Managing upward, the deliberate investment in understanding, supporting, and effectively influencing one's immediate manager, is among the most consistently underinvested organizational competencies at every level of the organizational hierarchy. Gabarro and Kotter (1993) established in their foundational Harvard Business Review article that the most effective organizational members at every level were those who understood managing their boss not as political maneuvering but as a professional responsibility: the mutual dependence between manager and direct report means that both parties benefit from the relationship's quality, and the direct report who invests in that quality produces better outcomes for themselves, for their manager, and for the organization than one who treats the relationship as a given rather than as a deliberate professional investment. This article reviews what effective upward management requires, examines the most common failure modes, addresses the specific behaviors most reliably building productive manager relationships, and considers the organizational conditions that support rather than undermine effective upward management.
What Managing Upward Actually Means
Gabarro and Kotter (1993) established the conceptual foundation for managing upward in their observation that the manager-direct report relationship is a relationship of mutual dependence whose quality determines both parties' effectiveness. The direct report depends on the manager for organizational resources, information, political support, developmental investment, and the organizational access that the manager's network and positional authority provides. The manager depends on the direct report for performance, execution quality, reliable information about the organizational domain the direct report operates in, and the organizational effectiveness that the manager's own performance depends on. This mutual dependence means that the direct report who invests in the relationship's quality is not doing the manager a favor; they are investing in the organizational infrastructure that their own performance and career development most require.
The specific components of effective upward management that Gabarro and Kotter (1993) identified include understanding the manager's goals, pressures, and organizational context; understanding the manager's working style and communication preferences; providing the information the manager needs rather than the information that is most convenient to provide; making reliable commitments and following through on them consistently; and managing the inevitable disagreements in ways that preserve the relationship quality while ensuring the direct report's genuine perspective is communicated rather than suppressed. Each of these components is a specific behavioral practice rather than a personality characteristic, making effective upward management a learnable professional skill rather than an interpersonal talent that some people naturally possess and others do not.
The most important distinction in managing upward is the difference between managing upward to protect one's own interests and managing upward to produce genuine mutual benefit. The first approach, which is what most people instinctively practice when they think about the concept at all, involves managing the manager's impression of one's performance and managing the information flow to protect against organizational scrutiny. The second approach involves genuinely understanding what the manager needs to succeed, providing that without being asked, and building the trust that comes from being reliably helpful rather than strategically self-protective. The first approach produces a defensive relationship that limits the direct report's organizational effectiveness. The second produces the organizational partnership that enables both parties to achieve more than they could with a more adversarial or indifferent relationship.
The organizational context in which managing upward is most consequential and most difficult is the one in which the direct report has a manager whose style, priorities, or working approach differs substantially from their own. It is easy to manage upward when the manager is similar enough to feel intuitive; it requires deliberate professional investment when the manager is different enough to require translation between working styles, communication preferences, and organizational priorities. The direct reports who develop this translation capability, who can adapt their communication and relationship management approach to the specific manager they have rather than requiring the manager to adapt to them, are those who consistently produce effective working relationships across a wider range of manager types and organizational contexts than those who manage upward only when the relationship requires minimal effort.
Understanding Your Manager
Know what your manager cares about most, what they are measured on, and what problems they are trying to solve. Their context shapes how your work is received.
Managers hate surprises more than bad news. Surface problems, delays, and changes before they become visible through other channels.
Some managers want detail; others want summary. Some want email; others want verbal. Mismatched style creates friction regardless of content quality.
Agree on what deliverables look like, when they are due, and what success means. Ambiguous expectations produce disappointed managers regardless of effort invested.
The diagnostic work most consistently producing effective upward management is the deliberate effort to understand the specific organizational pressures, goals, and constraints that determine the manager's priorities and decision-making. Managers are rarely operating on the simple optimization function that the direct report can observe from their position: they are navigating multiple competing organizational demands, managing the expectations of their own manager, balancing short-term performance pressure against longer-term capability investment, and managing the political dynamics of their peer relationships and organizational position simultaneously. Direct reports who understand this complexity are better positioned to provide the specific support that makes a genuine difference to the manager's effectiveness rather than the generic performance that technically meets the role requirements.
The specific dimensions of manager understanding most productive for upward management include the manager's organizational goals and the metrics by which their own performance is evaluated, because these define what the direct report's work contributes to when it is aligned with the manager's actual priorities. The manager's working style preferences, specifically their communication frequency and format preferences, their decision-making approach, and their tolerance for uncertainty and incomplete information, determine how the direct report should present information and proposals to make them most legible and actionable for this specific manager. The manager's current organizational pressures and stress points determine when is and is not the right time to bring problems that require managerial attention versus problems that the direct report should resolve independently to protect the manager's bandwidth for the challenges where their involvement is genuinely required.
The working style mismatch is the most common source of avoidable friction in manager-direct report relationships. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator research and subsequent working style research consistently shows that the source of most interpersonal workplace friction is not values conflict or performance disagreement but the collision of different working style preferences in the specific dimensions of information processing, decision-making pace, communication directness, and structure preference. Direct reports who recognize these style differences and adapt their working approach to bridge them, providing more structure when working with a manager who values it, being more direct when working with a manager whose preference is for candid communication, and packaging information at the level of detail that makes it most useful rather than most thorough, build working relationships that function smoothly across style differences that would produce significant friction without deliberate adaptation.
The information management dimension of understanding one's manager requires the direct report to develop explicit knowledge of what their manager needs to know, in what format, and at what frequency, rather than relying on the assumption that more information is always better than less. Managers who are overwhelmed with unfiltered information from their direct reports have less cognitive bandwidth for the specific information that most requires their attention. Direct reports who understand the difference between the information their manager needs to be aware of, the information their manager needs to act on, and the information their manager can safely ignore because the direct report is managing it effectively, and who provide each category in the right format and frequency, are performing a significant management service that most direct reports do not consciously provide because they have not systematically thought about what the information management function of their role requires.
Navigating Disagreement with Your Manager
The most consequential upward management challenge, and the one for which most direct reports have the least developed behavioral repertoire, is navigating genuine disagreement with a manager whose decision the direct report believes is wrong. The two dysfunctional responses that most direct reports default to are silent compliance, following the manager's direction without communicating the concern, and unproductive resistance, communicating the concern in ways that damage the relationship without increasing the probability that the concern will change the decision. Neither serves the direct report's organizational interests, the manager's organizational interests, or the organization's interests. The productive response requires both the courage to raise the concern directly and the skill to raise it in a way that makes genuine reconsideration more likely without making the manager feel attacked or undermined.
The behavioral approach most effective for productive disagreement with a manager combines explicit acknowledgment of the manager's perspective and the reasoning behind their position with a specific, evidence-based articulation of the direct report's concern and what specifically it adds to the manager's understanding of the decision situation. This approach is effective because it reduces the defensiveness that challenges to managerial judgment typically produce by demonstrating that the direct report has genuinely understood the manager's reasoning before challenging it, rather than rejecting it without engagement. It also frames the concern as additional information that improves the manager's decision rather than as a challenge to the manager's authority, which is the framing most likely to produce genuine reconsideration rather than defensive entrenchment in the original position.
The timing of upward disagreement is as important as its content and framing. Disagreements raised in public settings, where the manager's position has been stated in front of peers or senior leaders, require the manager to defend their position to maintain face regardless of the quality of the challenging argument. Disagreements raised in private, where the manager can update their position without the social cost of visible position change, are substantially more likely to produce genuine reconsideration. Direct reports who understand this dynamic and who bring their concerns to the manager privately before they become public disagreements produce more decision quality improvement from their challenges than those who raise concerns in the organizational settings that most increase the manager's defensive response.
The post-disagreement behavior is the upward management dimension most consequential for relationship quality over time and most frequently mismanaged in organizational practice. When the manager has heard the direct report's concern and made the decision anyway, the direct report has three available behavioral responses: genuine commitment to executing the decision well, compliance without genuine commitment that expresses itself as passive implementation, and undermining resistance that communicates the disagreement to others through the quality and enthusiasm of implementation. The first response preserves the relationship and the direct report's organizational credibility. The second and third damage both, because managers accurately read the difference between genuine commitment and compliance-without-commitment, and they calibrate their organizational trust in the direct report accordingly.
Building Lasting Upward Influence
| Manager need | % managers rating as important | % direct reports: I deliver this well |
|---|---|---|
| Proactive problem surfacing | 89% | 42% |
| Realistic timeline management | 84% | 51% |
| Clear priority questions | 81% | 38% |
| Explicit expectation confirmation | 76% | 44% |
| Upward feedback on my effectiveness | 71% | 28% |
The upward influence that accumulates into genuine organizational capital over time is built through a specific pattern of consistent contribution, reliable follow-through, proactive support, and honest communication that distinguishes the direct reports who are genuinely trusted and organizationally sponsored from those who are technically adequate but not organizationally invested in. The consistent contribution dimension means delivering reliably on commitments made, at the quality level the manager can count on without the verification overhead that unreliable performance requires. The proactive support dimension means understanding what the manager needs before being asked and providing it, which demonstrates the organizational attentiveness that genuine partnership requires rather than the transactional responsiveness that adequate performance provides.
The organizational trust that upward influence most requires is built most efficiently through the honest communication of bad news rather than the strategic management of it. Managers who learn about problems from the direct report who is managing them, before the problems have become significant enough to reach the manager through other channels, develop substantially more trust in that direct report than in those whose bad news management involves delay, minimization, or the presentation of problems as already-resolved when they are still developing. The short-term discomfort of proactive bad news communication is the investment in the long-term trust that makes the manager an organizational sponsor rather than an organizational evaluator for the direct report's career.
The political intelligence dimension of managing upward requires understanding not only the direct manager's position but the organizational context in which the manager operates: the pressures their manager is applying, the peer relationships that shape what is politically possible for them, and the organizational commitments that constrain their available decisions. Direct reports who understand this context are better positioned to bring proposals and requests that are feasible rather than ideal, to time their escalations and requests when the manager's organizational bandwidth makes them most actionable, and to frame their work in terms of the organizational outcomes that their manager is most accountable for rather than the outcomes that the direct report finds most personally significant. This political intelligence is not manipulation; it is the professional attentiveness that distinguishes organizationally effective direct reports from those whose genuine capability is consistently underutilized because they do not invest in the organizational context that would make their capability most visible and most valuable.
The organizational development implication of the managing upward research is that most leadership development programs systematically neglect the upward relationship management skills that research consistently identifies as among the most consequential for career advancement and organizational effectiveness. Programs that develop managers' skills in managing their direct reports without developing those same managers' skills in managing their own managers are producing half of the relationship management capability that organizational life requires. Organizations that invest in explicit development of upward management skills, including the diagnostic work of understanding the manager's context, the communication adaptation that style differences require, the productive disagreement approach that preserves relationships while ensuring genuine perspectives are communicated, and the trust-building behaviors that build organizational sponsorship, produce organizational members who are more effective at every level of the organizational hierarchy because they can manage relationships in all directions.
- Gabarro, J. J., and Kotter, J. P. (1993). Managing your boss. Harvard Business Review, 71(3), 150-157.
- Hill, L. A. (2007). Becoming the boss. Harvard Business Review, 85(1), 48-56.
- Jackman, J. M., and Strober, M. H. (2003). Fear of feedback. Harvard Business Review, 81(4), 101-107.