Need-to-Know Tactics for Managing Up Successfully  ## Metadata - Author: [[Diego Quiroga]] - Full Title: Need-to-Know Tactics for Managing Up Successfully - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #management - #engineering-leadership - #communication Author: Diego Quiroga Source: LeadDev (Article) Reference: https://leaddev.com/communication/need-to-know-tactics-for-managing-up-successfully date created: 2025-08-21 00:00 --- # Title: Need-to-know tactics for managing up successfully ## Table of Contents: - [🧭 Overview and definition](#-overview-and-definition) - [🏗️ Foundation: make managing up easier by running a solid team](#-foundation-make-managing-up-easier-by-running-a-solid-team) - [🧑‍💼 Know your manager’s style](#-know-your-managers-style) - [🧰 Tactics to build trust and reduce cognitive load](#-tactics-to-build-trust-and-reduce-cognitive-load) - [✉️ Communicate how you think (not just what you do)](#️-communicate-how-you-think-not-just-what-you-do) - [🧩 When your manager is difficult or distant](#-when-your-manager-is-difficult-or-distant) - [🕒 Scenario 1: Manager is consistently unavailable](#-scenario-1-manager-is-consistently-unavailable) - [🗣️ Scenario 2: Feedback is vague—ask for advice, build a network](#️-scenario-2-feedback-is-vagueask-for-advice-build-a-network) - [🧭 Scenario 3: Manager falls short—create clarity and momentum](#-scenario-3-manager-falls-shortcreate-clarity-and-momentum) - [🔁 Flip the lens: invite being managed up](#-flip-the-lens-invite-being-managed-up) - [📚 References](#-references) ### References: - Kellan Elliot-McCrea’s definition of managing up is quoted in the article. ## 📝 Summary: This article argues that managing up is a critical, often underdeveloped leadership skill—especially for engineering managers. Managing up means making it easier for your manager to support you in doing great work. It starts with a solid team foundation, then moves to understanding your manager’s style, reducing their cognitive load, and using structured, proactive communication. Practical tactics include separating status updates from 1:1s, sending short “how I think” blurbs, and enabling skip-level conversations. The article closes with patterns for handling difficult managers (unavailable, vague feedback, unclear direction) and a reminder to invite your own reports to manage up to you. ## 📖 Main Content: - Managing up is a competitive advantage for engineering managers because few do it consistently well. Great work = enabling team impact and growth, not just personal output (0–10%). - Clarify mutual expectations and ask for help before you need it; it’s not about appeasement or saying yes to everything (10–20%). - Build a solid base: deliver reliably and ensure your team’s impact is visible; trying to manage up without this is like asking for a promotion mid-missed deadline (10–20%). - Learn your manager’s working style: priorities, stressors, decision cadence, preferred update format, comfort with disagreement; translate your asks into what they care about (20–40%). - Reduce their cognitive load: follow through, flag risks early, summarize; augment capacity; present decisions with options and trade-offs; advocate for them (30–50%). - Treat 1:1s as strategic time; separate status into artifacts; twice a year share goals and growth areas (40–60%). - Send short “thinking” updates, e.g., “Working on X; trying Y before Z” to show judgment, especially remote; encourage skip-levels (50–65%). - When the manager is absent or unclear, be proactive: pre-share agendas, shift 1:1s from status to strategy; if feedback is vague, ask for advice and seek external signals from peers/mentors (60–85%). - If your manager won’t advocate, arm them with concise, factual updates to reuse; document decisions; keep them in the loop while driving momentum via your network (75–90%). - Flip the lens: invite your reports to manage up; experiment with one tactic at a time; evaluate and adapt (90–100%). ### 🗒️ Notes - Definition and stakes - “Managing up is making it easier for your manager to support you in doing great work.” (0–10%) - Not appeasement; it’s clarity, feedback, and early help requests. - Competitive advantage because few do it well. - Prerequisites - Solid execution, visible impact, engaged team (10–20%). - Avoid “promotion ask amid missed deadline” pattern. - Know your manager’s style (20–40%) - Top 3 priorities; stress level; recent changes. - Questions: tasks vs. people focus; concise vs. detailed; quick vs. deliberate decisions; prefers recs vs. options; welcomes disagreement? - Translate needs into their language (evolution to cautious; inefficiency to challengers). - Build trust and reduce cognitive load (30–50%) - Dependable delivery; early risk flagging; filtering/summarizing. - Augment capacity; present options with trade-offs; advocate for them. - Optimize 1:1s (40–60%) - Treat 30–45 min as strategic; capture and execute action items. - Keep status in shared artifacts (dashboards, docs); never let them be surprised. - Share goals and growth areas at least twice yearly. - Communicate how you think (50–65%) - Short decision snippets to reveal judgment; especially in remote settings. - Enable skip-levels to broaden visibility into team health and impact. - Difficult manager scenarios - Unavailable: pre-share agenda; gradually rebalance from status to strategy (60–75%). - Vague feedback: ask for advice; build a signal network (70–80%). - Falls short: document decisions; leverage peers/mentors; equip them to advocate; build reputation for delivery in imperfect conditions (80–90%). - Flip the lens (90–100%) - Invite being managed up by your reports; experiment, evaluate, adapt. ## 📖 References: - Kellan Elliot-McCrea’s definition of “managing up” is referenced in the text. - LeadDev context and practices for engineering leadership. ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: - Original idea: “Managing up is making it easier for your manager to support you in doing great work.” - Paraphrase: Managing up means smoothing the path so your manager can effectively back you, enabling you and your team to do impactful work. - Original idea: “As much as possible, keep project status updates separate from your 1:1s... make sure they’re never caught off guard.” - Paraphrase: Shift status tracking into shared dashboards and docs, and proactively ping changes so your manager always has context and is never surprised—freeing 1:1s for deeper topics. ## 📰 Newsletter: This week in WP Dev land: leveling up your leadership. While you’re wrangling hooks and filters, don’t forget the most underrated API in your toolbox—managing up. Quick wins: - Ship clarity, not chaos: Keep status in living docs and use short “thinking updates” to show your decision-making. - Optimize 1:1s: Pre-share agendas; spend the time on risks, opportunities, and growth. - Reduce cognitive load: Present options with trade-offs; flag risks early; never surprise your stakeholders. Community highlights: - New contributors onboarding series continues—now with Git/GitHub practice labs. - Plugins worth a look: performance-focused image optimizers and accessibility linting tools for editors. Recent updates: - Core discussions on sustainability and funding are heating up—join the conversation in Make WordPress. Links: - LeadDev on “managing up” for eng managers: Need-to-know tactics for managing up successfully - Make WordPress: https://make.wordpress.org/ - WP Accessibility Handbook: https://make.wordpress.org/accessibility/handbook/ Keep building, keep teaching, and yes—keep managing up. Your future self (and your team) will thank you. ## ✅ Action Items: Prompt to align article insights with your role and goals: - Purpose: Evaluate how each article informs open-source advocacy, contributor engagement, education, and OSPO leadership readiness within WordPress. - Use this prompt on any article you read: “Analyze how this article’s practices and principles: 1) Support open-source advocacy in the WordPress ecosystem (e.g., transparency, sustainable funding, governance). 2) Enhance contributor onboarding, retention, and psychological safety. 3) Translate into educational assets (workshops, tutorials, curricula) for PHP/JS/HTML/CSS/Git/GitHub. 4) Improve community health metrics (maintainer load, review SLAs, inclusive communication norm - Summary: Managing up can be difficult – even more so when you have a distant leader. Here's how to make the best out of the situation. - URL: https://leaddev.com/communication/need-to-know-tactics-for-managing-up-successfully [](https://leaddev.com/communication/need-to-know-tactics-for-managing-up-successfully)[communication article hero](https://leaddev.com/communication/need-to-know-tactics-for-managing-up-successfully) How engineering managers can build a strong partnership with their boss and use upward influence to gain success for themselves and their teams. As engineering leaders, we’re taught to support our teams, but many of us neglect turning our attention in the other direction: managing up. Whether it’s due to a lack of time, confidence, or clear expectations, this skill often goes underdeveloped until it’s too late. Early in my career, I didn’t know what managing up meant. I assumed my job was to run my team well and get along with my boss. For years, I reported to one of the company’s founders. We spoke once a month, having casual conversations about how I was doing, and I never thought to ask for more. I didn’t use these 1:1s as a sounding board for my decisions, and never shared when I was overwhelmed or disagreed with upper leadership decisions. As an engineering leader, it can be tempting to just soldier on and hope to figure things out on your own, but managing up is as critical as supporting your own team, regardless of whether your manager makes it easy or hard for you. The term “managing up” can mean many things. Personally, I like [Kellan Elliot-McCrea’s definition](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/management-challenges/) of it best: “Managing up is making it easier for your manager to support you in doing great work.” For an engineering manager, “great work” isn’t just your own output. It’s enabling your team to have an impact on the business while sowing seeds for their professional growth. When you manage up successfully, you are able to clarify mutual expectations, [give and receive feedback](https://leaddev.com/management/art-giving-and-receiving-feedback-leader), and ask for help before you need it. It doesn’t mean saying yes to everything, keeping your boss happy at all costs, or making a scene when they fall short. But it does mean you avoid missing out on recognition, opportunities, or clearer paths to work you care about. Few managers do this consistently well, which makes it a competitive advantage. Especially if any of these sound familiar: * You are frustrated about being left out of the loop. * Your manager insists on reviewing every message or plan. * Your team’s impact is not visible to the rest of the org. * Your 1:1s with your manager get canceled, postponed, or stuck in repetitive status updates. Managing up is far easier when your team is on solid ground. Your manager is more likely to listen, trust, and act on your input when you know your domain and your wider org impact, you and your reports deliver reliably, and people are truly engaged in their work. Trying to manage up without that foundation is like asking for a promotion in the middle of a missed deadline. It’s not impossible, but a tough sell. #### **Know your manager’s style** Once the basics aren’t in question, the next move is to understand the person you’re managing up to. It’s one thing to want a better working relationship. It’s another to build it. That begins with knowing your manager’s working style and preferences. Do you know their top three priorities? How busy or stressed are they? What has recently changed for them? Is there something you could take off their plate? You don’t need to guess. Listen carefully in meetings, read between the lines in their communication, and [ask direct but open questions in your 1:1s](https://leaddev.com/communication/how-hold-more-effective-11-meetings). The best managers I know translate their needs into what the other person cares about. They frame change as evolution to cautious leaders, or highlighting inefficiencies for those who like to challenge the status quo. Ask yourself: * Do they focus more on tasks and timelines or on people and relationships? * What are their hidden weak spots? * Do they prefer concise updates or detailed reports? * Do they decide quickly or take time? * Do they prefer recommendations or options? * Do they welcome open disagreement or avoid it? If you already know the answers to these questions, great; you’re one step closer to managing up. If not, work on cultivating a productive relationship with your boss. To do this, focus on trust and purposeful support – not arbitrary agreement. Show you’re dependable: follow through on commitments, flag risks early, and deliver. Create value for both. Take ownership when they struggle to delegate. Filter and summarize information when they’re swamped. Try to: * **Augment their capacity**: Ask, “What’s a big burden on you right now, and how can I help?” * **Help them make better decisions**: Present choices, pros and cons, outline trade-offs. * **Bring a problem-solving mindset**: Raise issues early, bring options with pros and cons. * **Advocate for them**: Find sincere, quiet ways to acknowledge their wins to others. When you reduce their cognitive load and help them shine, you build trust. Once that is in place, make every interaction count. You might get around 30-45 minutes of 1:1 time each week. Those short minutes should be treated as **strategic time**. Be curious, listen, take notes. Capture action items and execute on them. Focus on context, risks, and opportunities. And, at least twice a year, share your professional goals and growth areas so they can connect you with the right opportunities. As much as possible, keep project status updates separate from your 1:1s. Use shared artifacts like dashboards, spreadsheets, or documentation to your advantage and proactively update your manager on any changes to them – make sure they’re never caught off guard. In doing so, you create rapid awareness, give them historical context, and open the door for deeper discussions during your 1:1s. Another tactic I recommend is **to send blurbs that show how you think, not just what you do**. This might be a short paragraph outlining a key decision you’ve made or a conclusion you’ve come to about your current work. Occasional updates can give your manager insight into your decision-making process, especially helpful if you’re remote. For example: “Just a heads-up. Working on problem X. Trying Y before committing to Z,” or “Dependency X is delayed, validating a workaround to keep us unblocked. Will share results by Thursday.” These short messages complement your 1:1s by showing your judgment, giving your manager the chance to form a well-rounded perspective of you, your thinking, and your skills. Finally, make sure [skip-level conversations](https://leaddev.com/communication/fostering-skip-level-manager-relationship) between your manager and your reports actually happen. Encourage your boss or your team to prioritize them. These conversations give your manager a clearer picture of your team’s health and results, and they help create more advocates for your work. Managing up can already be a daunting prospect for some, never mind if you have a manager who makes the process all that much more tricky by being an absent, unclear, or simply unsupportive individual. That’s when managing up becomes about making the best of a less-than-ideal setup. Here’s an important caveat, though: your manager is also a human being. It’s easy to get frustrated when they put you in a tough spot, miss a follow-up, or forget to tell you something important. But in most cases, they did it with the best of their intentions. Give them room to be imperfect, and pay attention. Learn to spot the difference between someone under pressure, someone having a bad day, and someone who actually isn’t showing up for you or their skip-reports. That doesn’t excuse the impact on your work. But it can help you respond more constructively. Here are some common scenarios you might run into with a “difficult” manager and how to tackle them. #### **1. Your manager is consistently unavailable** Everyone gets busy, but if you’ve noticed a trend where your manager is rarely checking in on you, keeping you out of the loop, delaying their feedback, and responding only when things escalate, you’ve got slippery terrain to navigate. The remedy? Proactivity. [Address the communication gap](https://leaddev.com/communication/how-bridge-communication-gap) directly. Be kind, positive, and respectful – but do it. Before every 1:1, create a small list of important updates and share them in advance, ideally in a shared document, email, or direct message. The goal is to limit the status portion of the 1:1 to a few clarifying questions, rather than letting it dominate the conversation. If they only want to discuss status updates, shifting the pattern will take time. One approach that has worked for me was gradually introducing other topics, such as org-wide priorities, long-term opportunities, career goals, or opportunities for growth. We eventually moved from 100% status to a balanced 50/50 split with an agenda that worked for both of us. Some managers rarely offer useful feedback. They might only say “good job” without specifics, [avoid tough conversations](https://leaddev.com/culture/managing-conflict-engineering-teams), or leave you guessing about how you’re really doing. Let them know feedback matters to you. Explain that you’re looking for both strengths to build on and areas to improve. If they know you’ll ask regularly, they’re more likely to start thinking about it between conversations. Another tactic is to ask for advice, not feedback. People like to be asked for advice. Advice puts the attention back on them rather than you. If your manager’s feedback remains vague, you will need to look for signals somewhere else. Seek input from peers, stakeholders, or skip-level leaders. Build a network of trusted sounding boards. A good place to start is by reaching out to people you’ve worked well with in the past, or [considering a mentor](https://leaddev.com/management/how-find-and-become-great-engineering-mentor) at enough distance in the org chart to ensure their only interest is helping you. #### **3. Your manager falls short sometimes** Some managers avoid making decisions or fail to give clear direction, leaving their reports stalled and guessing priorities. Others struggle to advocate upward, or they get lost in execution details instead of enabling their reports to succeed. If you find yourself in this situation, focus on what you can control. Capture decisions in writing so there’s a record. If you’re not getting the direction you need, fall back on relationships you’ve garnered with peers or a mentor. Always keep your manager in the loop on key decisions and progress you’re making – especially if these developments came about through discussions with peers or mentors – but don’t rely exclusively on them to drive action. If they struggle to advocate for you or your team, prepare short, fact-based updates they can use in leadership discussions. The easier you make it for them to represent your work accurately, the more likely they are to do so. Over time, these actions will also strengthen your reputation as someone who can deliver in imperfect conditions. If the situation doesn’t improve, you will have built both the credibility and the network to explore opportunities elsewhere in the same company. New York ticket prices go up soon Management breeds unseen vulnerabilities. We don’t know what we don’t know. As managers ourselves, we’re juggling priorities, making fast decisions, and often missing context. That’s why the best managers don’t just expect to be managed up – they actively invite it. Now flip the lens: How can you make it easier for your own reports? The more you show openness to a real two-way dialogue, the more your team will open up about what they need, what they see, and where they want to grow. And here is a bonus challenge: Take your own advice and try something new in your relationship with your manager. Start small. Pick one tactic every few weeks. See what lands. Build on what works. Experiment. Evaluate. Adapt. Repeat., Need-to-Know Tactics for Managing Up Successfully, Diego Quiroga, 01k36r6z0rc3mk07gm8tvcjvhr.