Managing Your Manager

Managers change more often than you realize, especially when a company is growing or downsizing. New roles, new org charts, new reporting lines. Other times, you’re shopping around and you find yourself interviewing your future boss and trying to read between the lines. Ultimately, you will have a new manager in one way or another. Sometimes you end up reporting to someone far more seasoned than you. Other times, your new manager is technically junior to you.

Regardless of the scenario, the same questions should be in the back of your mind: How do I get my job done under this person? You should try to understand their expectations. You should try to observe their leadership style. You collect small data points. Be it how quickly they reply, what stresses them, what they prioritise, what they ignore. And beneath all of this is a skill most people never formally learn. Managing your manager.

First things first, this isn’t manipulating. It’s not politicking either. But understanding how to work with the human who controls your priorities, your visibility, your workload, your autonomy, and sometimes your sanity. This post is about that. My goal is to provide practical guidance on strategic upward influence: how managers think, how influence really works, how to communicate upward effectively, how to prevent surprises, and how to build a relationship where you and your manager become true partners in execution.

What Managing Up Actually Is

What comes to your mind when you think of it? It isn’t about your manager. It’s not always agreeing with them. Or trying to control them. At its core, managing up is the practical skill of making it easier for your manager to do their job. Hence, you can do yours with more clarity, autonomy, and momentum.

It starts with a simple mindset shift. Instead of depending on your manager for direction, you take responsibility for shaping how the relationship works.

A clear example of this came from one of my mentees. She found herself reporting to a manager who was constantly busy. She had multiple projects she wanted to run by him and several problems she hoped he could weigh in. Every conversation left both of them stressed and often behind their schedule.

I suggested a different approach. Rather than going to him with open-ended questions, she began going to him with the problem, her proposed solution, and one or two alternatives. With this change in place, a few things immediately took effect.

• She gained more autonomy. With well-thought-out solutions on the table, she no longer needed him to guide every decision.
• Her manager no longer felt obligated to insert himself into every detail. The burden lifted from him, and he appreciated not being dragged into problem-solving sessions he didn’t have time for.
• Her manager showed more trust in her skills.** **Because she consistently demonstrated structured thinking and initiative. Eventually, he gave her even more ownership.

This is what managing up looks like in practice. I know it sounds cliche but it’s about alignment, reducing friction, building a relationship where both of you operate effectively. When you manage up well, you create momentum and clarity for yourself and in doing so, you make the partnership stronger.

Understanding Your Manager’s Operating Context

Now that we all understand what managing up is, the next step is understanding the environment your manager operates in. I believe most friction between employees and managers doesn’t come from personality clashes. If both parties are reasonably professional, it comes from not fully grasping the pressures, responsibilities, and constraints your manager is dealing with behind the scenes. They are lonely in their own thoughts. The closer you get to your manager, which happens with time, you can know more about their world.

Managers, regardless of seniority, spend most of their time balancing four responsibilities:

1. Planning. We all set priorities, define goals, and forecast what needs to happen.
2. Organizing. We all align people, resources, timelines, and processes.
3. Leading. We all try to motivate, guide, and support the team.
4. Controlling. We all do our best to reduce risk, prevent surprises, and make sure things stay on track.

When you look at your manager’s behaviour through these lenses, everything becomes easier to interpret. The next time your manager asks a question, think about these. Generally speaking, here are a few rules you can go by.

• Asking for frequent updates is them trying to reduce uncertainty.
• Being hands-off simply means either they are stretched thin or prioritising strategic work.
• Asking for detailed context may be trying to fulfil their planning or controlling responsibilities.
• Digging into the “why” behind every task may be thinking about alignment or long-term impact.

The key insight is simple though. Your manager’s behaviour is often a reaction to their own pressures. If they feel anxious, overloaded, or blindsided, they tighten control. If they trust you, they loosen that control and give you autonomy. Do not take this personally.

This is why managing up works. Every time you bring clarity, structure, solutions, or proactive communication, you’re directly reducing your manager’s cognitive load and risk exposure. And when you do that consistently, they naturally respond with more trust and more freedom.

So the question shifts from:

“Why is my manager acting like this?”** ** to “What pressure is driving this behaviour, and how can I help reduce it?”

That’s pretty much the foundation of upward influence. You want to understand the system your manager operates in, and position yourself as someone who stabilises that system rather than destabilises it. When you operate from that mindset, everything downstream, communication, decisions, escalation, autonomy improves dramatically.

The Science of Influence

Alright, now we also understand our manager’s operating context, the next is to learn how to influence them in the right way. Influencing has decades of organizational behavior research mapping out how people persuade upward, which strategies work best, and which ones damage trust. I added a few good reads at the end, take a look. When you understand these patterns, managing up becomes far more predictable and far less personal.

The most widely used framework breaks influence into a set of tactics. Some are soft. Some are hard. Some are collaborative. Some are risky. Obviously, our goal isn’t to use all of them. We want to use the right tactic for the right moment. Let’s walk through the most relevant ones together.

Rationality

I believe this is the most effective and widely used influence strategy, especially in engineering. Your manager, being a past engineer, is probably a rational being. Thus, use facts, logic, and clear reasoning to make your case.

Managers, especially overloaded ones, respond well to structured thinking because it reduces their cognitive load. Rationality works best when you:

• Show the problem clearly. Make sure they understand why they should care.
• Quantify the impact. Show money, latency, what have you.
• Present a logical path forward. Give alternatives with relative risks.
• Anticipate objections before they come. Think about what counter arguments they can have and have your answers ready.

With this in place, you avoid emotional escalation, and build trust faster than anything else.

Co-Creating

When you are co-creating, you are asking them for their input to shape the solution together. This actually works both upwards and downwards. If you include people in your solutioning process, they simply feel more ownership. You still lead the thinking, but your manager feels involved in the creation. This increases their buy-in and reduces future resistance. It works especially well when you need:

• Alignment on a big change like a reorg
• Support for cross-team work like your dependencies
• Access to resources or budget given the market conditions
• Political coverage

Put simply, everyone supports what they help build.

Appreciation

This is often misunderstood. You aren’t trying to manipulate, you just recognize their work. I honestly have a hard time doing this. Maybe, you, too. Somehow, I need to learn it better. You appreciate work done by your direct report but not your manager? Yeah, I should do that, too. We should simply:

• show appreciation
• be pleasant to work with
• acknowledge their effort
• build rapport

The problem is people often think this is flattery or masking negative information. When you use it ethically, it creates relational ease. When you use it poorly, it becomes the politician’s failure mode. You simply become someone who tells the manager only what they want to hear, which destroys trust long-term. So the rule is simple: be warm, but never dishonest.

Exchange

Exchange is transactional. Here are a few examples.

• If you unblock this dependency, I can bring this forward by two weeks.
• If we hire this contractor, I’ll take ownership of onboarding them.

It works when your manager has something you need and you have something they value.

Use it consciously and sparingly. It’s effective, but purely transactional relationships don’t scale.

Assertiveness

Assertiveness is sometimes necessary, especially in crisis or when stakes are high, but it carries risk. You can say something like “This has been pending for two weeks. I need a decision by the end of day to stay on track.” This is direct, time bound and clear. Nonetheless, it can back fire if you use it a lot. In time, it damages long-term influence. You should use it like a fire extinguisher. Emergency only.

Coalition

This is an interesting one. You need to gather support from peers or stakeholders before approaching your manager but you need to understand their perspective. Note that this becomes less effective as you high up. It’s useful when you need to show:

• Cross-team alignment
• Broad agreement
• Operational consensus

If you do this wrong, your manager might feel like you’re doing something behind their back. So they can become defensive. I suggest talking about what you’re going to do subtly. Then, use it to strengthen ideas, not to corner your manager.

Escalation

This is absolutely a last resort. I’ve never done this even once. This is when you go above your manager to get a decision made. Before doing it, think three times and ask a friend. You should only do this when:

• the issue is tied to measurable risk
• your manager repeatedly ignores critical problems
• you’ve tried other tactics responsibly

Remember: when you escalate, your manager’s manager has to override your manager’s decision. That never feels good, and if done carelessly, it will damage the relationship. You also need absolute confidence that your manager’s manager is trustworthy and aligned with you. If not, escalation can backfire badly.

Adapting to Your Manager’s Style

Even with the right influence tactics, managing up only works when you adjust your approach to the kind of manager you have. If you are here, you might have already noticed that not all managers, especially new ones, operate the same way. There’s no one size fits all solution. Well, we are all humans with different personalities.

As you become a manager or leader, you probably understand, part of the drill is to manage dynamics. And that starts with recognizing what kind of manager is in front of you. There are three broad archetypes you’ll encounter: the Micromanager, the Hands-Off Manager, and the Senior Executive.** **Each requires a different strategy.

Managing the Micromanager

Micromanagers aren’t controlling because they enjoy it. They micromanage because they’re anxious, uncertain, or afraid of surprises. And sometimes they are insecure. Their behaviour is a reaction to a perceived loss of control. This happens a lot when someone becomes a manager of managers for the first time. They don’t know how to let it go.

Micromanagement decreases as trust increases. So your strategy is simple. Reduce their anxiety, increase their trust and gain their respect. Here’s what works.

• Proactive, detailed updates before they ask
• Clarity around progress, risks, and timelines
• Outcome-focused reporting such as what you delivered
• Avoid defensiveness. Pushing back only escalates micromanagement

When a micromanager sees consistency, transparency, and predictability, they should loosen their grip. Note that PIP related micromanagement is an entirely different story.

Managing the Hands-Off Manager

A hands-off manager isn’t necessarily disengaged. Often they’re juggling too many responsibilities, operating at a strategic layer, or simply prefer autonomy-first leadership.

This style sounds ideal in theory until you realise you’re operating without direction. Here’s what works.

• Drive clarity yourself. Come up with your proposal or the priorities.
• Set your own milestones and share them.
• Pull the information you need instead of waiting for it.
• Ask pointed clarification questions.
• Send executive summaries instead of long explanations.

Hands-off managers reward people who self-manage. The more you show you can run without guidance, the more they treat you like a peer rather than a subordinate.

Managing the Senior Executive

This is a category of its own. Senior leaders operate under extreme time constraints, broad scope, and massive uncertainty. They think in outcomes, risk, and resource allocation never in step-by-step detail. The rule here is simple: Say less, mean more.

Executives don’t want lengthy explanations or deep dives. They want clarity, speed, and decision-ready information. Here’s what works.

• Give very short updates. Condensed with Links. Brevity is king.
• Ask crystal clear such as I need this resource for X. No nonsense. No bullshit.
• Quantify impact. Frame everything in terms of business outcomes.
• Avoid data dumps. They want your input, not detail.

If you can compress complexity into clarity, they will trust you immediately.

All in All

Managing up isn’t a trick, a hack, or a political maneuver. It’s a professional competency. It’s something that becomes more important the further you progress in your career. Most people assume their success depends on having a “good manager.” There’s truth to that. But the reality is slightly different. Your success depends on how effectively you work with the manager you have.

When you understand your manager’s pressures, adapt to their style, communicate with clarity, and bring structured solutions instead of open-ended problems, three things happen:

• Your autonomy expands.** **Managers trust people who reduce their uncertainty and increase predictability.
• Your influence grows.** **You stop being someone who needs direction and become someone who shapes it.
• Your career accelerates.** **Those who manage upward effectively are the first to be seen as leaders, long before any formal title arrives.

Managing up is ultimately about creating a partnership, not a dependency. It’s about reducing friction, preventing surprises, and aligning your work with the broader system your manager operates in.

Good Reads

Talking Up: Study of Upward Influence Strategies

How To Manage Up – Lessons From Scaling Teams at Credit Karma & Lyft