Author
Antoine Buteau

Antoine Buteau

2 min read Free

Managing Up Series #7: Reading Your Manager's Real Priorities

What a manager says matters. What they revisit, reward, fund, and panic about matters more. Every manager has a stated set of priorities — usually documented in a team charter, a strategy doc, or a quarterly planning deck. These are real, but they're incomplete. They describe the official priority
2 min read Free

Managing Up Series #6: How to Bring Problems Without Becoming the Problem

There is a type of operator who brings a lot of problems upward. Every obstacle, every concern, every snag arrives as an email or a meeting request. Their manager starts to dread the interaction — because every conversation creates more anxiety, not more clarity. There is also a type of operator
2 min read Free

Managing Up Series #5: Disagreeing Upward Without Creating Friction

The worst organizational cultures share a common feature: people don't say what they actually think when a decision is being made. Either they're afraid of conflict, protecting the relationship, or convinced their view doesn't matter. The result is consensus that no one actually agrees
1 min read Free

Managing Up Series #4: Stop Sending Activity. Start Sending Signal.

Post 3 covered the structure of a useful update. This one is the field manual: how to take the thing you were about to send and turn it into signal before it reaches your manager. The move is simple but not easy: convert activity into consequence. Activity says what happened.
2 min read Free

Managing Up Series #3: The Update Your Manager Actually Needs

Most updates fail the same way: they describe what happened without explaining what it means. They are activity reports dressed up as communication. Your manager doesn't need to know everything you did. They need to know what changed, what matters, what risk is live, and what decision — if
2 min read Free

Managing Up Series #2: How to Make Your Manager Trust Your Judgment

Trust is not a feeling. It's a pattern. Your manager doesn't trust your judgment because they like you or because you've been there a long time. They trust it because they've seen it operate enough times to bet on it. This matters
2 min read Free

Managing Up Series #1: Managing Up Without Becoming Political

The word "political" does a lot of damage in organizations. It gets applied to anything involving the people above you — as if caring about your manager's effectiveness or trust is somehow beneath you. Or worse, as if managing up is a form of impression management: saying
4 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #10: The Redesign Playbook: How to Actually Fix an Organization

Good organizational design is boring, political, constrained, and iterative. That is why it works when theater does not. This post assumes you have already read the diagnostic series. You know how to map decision rights, information flow, handoffs, incentives, and informal power. You have your baseline measurements. You have a
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