Years before I became a manager, I had to make a shift in how I thought about the visibility of my achievements and who was paying attention.

Like many technical people I initially operated on the assumption that doing excellent work was all I had to do. If I kept my head down and focused on delivery, the people with power would magically notice the value of what I built and give me the external validation I felt I deserved. It was an appealing theory because it allowed me to focus on the technical skills I was rapidly building and strengthening, but it came with a strong sense of dissonance and disappointment when I didn’t receive “enough” recognition or when that recognition wasn’t from the “right” people. I felt I was doing all the right things and getting far less than I needed in return.

The cognitive shift happened after a casual encounter with a couple of senior leaders I knew vaguely at the time in a hallway. An innocent “how are things going?” led to me bursting into tears (which everyone handled gracefully, thankfully) and explaining through sobs that I was frustrated, burnt out, and feeling stuck.

They listened with warmth and compassion and I left the conversation with a couple of 1:1 sessions set up for the coming weeks with those leaders. In those conversations (and the many that followed over the coming years) a topic we returned to was the importance of making our achievements, goals, and interests visible to others at work so the value of the work is amplified through advocacy.

As a result, I started mentioning my interests in conversations with my manager/mentors, development discussions with people I was hoping to learn from, and interviews for new opportunities. I talked about the projects I successfully finished, the cool things I was working on next, and what I hoped to experience in my career. As I did this I noticed something: the more specific I got about my aspirations and what I was building toward, the more people showed up who wanted to help.

Not only my peers and my direct manager, but senior leaders (managers and individual contributors) with far more reach and context than I had. It turned out there were a lot of people who were willing to advocate, open doors, and make introductions; they just needed enough context to understand what I was working toward.

Learning from this experience was a turning point. Inviting people in (giving them the context they need to actually help you) is one of the most underrated skills that can add the biggest boost to anything you want to achieve, inside and outside of work.

By writing this I’m hopeful you’ll skip at least some of the frustration and crying in random hallways that I experienced and go straight to the “seen and shining” phase of your career, whether that’s as an individual contributor or as a leader.

Managing your manager is not a phrase people love because it sounds manipulative in a way that the concept isn’t intended to be.

Managing “up” is simply choosing to take active responsibility for the relationship(s) that shape almost everything about your experience at work.

Your growth, your ability to make decisions with confidence, your sense of whether you’re doing the right things, and the positive visibility and recognition that comes with doing all those things. This relationship is not your manager’s responsibility to own alone, it’s yours too. The earlier you take collective ownership, the faster the acceleration in your growth.

3 Strategies for Effectively Managing “Up”

1️⃣: Tell your manager what’s happening before they have to ask (also known as ‘no surprises’)

Technical professionals are often conditioned to trust that good work is self-evident. If we do excellent work, the right people will notice. Similarly if there’s a problem, I’ll escalate when I have more information. If I’m struggling, I’ll figure it out and bring the fully-formed solution, not the recommendation and proposed process.

These mindsets are rooted (to a certain extent) in good technical discipline, but actively work against you in a relationship with your manager.

Your manager can’t read your mind and they often have many projects and competing priorities to oversee. They are managing upward to their own leadership, fielding competing requests, and making decisions with incomplete information about a variety of topics simultaneously.

If you don’t tell them what’s happening in your world (the good, the bad, and the ugly) they have to guess, and there’s a high risk they may guess wrong (or not have capacity to guess at all).

🛠️ The fix: before your next 1:1, write down one thing your manager doesn’t know that they probably should. A decision you made and why. A risk on the horizon. Something you need from them that you haven’t said out loud.

Then simply make this visible to them and make it a habit. “Here’s something on my radar that I wanted to make sure you were aware of” is a sentence that will change how much your manager is able to advocate for you and offer help when you and your team need it.

This is also a positive trust-building cycle: each time your manager learns they can expect you to proactively share information so they can collaborate with you to take action based on your feedback.

2️⃣: Learn how your manager communicates and processes information

Each person (managers or individual contributor) has their own preferences on how they receive and communicate information. Some want to know the bottom line (e.g., results, outcomes, facts, etc.) first and will ask questions if they want more detail. Some want to think out loud and need space to talk through a problem before they’re ready to decide. Some prefer written context before having a conversation; others find this bureaucratic and prefer to talk first and document later.

Most of us default to communicating in a way that mirrors how we prefer to receive information. However, this presents a risk that our preferences don’t match our manager’s preferences.

🛠️ The fix: figuring out your manager’s preference isn’t complicated: you can observe them (how do they run meetings, how do they give feedback, what do they tend to ask for?) or you can just ask. “Is there a way you prefer to get updates from me?” is a completely reasonable question and most managers appreciate being asked.

For situations where your preferences and your manager’s preferences don’t align, it can feel like you’re performing or compromising something about your style by adjusting to a style that isn’t your natural preference. It’s not. Communication is only useful if it is actually received. Learning to translate for your audience (including translating upward) is a skill you’ll use for the rest of your career.

3️⃣: Bring a recommended path forward with every problem

Early on in leadership roles the instinct when something goes wrong is to escalate to the next level of management for help. “Here’s the situation” or “I’m not sure what to do about this” are natural communication starters we reach for, especially when we’re new and don’t yet have enough context to feel confident about a solution.

The problem is if that’s consistently how problems travel from you to your manager, the dynamic and the perception of your capability as a problem solver shifts over time. You become a reporter of issues rather than an active part of solving them. Your manager spends their time and energy reacting to your escalations instead of building trust in your judgment.

🛠️ The fix: this shift requires a little extra discipline: before you bring a problem, spend five minutes to build out an initial recommendation on a path forward.

Even if it’s high-level and even if you’re not sure the path forward is the finalized answer. “Here’s the situation, here’s what I’m thinking, I’d like to know if you see it differently” is a completely different, far more constructive conversation than “Here’s the situation, what do I do?”

Sometimes your recommendations will inform the solution, sometimes they’ll be discarded in favor of another path and that’s fine. The goal isn’t to always have the right answer, it’s to develop the habit of establishing a point of view before you share a problem with someone else.

The real examples underneath all three of these strategies is the same one: along the way (with plenty of help and reminders from my manager and mentors) I stopped waiting for my manager to notice what I needed and started saying it out loud.

Our relationship and collaborations got significantly easier as a result because they had the information they needed to help me, I had a clearer sense of what I was working toward, and we were intentionally working together instead of operating in parallel. Your manager wants you to succeed. Most managers do, but they can’t help you succeed if you’re not telling them what’s happening, what you need, or what you think. You own those pieces and the more seriously you take that ownership the higher your leadership trajectory will be.

Next week we’re getting into the territory a lot of technical managers find the hardest: when your team knows more than you do, and how to lead with authority when you’re not the technical expert in the room. That issue will be available for paid subscribers and I’m really excited to share it with you. (If you’re already subscribed at any level - free or paid - thank you so much. It means a lot and I appreciate you!)

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, this is a good week to consider becoming one.

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I would love to hear your stories about how advocacy and managing “up” have been helpful to you in your career journey. If you have strategies or helpful hints for others, feel free to add a comment, Substack Note, or send me a message at contact.kaleigh@proton.me. I read every reply and answer as many as I can.

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See you next Tuesday,

Kaleigh

My first management role reinforced for me that everyone is navigating invisible challenges alongside their visible workload. Pandemic restrictions were still shaping how people showed up physically, emotionally, and in their relationships. Some of my team members were relieved to be back on-site in our engineering lab while some were still calculating risk every morning before they walked in the door. Many were holding heavy burdens at home they hadn’t mentioned at work. At the time, I didn’t think much about that context. Not because I wasn’t curious about the people I managed but because I was so focused on being a Good Manager ^TM and getting clear on the technical details that had made me successful previously. I ended up fully missing what was actually going on with the human beings on my team. Here’s what happened…

I was freshly promoted to management via a leadership development program and surrounded by peer managers who were also figuring it out the best they could. One of them shared a structured 1:1 template: what did you accomplish since last time we met, what’s up next for your project, what help do you need for the technical work. It was organized, practical, and resonated immediately with my background leading Agile teams. I thought: this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I rolled the template out to my new team after scanning it briefly and updating it with our team name. I felt relieved to have a “best practice” to deploy and was excited to see the positive impact I was sure would emerge.

The first few 1:1s using the template were…fine. Everyone showed up with prepared answers, they were generally thorough, we covered the agenda but something felt stilted and wrong that I couldn’t quite pinpoint yet. The conversations felt scripted. The template had enough questions in it that we’d get to the end of the scheduled time and sometimes still have content to cover.

I was learning a lot about our lab, projects, and customers - and learning almost nothing about how the people on my own team were doing.

What I had done without realizing it was import a task management framework into a relationship-building context. No wonder the relationships felt stilted: the technical work was the priority; the person sitting across from me was not.

I made adjustments slowly at first: asking one open question before we opened the template and watching how people responded to it. What I noticed was that the answer to something as simple as “how is your week going?” told me far more about what the next thirty minutes should look like than any prepared agenda could.

Some people sat down visibly settled, ready to dig in. If there was a relative sense of calm, we could go forward with the agenda as planned.

Some people sat down carrying something. You could see it in how they answered the first question, if they deflected and how quickly, whether they made eye contact and what facial expressions happened. I tried to gauge this as best as I could, but I started to learn the agenda could wait and it was better for me to ask a follow-on question before assuming we should move forward with the agenda. Sometimes it was immediately clear that the meeting needed to stop being a meeting entirely and just become a conversation where I could offer support, a listening ear, or simply name a heavy thing I noticed someone might be carrying.

I had no framework for this at the time. I was learning to read it by feel, which meant I got it wrong and there were a lot of awkward silences, but the instinct I had was right. The first thing to understand in any 1:1 is not what’s on the agenda, it’s where the person in front of you actually is, emotionally. This data builds the frame for the rest of the conversation.

Since those first 1:1s, I built an actual framework to capture what I learned. It’s a way to check in with yourself before you check in on the agenda: I call it the Emotional Temperature Framework.

See below for a short summary - at the end of this issue you’ll find a link to a free PDF download with a more detailed version for your reference!

The Emotional Temperature Framework

Before starting your 1:1 agenda, take sixty seconds to read the room because the conversation your team member needs may be different from the one you both planned.

🟢 Green: Present and engaged. They’re making eye contact, their answers are direct, their energy is engaged. This person is ready to work. Proceed with the agenda.

🟡 Yellow: Slightly off. Something’s a little flat, a little distracted or fatigued. They’re doing fine, but they’re not fully present yet. Ask one more open question before you move forward. Give them a moment to arrive before making a decision about whether to proceed with the agenda.

🟠 Orange: Visibly tense. Stress, fear, or frustration is showing. This could be workload, something at home, or something else that happened today. The agenda is secondary. Acknowledge what you’re noticing; sometimes naming the tension helps it release.

🔴 Red: Distressed or overwhelmed. Something significant is happening and visible, strong emotion is present. This is not a day for project updates. Put the agenda away entirely. This is now a conversation to offer support.

FREE PDF: Emotional Temp. Framework

The goal isn’t to become, act, or function as a therapist for your team, in fact it’s essential that team members are reminded of any Employee Assistance Program-type resources available to them and encouraged to access them at any point, not just when they are in distress. The goal is to stop treating 1:1s like status reports and start treating them like the trust-building opportunity they actually are.

You don’t have to be a mind reader to successfully apply this framework, but it does require you to pause and be aware of what you see, hear, and feel in the energy coming from the other person in your 1:1.

In the end, the 1:1 template my peer manager sent me wasn’t the wrong resource, but I needed to be more thoughtful about how I and my team chose to utilize it. The technical work still matters, of course, but the hardest part of this job —the part that determines whether the technical work gets done at all — is ensuring you are building trust with the awesome, brilliant human beings making the technical dreams possible.

The Emotional Temperature Framework is also included in The Manager’s Conversation Toolkit — a set of tools built for the exact moments no one prepares you for. The full Manager’s Conversation Toolkit is available instantly to paid subscribers. Paid subscribers also have access to it via the pinned post at the top of the subscriber section so it’s always easy to find. It includes four full 1:1 conversation templates built for the exact moments no one prepares you for.

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I would love to hear about your strategies for running effective 1:1 meetings with your teams, your experiences reading the emotional temperature of your fellow human beings, and how you care for yourself through it all. Please feel free to add a comment, Substack Note, or send me a message at contact.kaleigh@proton.me. I read every reply and answer as many as I can.

See you next Tuesday,

Kaleigh

Hi and welcome!

You’re now a paid subscriber: thank you, seriously. Below is a link to the first thing I owe you: The Manager’s Conversation Toolkit.

This is a pinned post that will always be in your subscriber feed. It’s not going anywhere.

The Toolkit lives in Notion. If you open it via the link below and can’t edit anything, that’s normal since the shared version is read-only by design. To get a fully editable copy in your own Notion workspace, hit the “Duplicate” button in the top right corner on the Notion page. You’ll need a free Notion account if you don’t already have one, but that’s all you need to get started.

Inside the Toolkit (linked below) you’ll find four ready-to-deploy 1-on-1 conversation templates for the situations that are hardest to walk into without a plan: career development, performance discussions, navigating change and ambiguity, and rebuilding trust. There’s also two bonus frameworks included: one for reading a team member’s emotional state before a 1-on-1, and a second guide for what to actually say when someone on your team is struggling (including what not to say, which is definitely the tougher list).

Read more

In late 2020, I got the “Congratulations, you’re getting a promotion…into management!” phone call. A few days later I found out I’d be waiting for that promotion to become effective for six more months.

During a global pandemic, many paths for career development were effectively frozen and while a six month delay wasn’t ideal, slow progress was still progress. The leadership development program that would make my promotion official needed time to fully negotiate, approve, and place our cohort of new managers into assignments. The logic made sense and I tried to find comfort in knowing there was a plan while navigating the emotional roller coaster of a ‘hurry up and wait’ reality.

I’d love to tell you that I spent those six months carefully preparing, reading leadership books, and writing a vision for the manager I wanted to become.

What I really did was spiral through the same questions on a loop. How would I stay authentically ‘me’ when I went from individual contributor to manager? Who would be on my new team? What if their technical expertise was in areas I knew nothing about? What would I tell my current teammates? (The people I was leading as an individual contributor, who had no idea I was leaving.) Would my senior manager be open to teaching a new manager? There were so many layers of work-related uncertainty stacked on top of the outside-of-work uncertainty that was overwhelming so many people during the pandemic and with every painful rotation of the spiral I felt less and less anchored. It was pretty rough.

I started my first management assignment six months later in mid-2021 and transitioned from working fully remotely to fully on-site in an engineering lab environment with some of the smartest, strongest human beings I’d met. My team included experienced engineers and techs whose expertise in some areas outpaced mine by decades. My senior manager received me as a brand new manager and made the best of it with dry humor that broke the ice and made me feel glad to be there. However, it didn’t change the fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing as a manager in the beginning.

Even as a person with a reasonable level of self-awareness and curiosity, the leadership development resources available to me at the time really only prepared me for the basics of being a manager: how to run a bare bones one-on-one meeting, how performance management processes work, how to sign a time card, and when to call the fire department. What they couldn’t prepare me for were those same, persistent questions that continued to loom in a corner of my brain every day in those first months, plus a new one:

“If I’m not a technical expert in the room, how can I be of help to this team?”

It took me a while to find my footing and I sometimes feel I’m still finding it, but I gradually found my way out of the question spiral and back to my sense of self. What I’ve learned since (from my own transitions and from watching others step into management roles) is that the feeling of disorientation is universal. The spiral is normal. Navigating the gap between “I’m a manager now” and “I actually know what I’m doing” is not a failure of preparation, it’s just what the transition looks like from the inside.

So if you’re in a role transition right now: waiting to start, newly started, or six months in and still wondering if anyone is going to figure out that you are in fact winging it, below is a framework I wish I had for that first transition. Not a roadmap, just five questions worth sitting with when you’re in the spiral and need some help to climb out. The good news is, these questions are also valid for any later role transitions, so when that promotion to the next level of management comes…you’ll be ready!

Five Questions for Leaders During Role Transitions

1️⃣ What expertise did you earn that didn’t disappear when your title changed?

Technical depth doesn’t evaporate when you become a manager, it becomes context: for making calls, for knowing when to push back, for earning credibility with your team. You didn’t leave it behind. It’s still yours.

2️⃣ What are you most afraid to admit you don’t know yet? Say it out loud, even just to yourself.

Something shifts when you name this directly, even privately. It’s harder to spiral around something you’ve already looked at and acknowledged.

3️⃣ Who on your team needs you to see them as a person before you ask them about the project?

This is the shift that changes everything early on. The technical answers aren’t what your team needs from you right now, they need to know you’re paying attention to their needs as human beings.

4️⃣ What can you actually control today? Name one thing specifically.

Not “the situation.” Not “the culture.” One thing. Identify it, then work on a path forward.

5️⃣ What is still recognizably ‘you’ in this role?

A role transition changes all kinds of things but rarely changes everything. Finding what’s continuous: your instincts, your humor, the way you explain a super complex problem, is how you stay anchored while everything else shifts.

These questions don’t have to have clean answers, that’s valid and normal. They’re check-ins, not solutions. Something to return to when you’re feeling overwhelmed, unsure, or like you’ve lost your sense of self.

More good news: you got this and you’re not lost. You’re just in the middle of it and you’re not alone.

If you want more tools for the conversations and moments that are hardest to navigate as a new manager, The Manager’s Conversation Toolkit was built exactly for that. Paid subscribers get access immediately and maintain access through the pinned post at the top of the subscriber section.

Subscribe now

I would love to hear about your first management / leadership assignments, your strategies for getting out of a spiral, the ways you stay grounded in moments of uncertainty, and the things you wish someone told you before you became a manager! Please feel free to add a comment, Substack Note, or send me a message at contact.kaleigh@proton.me. I read every reply and answer as many as I can.

See you next Tuesday,

Kaleigh