The Case for Managing Up
Plenty of talented people leave their careers to chance because they think good work speaks for itself. It does not. Here is what actually moves the needle.
By The Weekly Reset Team
There is a widely held belief in workplaces that if you do your job well, the right people will notice and the right things will happen. This belief is reassuring and largely false.
Careers are not determined by output alone. They are shaped by the relationships you have with the people above you, the visibility your work has, and whether the people making decisions about you have an accurate picture of what you are doing and why it matters. Managing up is the practice of taking some responsibility for that rather than leaving it entirely to chance.
What managing up is not
The phrase has a slightly uncomfortable association with office politics, with people who are better at appearing productive than at being productive. This is a real phenomenon but it is not what we are talking about.
Managing up in the useful sense is not about impressing people or managing perceptions in the superficial way. It is about ensuring the person you report to has the information they need to do their job, which includes supporting and advocating for you. It is about understanding their priorities well enough to orient your work around what actually matters to them. It is about communicating honestly, including about problems, early enough that something can be done.
These things benefit your manager as much as they benefit you. A team member who is easy to manage, who surfaces issues early, who makes their work visible and their thinking clear, is a significant relief to a stretched manager. The relationship works better for everyone.
The information asymmetry
Managers often do not know what their direct reports are actually doing. This sounds absurd but it is structurally true. A manager with six direct reports, each running multiple workstreams, cannot possibly track everything without deliberate effort from both sides. Work that is not made visible does not get noticed, regardless of its quality.
This is not a character flaw on anyone's part. It is just a volume problem. The person best placed to solve it is the person doing the work, through proactive, regular, brief updates that give the manager what they need without requiring a dedicated meeting.
A short note at the end of the week, covering what progressed, what is blocked, and what decisions are needed, does more for a working relationship than a year of assuming things are understood.
The compound effect
The reason managing up matters beyond the immediate relationship is that the people above you shape the opportunities available to you. Projects get assigned based on perceived capability and reliability. Promotions and recommendations go to the people whose work has been seen and whose judgment has been tested.
None of this is unfair, exactly. Decision-makers work with the information they have. Managing up is how you make sure the information they have is accurate.
Doing good work and making it visible are not in tension. They are both part of the same job. The second one is just easier to skip, and more costly than it looks.