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managing-up

managing-up 3 min read Free

Managing Up Series #10: Making Your Work Legible to Leadership

There is a recurring frustration among capable operators: they do good work that goes unappreciated. They watch less competent peers get promoted, get high-visibility projects, and get recognized for things they built. Meanwhile their own contributions are invisible — not because they aren't real, but because they haven'
managing-up 3 min read Free

Managing Up Series #9: How ICs Should Communicate With Executives

Individual contributors often behave differently in rooms with executives than in rooms with their peers. Some get hyper-formal, over-explaining their work in minute technical detail. Some go the other direction, over-simplifying to the point of meaninglessness. Some get deferential — pausing for approval before finishing sentences, hedging every claim, performing humility
managing-up 2 min read Free

Managing Up Series #8: When to Escalate and When to Handle It Yourself

One of the most common managing up mistakes is getting the escalation dial wrong in one direction or the other: either escalating too much (creating dependency, clogging your manager's queue, undermining your own authority) or too little (getting caught in problems you should have flagged, surprising your manager
managing-up 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
managing-up 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
managing-up 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
managing-up 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.
managing-up 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
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