We’re a few weeks into the new year.

And if you’re like most people, you’ve probably heard about “Quitters Day” — that second Friday in January when lots of different studies and surveys show that people have already abandoned their New Year’s resolutions. They’ve thrown in the towel either because their goals were too vague, overwhelming. Because their plan was nonexistent and their motivation just fizzled. 

Since we’re working with driven career oriented professionals though, instead of Quitters Day, often what we see is more like… Disillusionment Day.

Let me explain what I mean. You probably came back that first Monday in January raring to go. You took some time for yourself over the holidays with family, recharged finally tackled that closet you’ve been meaning to organize for months. You reflected on where you want to go this year. You set a vision for yourself and what you want to achieve at work. That promotion. Getting that critical project off the ground. Finally getting your team operating at the level you know they can. And you were riding high on the promise of it all.

Then… reality hits.

You’ve had your first frustrating meetings of the year. The conversation you wanted to have with your boss — the one you idealized in your head during your morning runs, practiced in the shower — either hasn’t happened yet or didn’t go the way you hoped. You’re starting to get bogged down in the weeds and minutiae again. The luster of those hopes and careful planning is already fading away because you’re back in your imperfect workplace with stress and imperfect people. The priorities around you are shifting once again, and you’re left reacting to it all. 

If you’re listening and thinking YES how are in my mind?! Then good! This is an EXTREMELY important moment and you’re hearing this episode for a reason today. 

You are at a fork in the road. On path, option A – you can recognize what’s happening right now and make the conscious choice to do what is within your power to regain a sense of agency and control at work. You can use this moment as the reset and jumping up point that sets a precedent for what you signal to others is acceptable or not the rest of the year. 

Or, Option2, you can let the current keep carrying you away. You may wake up and it’s July. Or October. And you’re further away from that promotion. Further from getting your ideas heard in the way you had been dreaming of back. Further from the version showing up at work as confident and convicted that you were so clear a few months ago. 

I’m going to guess you’re listening to this because you’re an Option A person. And if you’re not — if you’re like, I’ll deal with things as they come. If you’d prefer to sit on Linkedin and complain in comments about how workplaces should be better rather than dealing with how they actually are, you can turn this episode off now. No judgment. It’s cool, we will miss you, but I don;t want to waste your time. Because what I’m about to share isn’t for passive participants.

The thing no one is telling you, frankly because it’s more attractive to just sell you excuses, is that the reason you’re feeling jerked around by the whims and priorities of people above you isn’t just because your boss is disorganized or your organization is chaotic. That may be part of it. But what we’re really neglecting to talk enough about is the fact that over the last year or 18 months, there have been some quiet shifts in how people are behaving at work, how organizations and or the economy are operating,  that have fundamentally changed the rules of how to gain influence in your career.

These are subtle and you can’t see them when you’re inside your own team, living it every day, you only have access to your small microcosm. I have a different vantage point and it’s why I want to do this episode today. I’m a longtime researcher in emotions, I’m a professor of human and over the last year, my team and I have directly worked with hundreds of professionals across industries in our programs — corporate, nonprofit, tech, healthcare, finance, pharma, agriculture, construction – you name it. 

We’re watching the same patterns show up everywhere. And what tells us something structural is evolving. Becoming better at your job, mastering AI – those skills matter. But if you don’t recognize that the ground underneath you is shifting, you’re going to be in trouble. 

So let’s make the invisible visible for you today and talk about how and why the rules of influence at work have changed and why now at this moment in time, managing up is absolutely not optional. It’s not something you can thrust aside any longer. 

New rule #1: Your Influence Is Built In Fragments, Not In Formal Reviews. We’re seeing is the rise of micro-evaluations. You’re being evaluated constantly, but never as comprehensively as in the past. Think about how fractured every interaction has become. You get thirty minutes with the leadership team here. Five minutes with your project sponsor there. A quick Slack exchange with your boss between their back-to-back meetings. A two-sentence update in the hallway. A rapid-fire email thread where tone gets lost and context evaporates.

All day, every day, you’re communicating in fragments. Responding to fractured messages. Showing up in slivers of time and attention.

Decision makers, those you need to manage up to build influence – they are forming opinions about you through that. Sure, your performance review is still a thing. But that’s once a year, when this is every day. There are countless of these informal, instantaneous judgments that happen in the gaps. It’s that 10 minutes after you left the leadership meeting where you absolutely nailed a recommendation, your boss is debriefing with a peer how they now want to bring you in on something better.  It’s in the split-second gut reaction someone has when your name comes up in a talent calibration conversation.

This is a massive shift from how careers used to be built, which was through defined cycles, very structured development conversations, clear criteria. Your boss and the people around them had the time and mental space to actually think about your performance holistically. But not anymore. Fewer and fewer organizations have defined advance paths anymore. The traditional “put in your time and get ahead” idea is long gone. Opportunities are increasingly relationship-driven, informal, and decided in those fractured slivers like I’m talking about.

Which means if you’re not actively managing up in those micro-moments — if you’re not thinking strategically about how you show up — you’re letting your trajectory get decided by whatever random snapshot the people in power happen to retain.

New rule #2: Build your adaptability insurance now. Your career security comes from being as being able to grow and evolve with changing needs and to slot in and quickly get up to speed in a role that is mission critical, not from how long you’ve been there. And this is GREAT news, because it means you don’t have to be limited or doomed, if you don’t have the title of seniority you want just yet. Because it means you’re not limited by time served or stuck waiting in line.

To ground this in some data, in the US layoffs there were 1.17 million job cuts announced in 2025 — the highest total in a single year since the pandemic. And surveys are showing that  6 out of 10 companies plan to lay off employees in 2026. The numbers themselves are a bit daunting for sure, but where things really get interesting is if we go one layer deeper. These layoffs are NOT following the old patterns. 

Historically, the first to go were underperformers, then junior roles and people with less experience and who hadn’t been at the company as long. But now, experienced individual contributors and middle managers are the most scrutinized layers. People who’ve been there for years. People who are good at their jobs but are seen as tied to one specific function or stuck in a role that might not exist in the next restructuring.

Companies are asking: “Is this role necessary? Could we flatten this layer? Is this person adaptable or are they only valuable in their current capacity?”

So here’s the new rule: Your job security doesn’t come from how long you’ve been there. It comes from being perceived as adaptable and strategically valuable across changing business needs.

This is where managing up becomes the closest thing you have to a career insurance policy in a time when nothing stays static for very long. .

When you actively build relationships across the organization — not just with your direct boss but with leaders in other functions, stakeholders on cross-functional projects, vendors and clients outside the org  — you’re not dependent on one person or one role for your relevance.

Plus managing up ensures you’re associated with critical, revenue-generating work. Not just busy work, “keeping the lights on” stuff. You are connecting to problems leadership is losing sleep over. This makes you much harder to cut AS LONG AS you’re able to translate the RESULTS of work into language decision-makers care about.

New rule #3: pushback is now a senior level skill 

There’s a very frustrating double bind you hit at a certain point in your career. You realize that the fastest way to stall your growth is to say no to everything. AND the fastest way to stall your growth is to say YES to everything.  

You’ve been taught that pitching in builds your reputation and shows you’re a team player. That’s still true. But if that’s ALL you are — always willing, always available — leaders see: Someone who can’t prioritize, who doesn’t discern what actually matters, who’s too tactical trust with headier responsibilities. 

The most influential people we work with have cracked a different code and learned to operate in what researchers call the “charisma zone”. They have high warmth AND high competence at the same time. They’re genuinely helpful and collaborative. People like working with them. They build goodwill by being responsive and supportive. But they’re also selective about where they invest their time. They’re willing to have the tough conversation about tradeoffs. They push back when something doesn’t make business sense — and they do it in a way that actually strengthens relationships and leaves people feeling good. 

In more stable times, if you said yes to a bad idea, the organization could absorb it. There was budget to scrap something that wasn’t working. There were enough people that someone could pick up the pieces if a timeline was unrealistic.

Not anymore. Companies are running leaner. There’s less slack in the system. When you commit to an unrealistic timeline, there’s no extra headcount to throw at it and it because an expensive oversight. When resources get allocated to the wrong priority, there’s no spare budget to course-correct.

Every week I am hearing from organizations who bring me in to speak to their teams and tell me, “our people aren’t pushing back and it’s costing us time, competitive ground, credibility when we have to walk back commitments because nobody flagged a problem early.” 

So the ability to pushback diplomatically is something that will leapfrog you past other people. The person who can say “I want to make sure we’re solving the right problem here before we move forward” or “This timeline doesn’t seem to account for this dependency, here’s what would need to change to make it possible” — that person is demonstrating executive judgment which is much more rare than the ability to follow directions. The talent pool for reliable workhorses is larger than the one for strategists who can see around corners, predict and project 3 steps ahead. 

Our fourth and final new rule of influence: How You Think On Your Feet Now Outweighs How Well You Prepare. Your Unscripted Moments Now Matter More Than Your Polished Deliverables. Your Real-Time Performance Has Become The True Test Of Your Capability. 

Why? All because of something you’d heard A LOT about: AI. Anyone can sound smart asynchronously now. ChatGPT can craft you a solid email. There are countless tools that can help you wordsmith a presentation deck, make your slides look professional, strengthen your executive summary. But none of that helps you when you’re put on the spot in a meeting.

This is why real-time interactions — how you respond when asked an unexpected question, how you handle a customer’s reaction in the moment, how you articulate your ideas when you have to do so off the cuff — now carry disproportionate weight. Decision-makers know you didn’t have time to workshop your response or run it through AI to make yourself sound smarter. It sends an undeniable message that: You’re not faking it. You actually have these skills.

On the other hand, if you freeze, ramble, or get defensive when caught off guard? That’s what they remember. Not the eloquent follow-up email you send later.

So, Build the foundation now that lets you succeed in those unscripted moments later. You can’t prepare meticulously for those spontaneous interactions. You may have an idea of the direction a conversation will take, but inevitably there will be twists and turns you couldn’t have anticipated. 

What you CAN do is come armed with the context and heuristics that makes you capable of thinking clearly when you’re put on the spot.

And this is exactly where managing up becomes your unfair advantage.

When you’ve invested in decoding your leadership’s priorities, their communication styles, their pressure points — you’re not starting from zero when they pepper you with questions. You can read between the lines. You know what they’re really asking for. You can bridge from what you weren’t prepared to discuss to something you can speak to with more confidence.

And beyond that, you need frameworks you can internalize and fall back on in the moment.

For example, in our Speak Like a Senior Leader™ program, we teach you exactly how to rapidly distill a complex idea and present it coherently in a way that makes decision-makers lean in and take notes. We give you a constrained set of three go-to tactics for when you’re caught off guard and you need to respond without saying “uhh, I’ll get back to you.”

This combination — understanding how your specific leaders think, having mental models for how executives operate in general, and having practiced frameworks for real-time communication — is what makes some people seem effortless in high-stakes moments while others just crumble. 

Let’s pull those 4 new rules of workplace influence together. 

Rule #1: Your influence is built in fragments, not formal reviews. You’re being evaluated in micro-moments every single day, and those snapshots are determining your trajectory. 

Rule #2: Build your adaptability insurance now. Your career security comes from being seen as valuable and able to evolve across changing needs — not from how long you’ve been there.

Rule #3: Pushback is now a senior-level skill. The ability to diplomatically challenge bad ideas and make tradeoffs demonstrates the executive judgment that leapfrogs you past others.

Rule #4: How you think on your feet now outweighs how well you prepare. Your real-time performance has become the truest test of your capability in an age where anyone can make their work look good using AI. 

These are the invisible shifts that have changed everything about how you persuade, build trust, gain buy-in, become that trusted advisor who is handed opportunities before you ask. And most of all, when you can see what’s really happening in the dynamics around you,  you’re no longer a pawn. You become an active player. Now, being an active player doesn’t make you a political operator. It doesn’t make you a conniving asshole. I come back to this idea again and again when I’m speaking to teams, in our program Speak Like a Senior Leader: 

Managing up is not something you do for your boss. It’s not about stroking their ego or becoming the favorite. It’s about creating the conditions for YOU to do your best work — logistically, so you have the clarity, the direction, the feedback to be successful. But more importantly, it’s so you can be at your best mentally and emotionally in your role. Feeling in control, like you have agency, freedom, respect. 

That’s all for today. I’ll see you in the next episode!