Managing Up: How to Manage Your Manager

Managing up means paying attention to what is important to your manager and adjusting to their individual style and preferences. Beyond that, it means having conversations and discussions to ensure that you have what you need in order to achieve your goals and complete your projects. It is one of the most practical communication and influence skills a professional can build, because the relationship with your manager shapes your daily experience of work more than almost any other. This guide covers what managing up is and is not, the behaviors managers consistently support and the four-step conversation process we teach for getting your needs met, with the exact words to open each step. If you lead talent development for an organization, the section near the end covers how to build this skill across an employee population.

What is managing up?

Managing up is the practice of working effectively with your manager by understanding their priorities and pressures, adapting how you communicate to how they prefer to receive information and proactively asking for what you need in order to do your job well. The term "managing up" sometimes raises eyebrows, because some interpret it as manipulating rather than influencing. Managing up is not unauthentic flattery. Far from being manipulative, managing your manager is expected and even welcomed by those with direct reports, provided it is done with the authentic intention of enhancing the relationship and making it easier to get effective work done and the best outcomes. Your manager has goals and constraints of their own, as well as a boss above them. Individuals who manage up work with that reality and consider their manager a stakeholder who is important to end results and individual growth.

Why managing up matters

Workplace research has linked the quality of the manager relationship to engagement, satisfaction and retention for decades. Most people do not need the research because they've experienced the importance of a strong relationship with their managers. For instance, a week working for a manager you communicate well with feels different from a week working for one you do not. Having a strong relationship with your manager contributes to practical outcomes. Access to information, timely decisions, resources for your projects, visibility for your work and support for your development all flow through your manager. Waiting passively for a busy manager to notice what you need is a plan that depends entirely on their spare attention, and spare attention is exactly what most managers lack. Managing up is a replacement for waiting. With a small set of habits and by using a structured conversation, most individuals can greatly improve their relationships with their manager and reap benefits such as improved engagement, more job satisfaction, better career growth and fewer conflicts.

Research supports the importance of strong employee-manager relationships, achieved in part through use of skills in managing up. A good indicator of the importance of manager-employee relationships is voluntary turnover, for instance. Comprehensive exit analyses indicate that the vast majority of voluntary turnover is preventable and directly linked to supervisory behaviors [1, 2, 3, 4]. Research from Gallup and the Work Institute establishes that between 42% and 75% of all voluntary departures could be prevented by effective organizational and managerial interventions [1, 2, 3, 4]. And 52% of exiting employees explicitly report that their manager or organization possessed the power to prevent their resignation [2].

What your manager notices: a six-point self-check

Communication skills are important in managing up, but before using any conversation technique, do a self-check on whether you have earned the right to "be supported." That sounds harsh, yet we know that those with higher authority levels appreciate and support direct reports who:

• Are trustworthy.
• Hit deadlines and goals.
• Prevent problems.
• Are competent.
• Are easy to manage.
• Think ahead.

No amount of communication skill can overcome the challenges created by not managing yourself and your own work. Notice that the items on the list require an honest self-audit: many professionals are strong on two or three and have not given the others much thought.

"Easy to manage" deserves special attention because it is the one people most often miss. It means your manager rarely has to chase you for updates, decode your messages or brace for surprises; you deliver information in the shape they can use, at the time they need it.

"Think ahead" is its partner: raising the risk, the resource gap or the conflict two weeks before it lands, while there are still options. Managers tell us that having direct reports who are "easy to manage" and who "think ahead" makes it possible for them to delegate with confidence, and confident delegation is what turns into bigger assignments and increased opportunities.

Here is a mini-assessment to gauge what your manager notices. Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 3, with 1 being "Rarely," 2 being "Sometimes" and 3 being "Consistently."

• Scores below 20 mean you could benefit from building your own professional maturity and self-management skills.
• Scores between 21 and 30 mean you are strong in some areas, with a few areas of focus to better build your relationship with your manager.
• Scores of 31 or above show that you likely have a very strong foundation for managing up.

If you complete the self-check and realize that you are scoring yourself lower in certain areas, focus on those before tackling conversations to get your needs met.

The four-step conversation process for getting your needs met

The six behaviors build the relationship, while a conversation puts them to work. When you need something from your manager, whether support for an idea, a resource, a decision or a change, we teach a four-step discussion process. It comes from our Managing Your Manager discussion guide. It is short enough to run in ten minutes.

1. Preview

Open by framing what the conversation is about and why. Be clear about your intent and what you want to discuss, so your manager can orient before reacting. Useful openers:

• "I'd like to discuss..."
• "I'd like to share..."
• "I'd like to get your opinion on..."

Be sure to adjust your style to your manager's preferences here as well. If your manager is more action-oriented, be brief and succinct. If they are more emotive, bring more energy and context. Adjust your behaviors so that your manager is comfortable with your approach. Want to know more about adapting your style to your manager's style? Learn more about Interaction Styles® or take the self-paced microlearning program Interaction Styles in Action: A Beginner's Microcourse in Influence.

2. Advocate

State your goal or idea, the need behind it and, most importantly, how it benefits your manager, the department or the organization. The more you can link your request to something tangible your manager already cares about, the better your chances. Useful phrasings:

• "My goal is..."
• "The idea I have is..."
• "A need that would help us achieve is..."

Notice the last one says "us." Advocacy that intends to create benefits for the team is stronger than advocacy for personal preference.

3. Ask, then listen

Ask for what you want, then listen to and summarize what your manager says. Useful questions:

• "Is that something you could support?"
• "From your point of view, would that work?"
• "Is there any reason you couldn't support this?"

Listen to the words and to the meaning behind them. A hesitant yes often carries conditions worth surfacing now rather than discovering later. A question about details may be your manager rehearsing how to defend the idea upward, which is a good sign worth supporting with specifics.

4. Summarize

Close with agreements and next steps, in a minute or less. Recap what you heard or the overall meaning, and thank your manager for the time and attention. Useful closers:

• "It sounds as if you are willing to..."
• "It seems as if we are in agreement on..."
• "I will... and you will..."

Many individuals skip the summary step, yet doing it ensures that you both leave with the same agreement. It takes thirty seconds and saves an awkward reconstruction later. Remember, managers (and others!) appreciate "preventing problems."

Reading your manager's style

The four steps stay the same from manager to manager, but how you deliver them should adapt. Some managers want the headline first and the detail only on request. Some want to think out loud with you. Some process by reading, and are at their best when your request arrives in writing before the meeting. Some decide in the meeting; others decide two days after it. None of these preferences is a flaw, and matching them is not becoming someone else; it is removing the friction between your message and their attention. Watch how your manager communicates when they are at their best, and borrow the pattern. For a structured way to read and adapt to different working styles, this is exactly what our Interaction Styles® model teaches, and the approach-points thinking in our influence guide applies to managers as much as to anyone else. One caution for global teams is that directness norms vary across cultures, so calibrate these scripts to what is respectful in your context, not just to your manager's personality.

Managing up in practice: three common situations

What managing up looks like depends on the manager you have. Three situations come up constantly in our workshops:

The overloaded manager

Your one-on-ones keep getting cancelled and emails go without reply. Managing up here means diminishing the effort it takes to support you. Send a short written preview with your request and a recommended option, use the four-step conversation process compressed to fit in five minutes when you catch them, and close every exchange with a summary step so decisions are clear. Chasing an overloaded manager with more meetings usually backfires, but making each contact less of an effort for managers usually works.

During a recent series of workshops for new and incumbent managers that PPS International Limited facilitated for a regional healthcare organization, this pattern showed up. Over the course of facilitating multiple two-day programs, with more than 450 clinical, business, administrative and other leaders attending overall, we polled leaders through a quick show of hands about who felt they had enough bandwidth and time to manage and support their teams to the degree they wanted. From cohort to cohort, very few managers raised their hands. The insight we gained with this client, and in working with leaders across the globe in a variety of industries, is that managers want to be supportive—they often struggle to do it because of a lack of time. Remember, the overloaded manager is present in most organizations. Skillful employees manage up by adapting to this reality, rather than complaining about it.

The new manager

A manager new to the role, or new to the team, is forming their picture of who is dependable. Early, low-stakes uses of the conversation process, previewing what you are working on, advocating for existing commitments and asking how they like to receive updates, all establish you as easy to manage early on in the relationship. The questions you use in the "ask" step of the conversation are especially useful in the first month, because a new manager is rarely queried about how they like information.

The remote manager

When you rarely share a room, the ambient visibility that carries your reputation is missing, and demonstrating the items in the six-point self-check list has to travel through deliberate efforts. Make your progress visible without being asked. In conversation, make the summarize step non-negotiable, since remote agreements have no hallway follow-up to catch misunderstandings. These habits mirror what we advise managers to do as they work toward staying connected with a remote team.

What managing up is not

Managing up sometimes gets misinterpreted as being less than authentic or even manipulative. You can keep these perceptions from becoming reality by avoiding the behaviors that create mistrust and broken rapport. Managing up is NOT:

• Flattery. If you always agree with whatever your manager suggests, your agreement is automatic. Your manager learns your input carries little value. Earn support; avoid empty compliments and agreement.
• Going around your manager's authority. Escalating past your manager, except for serious ethical concerns, damages the relationship rather than building it.
• Doing your manager's job for them. Managing up informs and equips your manager; it does not absorb their responsibilities without agreement or credit.
• One-way accommodation. Your goal is to adjust the way you approach and communicate with your manager, not the substance of your interaction. Advocating for what you need is a critical focus of the conversation process. Be careful of constant accommodation with no requests of your own. That is not managing up. The advocacy step matters as much as your adjustment to your manager's preferences.

When managing up is not working

Sometimes your relationship with your manager needs more than technique. If you have considered the six-point self-check and used the mini-assessment, used the conversation process consistently for a few months and still cannot get decisions or information, widen your approach: build relationships with other leaders and peers so your support does not depend solely on one person. Keep brief records of agreements from your discussions, and consider a direct conversation with your manager about the working relationship itself, using the same four steps with the relationship as the topic. If the situation involves behavior that crosses ethical or policy lines, that is no longer a managing-up problem, and HR or another trusted channel is the right route to take. Technique improves most manager relationships; it should not be used to endure a situation that needs to be addressed directly.

Building managing-up skills across your organization

For talent development, HR and L&D leaders, managing up is a workforce capability, not only an individual skill. When employees manage up well, managers get information early rather than late, requests arrive with a recommended option attached, decisions move and the quiet friction that shows up in engagement surveys as "my manager doesn't support me" tends to shrink from both directions. The research above on preventable turnover [1, 2] is one measure of what is at stake in the manager-employee relationship, and managing up is the half of that relationship an organization rarely trains.

Signals that your employee population is not managing up

• Managers routinely chasing updates rather than receiving them.
• Decisions stalling because nobody made a clear request with a recommended option.
• Surprises reaching managers late, after the options have narrowed.
• Skip-level conversations revealing needs that managers never heard about.
• One-on-ones canceled by either side or treated as status readouts.
• Upward feedback rare in pulse or engagement surveys, even where downward feedback is common.

How to build the skill in employees

• Teach the four-step conversation process in onboarding and early-career development, where the habit forms cheaply and pays off for years.
• Include managing up in emerging leader and new manager programs; managers are also employees who need to manage up, and they are better at inviting it from their own teams once they have practiced it.
• Use a shared style framework such as Interaction Styles® so that adapting to a manager's preferences becomes a common vocabulary rather than guesswork; the self-paced Interaction Styles in Action microcourse gives individuals a low-cost starting point.
• Give managers the same conversation process so they can invite it ("What do you need from me to move this forward?") and reinforce it in one-on-ones.
• Keep the discussion guide in circulation as a job aid; a printable page that survives on a desk does more than a slide that lives in a course.

How other organizations solve for it

In our work, the organizations that build this capability tend to embed it rather than run it as a standalone course: a manager-employee alignment session at the start of a new reporting relationship, where both sides say how they like to receive information and requests; the conversation process woven into new manager and emerging leader cohorts; and a shared style framework used across intact teams, so that a manager and their direct reports read one another with the same map. The healthcare organization described above reached this from the manager side, by helping overloaded leaders see how much of their bandwidth problem could be solved by direct reports who preview, advocate and summarize well.

Frequently asked questions

What is managing up in simple terms?

Managing up is working with your manager deliberately: understanding what matters to them, communicating in the way they take in information best and proactively raising what you need to succeed, instead of waiting to be noticed. It benefits both sides, which is why experienced managers welcome it.

Is managing up a good thing?

Done authentically, yes. Managers with direct reports generally expect and appreciate it, because it makes the working relationship more efficient and reduces surprises. It becomes a problem only when it slides into flattery or politics, which is a departure from managing up rather than a form of it.

What is the value to the organization when employees manage up?

Managers spend less time chasing information and more time deciding, requests arrive with options attached and problems surface while there is still room to act. Because the manager relationship is so closely tied to engagement and retention [1, 2], a workforce that manages up well protects the relationships that keep people, and it develops the communication habits future managers will need.

What is another term for managing up?

Managing upward, upward management and managing your manager all describe the same practice. Whatever the label, the substance is the same: adapting your communication to your manager's style and initiating the conversations that get your needs met.

How do you manage up with a difficult manager?

Start smaller and more structured. Use written previews so conversations begin oriented, link every request to something the manager is accountable for, ask for reactions and summarize agreements in writing afterward. If months of consistent effort change nothing, widen your support network and consider addressing the working relationship itself as a topic; technique alone should not be asked to fix everything.

What are examples of managing up?

Sending a two-line agenda before a meeting with your manager; proposing a solution alongside every problem you raise; asking "is that something you could support?" instead of assuming silence means yes; flagging a deadline risk two weeks early with options; and closing conversations by confirming who will do what. Each is small; together they change how the relationship works.

Where to start

Run the six-point self-check and pick the one behavior that would most change how your manager experiences you. Then use the four-step conversation process in your next conversation, scripts and all; expect it to feel structured the first time and natural by the third. Managing your manager can enhance your professional life in many ways. For a printable version of the conversation process and checklist, download the discussion guide below.

Download the Managing Your Manager Discussion Guide (PDF)

If you want to build this capability across a team or an organization, our communication and influence programs cover it for intact teams and cohorts, and the self-paced Interaction Styles in Action microcourse supports individuals who want to start on their own.

References

1. 42% of Employee Turnover Is Preventable but Often Ignored, Gallup.
2. 30 Employee Turnover Statistics Every HR Leader Should Know in 2026, Qooper.
3. Employee Retention Strategies: 10 Data-Backed Methods (2026), Pin.
4. 40+ Employee Turnover and Employee Retention Statistics, Yomly.