Picture this you’re sitting at your desk, staring at the email you just got from your boss’s boss, and your heart does that little flutter thing because surprise, she wants your input on the company’s new strategic initiative. And while part of you is doing that mental happy dance, there’s also a voice in your head whispering, don’t screw this up.

Well, if you have ever found yourself there, the timing could not be better because if you are listening to this at the time it releases, then in less than two weeks, you will be able to get your hands on something that’s going to be your secret advantage for moments exactly like this.

My new book, Managing Up How to Get What You Need From the People in Charge hits shelves on March 4th. And the great news is that you can still pre order right now. And that means you’re going to be among the first to get a copy. But you will also get your hands on over $400 worth of implementation bonuses.

But you have to hurry because these bonuses do disappear on release day. So head to managingup.com for all of the details. I couldn’t be more excited for this book to finally, finally get into your hands. I have truly poured my heart and soul into this over the last few years because I wanted to make it the definitive and indispensable playbook for navigating relationships with higher ups and really make sure it was packed with tons of science based strategies, step by step tactics, and lots and lots of lots of word forward scripts. Oneof my favorite things is that you don’t need to completely reinvent yourself to be successful and you also don’t have to spend hours upon hours applying what is inside the book. You’re going to get small doable tweaks that add up to major influence. So we had one early reader, Carolina, she reached out and she said that she’s in the process of making a case for her promotion. And she’s going to be using the phrasing that is in chapter eight, the Advancement Conversation to make a more compelling justification. And another early reader, Jennifer, thank you, she mentioned that in chapter two, the Styles Conversation was like a lightning bolt for her. And she said, What a great idea. This is usually a conversation about just what your boss wants. But now I can say, here’s my approach for getting things done. And does this work for both of us.

As I’ve been getting out there and doing more and more talks and trainings on the book? I’ve been hearing some things. Again, and again, and I have to address it because these ideas are not only outdated and in some cases dead wrong, but most of all, they become beliefs that hold people back from the very things they want and deserve most in their careers, respect, recognition, peace of mind every day.

Managing up is your fast track to the money opportunities and freedom you want at work. But when I say this. There is usually some cringing or skepticism, questioning that comes from people. They say, managing up, how could I possibly get more control, more freedom from that? And I get it because it does sound like an oxymoron. It sounds backwards. How could managing up, which sounds like more work, kissing up, compromising who you are, how could that possibly lead to more autonomy and authority? What I’m going to prove to you today is that it’s because the way we’ve been taught to think about managing up is all wrong. If you feel a little resistance to the idea of influencing up your chain of command, then that makes complete sense. I totally get it.

And maybe you have been hearing me talk about this topic. You’re intrigued, but, you’re unsure if it’s going to work for you. And all of that is totally normal, but we have to unpack why this resistance is there. We have to dismantle what’s in the way. Because that’s exactly why most professionals never master this skill. They try a few techniques here and there, and then they ultimately fall back into their old patterns. It’s not because the strategies don’t work. It’s because we’ve never addressed the real obstacle. And that is the story we tell ourselves about what managing up actually means. Who does it make us if we are trying to, attempting to manage up? That’s what stands in our way.

So I want you to think of it like trying to drive a car. You have one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake. You’re not going to get very far. And in the same way, you could have all the best techniques in the world for managing up. But if your mindset is working against you, if you have pre programmed beliefs about managing up being bad, skeezy, slimy, you will stay exactly where you are, or worse. And we don’t want this happening, you will start losing ground to the people who have figured out this skill. And this is simply how human brains work. We act consistently with our beliefs. If you believe managing up is cringy, dirty, political, conniving, You’ll stay right where you are. We don’t want that for you.

So today that’s why I wanted to unpack five managing up myths.

And let’s start with myth number one, which is managing up means being a suck up.

Managing up for a very long time has been conflated with brown nosing, politicking, and just think about the message we were fed when we were younger. You could pick up any old school management book and you’ll hear managing up talked about as keeping track of your boss’s coffee order and their preferences, knowing their spouse’s birthday.

That’s not managing up. That’s becoming a professional pushover.

We are not working in 1995 anymore. We are working in a world of hybrid teams, instant messaging. We have four different generations now in the workplace having to collaborate side by side. You are working in a world now where your boss may be younger and less experienced than you. Where expertise tends to matter more than hierarchy. And where a lot of our FaceTime happens through Zoom, happens virtually.

And yet our mental model of managing up is still stuck in the nineties. We’re still stuck in that old office with fax machines and water cooler politics. The water cooler barely even exists anymore. So we’re trying to navigate our current workplace challenges with a nineties playbook, and that’s not going to work.

Modern managing up is not about becoming the office doormat or morphing into some corporate chameleon who just shapeshifts depending on who’s in the room.

It’s about something much, much more powerful. Becoming a strategic partner, a strategic partner, an advisor who knows how to work the system without letting the system work you.

So what I’m asking you to do is shift from your main question being, how can I please my boss? How can I get on their ingratiate myself to them? I want you to change the question to, how can we work together to each get what we need in this relationship? And when you do this, when you ask yourself better questions, you get better answers and results and something very powerful happens.

This isn’t just a change in words. It’s a complete shift in the lens through which you see power dynamics. You’re not just that person who’s desperately trying to read between the lines on the emoji that your boss used in an email. You’re a strategic partner. That word is important partner who understands how to align your goals with theirs, how to communicate in ways that get you heard that get results and how to navigate the dynamics that are happening around you.

With confidence without losing yourself in the process.

Myth number two. Managing up is something you do for your boss’s benefit.

The moment I mention managing up, someone inevitably raises their hand and says something like this. So basically what you’re telling me is that I need to do my boss’s job for them, right?

And I get it. Again, I get that reaction because when your boss sends you that 11 p. m. email, that’s marked as urgent, it absolutely feels like you are carrying someone else’s emotional labor. But we’ve got this completely backwards. Managing up is not about your boss at all. It’s about you getting what you need to be at your best and make your work easier.

So I want to drive this home with an example of one of my clients. I’m going to call him Jeremy and he used to dread his one on ones because his boss would just ramble for 30 minutes without. Addressing any actual questions or any of the actual topics they needed to talk about. And Jeremy would leave every one of these meetings feeling more confused than having clarity. But instead of just continuing to suffer and resign himself, just saying like, I guess I have to deal with this, or being frustrated about his boss being so scattered. He learned to manage up and now he sends a focused agenda beforehand. He redirects the conversation when his boss starts to go on rabbit trails. And he walks away with exactly what he needs to keep his team moving forward. Now, did his boss just overnight become a master communicator? Not at all. That’s not possible. He’s still the same person who can turn a five minute update into like a massive Ted Talk.

But the key here is Jeremy is different. He is more equipped. He’s able to handle the pressures, the frustrations without letting them overcome him. He’s developed the skills to get clear direction from his boss’s chaotic nature. He knows how to turn vague feedback now into actionable steps.

And so this is exactly what I mean when I say managing up is about you. It’s not about your boss. It’s about you getting what you need, regardless of who you’re reporting to, because you can’t control that.

There will always be managers who don’t have their stuff together, who avoid conflict, who are terrible at giving feedback, who want all of the details and minutia. But when you master this skill, you’re not at the mercy of their limitations. So instead of waiting for your boss to change again, they probably won’t. I hate to tell you that. You become the person who can navigate any leadership style, the person who can get buy in for their ideas, even when money is tight, the person who can have strong boundaries, even when everybody else seems to be in crisis mode.

So instead of thinking of managing up as extra work and additional emotional labor, start thinking of it as your biggest asset. It is there to help you make your work easier and less stressful because at the end of the day, your success should not depend on whether your boss gets better at their job.

It should depend on how skillfully you can navigate the relationship to serve your goals.

Myth number three, managing up is only for difficult bosses.

If you were to go Google managing up right now, what you would find is almost entirely focused on surviving bad bosses. There is article after article, there are even books about dealing with micromanagers, navigating toxic leaders, protecting yourself from workplace bullies.

So the message here is that managing up, is a emergency toolkit for when things go wrong. Now, when you are dealing with a difficult boss, you’re in desperate need for solutions. You are actively searching for any help you can get and the pain, it feels very immediate and real. But when you treat managing up as just a defense mechanism for a bad boss, it’s completely missing the point.

And it’s almost like we’ve taken this very fundamental career skill, we’ve reduced it to something that is only first aid. We’re acting like managing up is about damage control when in reality, it’s one of the most powerful tools you have for proactive career development. Managing up is a skill you need regardless of who you report to. And in fact, having a great boss is exactly when you should be developing these abilities, because this is the reality of modern careers.

Change is constant. You may have experienced in your own career in the last one to five years that you’re amazing boss, they will get promoted. They will leave for another opportunity or your department will be reorganized without much notice. So the only thing you can count on as the old saying goes is that things will keep changing. Change is the only constant.

But here’s the even bigger reason why this matters. When you focus on managing up as just a response, as just a defense to a difficult boss, you miss out on all the opportunities it creates with the good ones. Because even the world’s best boss, there is always room to align more closely together to communicate more effectively, to build a stronger partnership with them.

So these skills are not just about survival. Again, they’re about getting what you need. And let me put it this way. You wouldn’t wait for a cavity to start brushing your teeth. You wouldn’t wait until you’re millions of dollars in debt to start saving money. At least I hope not. So, why do we apply that same logic in this case?

Why do we wait for a bad boss to start developing one of the most crucial skills we need in our professional lives? Managing up is about building the habits, the mindsets, the strategies that make you more effective, no matter what’s going on, so that you can be more agile when change comes your way, because it will.

Myth number four, your boss is the gateway to your success.

You have probably been told your entire career that your boss controls your future, your manager is your number one customer, or maybe you heard focus on making your boss happy and everything else will just fall into place.

And this advice may have worked 10, 20 years ago when organizations were much simpler, reporting lines were clear. But today the workplace looks radically different. Again, I’m sure, you know, firsthand, your boss is just one voice in a very complex web of decision makers who have an impact on your career.

Think about the last major project you were part of. You probably did have to navigate your direct boss, but there was probably also a project sponsor in the mix from another department, multiple stakeholders across teams, maybe even external clients. And each of those have their own priorities and preferences. The VP that’s running your biggest initiative, they may have input on your performance review. The director who controls resources, they decide if your team gets priority for new hires. The executive sponsor that you see maybe once a quarter, they could be a key voice in your promotion discussion.

Influence flows through networks. So your success depends on your ability to navigate what is now this ecosystem of different stakeholders, people that each have their own goals, preferences, and power dynamics. Managing up isn’t just about one relationship anymore. It’s about positioning yourself within this whole web of different players.

If you are only managing up to your boss, you are missing out. Myth number five. Managing up requires that you have an outgoing personality.

You might have told yourself that you don’t command attention like others do. Or that you’re too introverted for all of this. You have probably seen that one colleague who tends to dominate a meeting, they come with their buzzwords and bravado and fancy slides.

And they just seem like they could nonchalantly interrupt the CEO mid sentence with their brilliant idea. But what you don’t see is what happens behind closed doors. As an executive coach, I am privy to. What you don’t see is the conversations about how that person who always has an opinion, how they are exhausting to manage. Or the impatience people have with them constantly self promoting and not having a lot of substance to that.

And so these people, yes, they may seem very successful on the outside. But what I can tell you is that they tend to just flame out spectacularly because they mistake attention for influence and volume for value. Your quiet traits, they actually give you a huge competitive advantage when you are managing up. While others are busy just talking, talking, talking. You are noticing that slight hesitation that a senior leader has. When you’re discussing a project timeline, when your colleague is focused on making their next point, you’re catching how a C suite leader’s body language shifts when certain metrics come up.

When everybody else is taking that terse email at face value and just moving on or immediately reacting to it. You’re trying to read between the lines. You’re trying to understand what’s the real concern behind this. Where did this come from? So that careful observation, it helps you time your requests better.

You, you read the room. You may know when your boss is more receptive to a new idea versus when they are too stressed to be open to change and bringing something up might backfire and make them defensive. Your thoughtful listening means you are picking up on the priorities, on the desires that are hiding beneath what someone says on the surface level.

Your tendency to process, to think before you speak means that when you do share ideas, they are insightful, they are well considered, and they sync up with what others care about. So let’s recap those five myths of managing up.

Number one, managing up means being a suck up false. It’s about becoming a strategic partner.

Number two, managing up is something you do for your boss’s benefit. False. It’s about you getting what you need to be at your best and make your work easier.

Number three, managing up is only for difficult bosses.

False. Managing up is a skill you need regardless of who you report to. Four, your boss is your gateway to your success. False. Your boss is just one voice in a big web of decision makers who affect your career.

And five, managing up requires an outgoing personality. False. Your quiet traits actually give you a competitive advantage here.

All of these myths point to the same truth. When you shift how you think about power dynamics, everything changes. You gain a sense of control, of agency.

So going back to that example of that urgent late night email from your boss, instead of getting preoccupied of seeing this as an intrusion, you see it as a chance to be clear about your boundaries. Instead of dreading that rambling one on one you see it as a chance to demonstrate leadership by bringing structure. So the list goes on and on.

If everything I shared today resonates with you, if you are ready to stop letting these outdated beliefs hold you back, to start using managing up, as your springboard to more money, influence, freedom at work, then make sure you preorder my new book, Managing Up How to Get What You Need From the People in Charge.

It launches very soon on March 4th and it is packed with so many different tactics, strategies, tons and tons of scripts to show you exactly how to put these principles into practice. And remember, if you pre order, or I should say, as long as you pre order before launch day, you’ll get access to over $400 worth of implementation bonuses.

I wanted to make sure you had plenty of resources to put the strategies in the book into action immediately. So just head to managingup.com now you’ll find all the details there. Thank you so much for joining me today, for tuning in. I will see you in the next episode.