3 Strategies for Effectively Managing "Up"
Flipping the switch from unseen and unrecognized to seen and shining
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.
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.
See you next Tuesday,