You can’t control your boss. You can’t change their personality, override their decisions, or make them manage you the way you wish they would. But you can absolutely influence how the relationship works, how much visibility you get, how well your needs are understood, and how much your contributions actually register. That’s what managing up is. It’s not manipulation. It’s not going around your boss or undermining their authority. It’s the deliberate, strategic work of building a relationship with the person above you so you can do your best work and they can do theirs. Today, I’m walking you through exactly how to do it.
9-minute read
What Does Managing Up Actually Mean?
Managing up is the practice of actively shaping your relationship with your manager rather than simply reacting to it. It means understanding what your boss needs, how they work, and what success looks like from their perspective, and then communicating and operating in ways that make the relationship work better for both of you.
It’s worth saying clearly what managing up isn’t. It isn’t being a sycophant (aka: ass kisser). You’re not performing to keep your boss happy. Managing up is honest. It involves telling your boss things they might not want to hear, advocating for what you need, and having direct conversations about how you work best. Done well, it makes you more valuable and more trusted, not less.
It also isn’t survival mode. There’s a separate, related conversation about how to keep your nervous system intact when you’re working for someone whose behavior is consistently difficult or dysregulating. That’s not what we’re doing here. Managing up assumes a basically functional relationship and asks how you make it better, more collaborative, and more useful to your career.
Why Do Most People Fail at Managing Up?
Because it requires initiating, and most direct reports wait. The default posture most employees take with their manager is reactive. You respond to what they assign, ask, or decide. You wait to be given information, feedback, direction, and recognition. You assume your manager knows what you’re doing and why it matters, that your workload is visible, and that your contributions are being tracked.
Most of the time, those assumptions are wrong.
Your manager is managing multiple people, multiple priorities, and their own manager above them. Your work is one input among many. The classic Harvard Business Review work on managing your boss, originally published in 1980 by John Gabarro and John Kotter, made the case decades ago that the relationship between a manager and a direct report is one of mutual dependence, and that the burden of making it work falls on both sides, not just the boss. If you’re waiting for your manager to notice, you may be waiting a long time.
Managing up is the practice of closing that gap intentionally rather than hoping it closes on its own.
What Does Your Boss Actually Need from You?
This is the question most direct reports never ask, and it’s the foundation of managing up. After 35 years inside organizations as an organizational psychologist and consultant, I’ve watched the same three needs show up over and over, across industries, generations, and management styles. Managers need three things from the people who report to them: predictability, clarity, and alignment.
1. Predictability
The first is predictability. Managers need to be able to count on you. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about being someone they can count on. They need to know that if you say something will be done, it’ll be done, and that if something’s going wrong, you’ll tell them before it becomes their problem. Surprises are expensive for a manager. Being the person who surfaces problems early rather than hiding them is one of the most powerful moves you can make.
2. Clarity
The second is clarity. Managers need to know where you are on things without having to chase you. This doesn’t mean constant updates. It means proactive, brief communication at the right intervals. “Here’s where I am on X, I expect to have it done by Thursday, one potential issue I want to flag is Y” is far more valuable than a detailed report nobody asked for or complete silence until it’s done.
A note about the modern workplace. The channel for this clarity has changed. A weekly check-in by email used to be the standard. Now it might be a Slack thread, a Loom video, an async note in a shared doc, or a brief check-in on a Friday afternoon. Your manager’s preferred channel matters, and most direct reports never ask. We’ll get to that in the next section.
3. Alignment
The third is alignment. Managers need to know you understand and are working toward the same goals they’re accountable for. This means you need to know what your manager is being measured on, what pressures they’re managing from above, and what success looks like for them, not just for you. When you understand their context, you can frame your work, your requests, and your ideas in ways that land rather than miss.
How Do You Figure Out How Your Boss Actually Works?
You ask. Directly and early, ideally at the start of a new reporting relationship, but perfectly fine to do at any point.
The questions that matter most are these.
- How do you like to receive updates, written or verbal, brief or detailed, on a set cadence or as needed?
- What’s the best way to bring you a problem?
- What’s most useful for you to know about what I’m working on?
- What does a great direct report look like to you?
These aren’t intrusive questions. They’re professional, and they signal that you’re thinking about the relationship, not just your own work. Most managers are genuinely surprised and pleased to be asked, because almost no one does.
Research on what’s called employee voice, the willingness to speak up to a manager with information, ideas, and questions, consistently shows that the people who ask are not the people whose careers get held back. The opposite is true. Voice behavior is associated with stronger performance ratings and better relationships with managers, not weaker ones. The risk you think you’re taking by asking is much smaller than the risk you’re already taking by staying quiet.
A note worth making for any Gen Z listeners and anyone managing one. Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, which polled more than 23,000 people across 44 countries, found that 75 percent of managers describe Gen Z as the most difficult generation to manage. At the same time, Gen Z workers consistently say they want clear, direct communication, mentorship, and feedback rather than oversight. The gap between those two things is exactly the kind of gap that asking direct questions about working style is designed to close. If you’re a Gen Z direct report, the willingness to initiate a conversation about how the relationship will work is one of your sharpest advantages, not a faux pas.
How Do You Advocate for What You Need Without Overstepping?
Overstepping means claiming authority you don’t have, going around your manager without transparency, or making decisions that belong to them without involving them. None of that is what we’re talking about. Advocating for your needs means being clear about what you need to do your best work and making that known through direct, honest conversation rather than suffering in silence or complaining to others.
Research on proactive behavior at work, the active set of behaviors employees use to influence their environment rather than just react to it, consistently shows that employees who proactively communicate their needs, constraints, and ideas are rated as more competent and more promotable than those who don’t, even when what they’re communicating includes a request for support. Visibility and honesty about what you need reads as ownership, not weakness.
The framing matters. “I’m struggling, and I don’t know what to do” is a different conversation from “I want to flag something I think is affecting my output, and I have a thought about how to address it.” Both are honest. One positions you as overwhelmed. The other positions you as someone who owns their work and brings solutions, not just problems.
One adjustment for the current moment. According to Randstad’s 2025 global workforce research, the average tenure for Gen Z in their first five years of work is just 1.1 years, compared to 2.8 years for Gen X. That means you may be advocating in a relationship that may not last very long. That doesn’t make managing up less worth doing. It makes the speed at which you do it more important. The conversations that used to happen in year two now need to happen in week two.
How Do You Give Your Boss Feedback They Need to Hear?
This is the most advanced version of managing up, and the one most direct reports avoid entirely. Sometimes your manager is doing something that’s making your work harder, your team less effective, or the environment less healthy. Saying nothing is a choice with its own costs.
The approach that works is to start with the relationship and then give your specific observation. You’re not delivering a character assessment. You’re describing your goal for your working relationship and then citing a specific pattern and its impact (and then making a specific request).
Here’s the script. “I want to share something because I think it’ll help us work together better. When I get feedback on my work in the group meeting rather than privately first, I find it harder to take it in and act on it well. I do much better when I hear it from you directly first. Is that something we could try?”
That’s specific, honest, focused on a solution, and framed around your effectiveness rather than their failure. That last piece matters. You’re not telling your boss what they’re doing wrong. You’re telling them what will help you work better together and what will help you do your best work. Same information, completely different dynamic.
Psychological safety researcher Amy Edmondson has shown for decades that the teams and relationships where this kind of upward feedback is possible consistently outperform the ones where it isn’t. The relationship has to be built before the hard conversation, which is exactly why the work in the earlier sections matters so much.
Wrap Up
Managing up is the practice of actively shaping your relationship with your manager rather than passively reacting to it. It requires initiating rather than waiting, understanding what your boss needs and how they work, communicating proactively rather than hoping your contributions are visible, advocating clearly for what you need to do your best work, and occasionally having the honest conversation about what would help the relationship function better. None of it requires your boss to be easy or your situation to be ideal. All of it is within your control, regardless of what they do.
Putting Today’s Lesson into Action
Grab the free Managing Up Starter Kit, your guide to understanding your boss’s working style and communicating in ways that actually land.
References
- Gabarro, J.J., & Kotter, J.P. (2005). Managing your boss. Harvard Business Review, 83(1), 92 to 99. (Originally published 1980.)
- Morrison, E.W. (2011). Employee voice behavior: Integration and directions for future research. Academy of Management Annals, 5(1), 373 to 412.
- Deloitte Global. (2025). 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey.
- Grant, A.M., & Ashford, S.J. (2008). The dynamics of proactivity at work. Research in Organizational Behavior, 28, 3 to 34.
- Randstad. (2025). Gen Z workplace blueprint: future focused, fast moving.
- Edmondson, A.C. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.
