A Day in the Life of a Senior Leader

Chapter 17. Managing Up

My problem with the phrase managing up involves a hard-earned historical observation regarding its weaponization. The helpful version of managing up is to develop a clear understanding between you and your manager that there are uncommon, intriguing, or worrying developments that you—without hesitation—share with your manager.

Isn’t that their responsibility as well? It is. Also, wouldn’t you expect them to have significantly more of these observations because their observational window is larger? You would. Do we call this managing down? Gross. No, we call this bidirectional effective communication, which is a mouthful. It is also only half of a correct strategy.

Managing up is problematic because it often describes a subset of humans whose belief is, “I am artisanally selecting the most important bits of information to share upwardly because my judgment is incredibly sound.”

This is not what they are doing. What they are doing is manipulating perception. They have a specific selfish narrative they want their manager to build, so they carefully select a subset of the truth and market it as the complete picture. They believe their manager is so busy soup tasting that their interpreted version of the story will become canonical.

Bad news, truth tweakers. A competent leader will source their facts. They will share that partial story with a trusted other—not because they don’t trust you but because a story must defend itself, stand up to scrutiny, and prove ...