibility of values, persistent undermining, or behaviour that crosses into inappropriate territory, then the relationship needs to be named and addressed — or escalated to HR if addressing it directly is not feasible.
A relationship that is simply difficult is usually worth investing in. A relationship that is causing you consistent harm or asking you to behave in ways you find ethically uncomfortable is not a managing up problem. It is a different problem, and should be treated as one.
Related reading
- Communication skills — frameworks for difficult conversations and giving effective feedback upwards and across the organisation
- Leading teams — building trust, managing expectations, and working effectively with the people around you
- Conflict, negotiation and influencing — how to influence without authority and navigate organisational dynamics
Managers looking to develop their leadership skills in a structured way — including stakeholder management, communication, and influencing — can find CPD pathways at SkillsCircle, developed by Accipio. For a recognised qualification in leadership and management, Aicura offers CMI-accredited programmes, including levy-funded apprenticeship routes.