Managing Up: The Skill Nobody Teaches
Has anyone ever been on a training course about how to manage your boss? No? Me neither. Strange, isn’t it.
Managing up is arguably more important than managing down and yet nobody teaches it. There are really only two levers. Make it their risk. Or make it their win. Everything else is detail.
But before I get into the mechanics, I want to be clear about something. This is not manipulation. This is respect.
Your boss’s vantage point is genuinely different from yours. The thing you’re bringing to them might be the most important issue on your desk. For them, it’s one of fifty. They have Executive reporting, departmental KPIs, audit recommendations, political pressures, and a dozen other conversations you’re not in the room for. Acknowledging that isn’t weakness. It’s the starting point for every conversation that actually gets a result.
I tell my director this regularly: “I appreciate your vantage point is different from mine.” It’s not a throwaway line. It’s a discipline. It tells him I’m not about to dump my problem on his desk and expect him to feel the same urgency I do. It buys me credibility every time I use it because when I do come to him with something urgent, he knows I mean it.
The Bandwidth Principle
Most people pitch to their boss as though their issue is the only thing on the desk. It isn’t. It never is. The moment you walk in assuming your priority is their priority, you’ve lost the room before you’ve opened your mouth.
Before I raise anything with my director, I ask myself one question: what does his week actually look like right now? If I know he’s preparing for an Executive meeting on Thursday, I’m not going to land a complex funding proposal on his desk on Wednesday morning. I’ll wait until Friday when he has the headspace to think about it properly. The ask doesn’t change. The timing does. And timing is half the battle.
Taking five minutes to understand what your boss is dealing with this week isn’t strategy. It’s basic respect. The fact that most people don’t do it is exactly why it works so well when you do.
Speak Their Reporting Language
This is the technique that changed everything for me. I learned what my director is measured on; his quarterly targets, his departmental KPIs, his reporting obligations. And I stopped framing my proposals in my language and started framing them in his.
Instead of “I need approval for this funding bid,” I’d write: “This bid aligns with the Q3 target for service development and would put us ahead of the audit recommendation on community-based funding thresholds. If we secure it, you can report progress at the next Executive meeting.”
Same ask. Completely different frame. I’m not asking him to care about what I care about. I’m showing him that what I want already fits inside what he’s measured on. He doesn’t have to translate my operational request into Executive language, because I’ve already done it for him.
Control the Timeline by Giving It Away
This is the one my colleagues don’t understand. When I need something approved, I don’t fight for my deadline. I ask my director to set one that fits his reporting cycle.
“I’d like to get this moving. Where does it sit best for you, this quarter or next?”
He feels in control of the timing. I get a commitment I can hold him to. And because the timeline fits his schedule, it doesn’t feel like pressure, it feels like planning.
My colleagues sometimes wonder why I seem to get the resources. It’s not luck. It’s not favouritism. It’s that I took the time to understand what my manager’s week actually looks like and I framed every conversation around that, not around what I needed.
The Two Levers in Practice
When you need your boss to act on a risk, frame inaction as the exposure: “I’d rather we got ahead of this now than had to explain it later.”
When you want them to back your idea, frame it as their opportunity: “This positions the department well for the next reporting cycle and it builds on the work we’ve already started.”
Both levers work because they speak to your boss’s world, not yours. That’s not manipulation. That’s communication that respects the person you’re trying to move.
The full phrase bank, including the wording for both levers, is in Battle Tested Emails. These aren’t scripts. They’re starting points. Use them once and you’ll find your own version.