Managing up can be tricky.
For instance, do you ever find yourself lying awake at night, mentally rewriting that email you sent to your boss? Or rehearsing how you’ll handle tomorrow’s tough conversation about yet another shifting deadline?
Perhaps you get defensive when your boss hits you with unexpected feedback. Maybe you struggle to ask for what you need—whether that’s resources, flexibility or support.
You’re not alone. Many professionals spend a significant amount of mental energy navigating workplace relationships, especially managing up the chain.
And what’s the usual advice we get? Work on your confidence. Practice more self-care. Be kinder to yourself. After all, when it comes to getting ahead and finding happiness at work, most of us tend to focus on improving our own thoughts and emotions.
While this internal work is valuable, it’s incomplete. Because success extends far beyond managing your own psychology. Your ability to influence, make an impact, and find peace of mind at work also depends on your ability to navigate others’ psychology, too. Every day you have to navigate a complex web of interpersonal dynamics:
- Your boss’s stress levels
- Your senior leaders‘ pet peeves
- Power dynamics in meetings
- Unwritten rules of your workplace culture
When you don’t know how to navigate these dynamics effectively, you end up overthinking every interaction, missing opportunities because you’re not sure how to position yourself and feeling stuck despite doing excellent work.
Why Managing Up Is The #1 Skill You Need For Career Happiness
Managing up is defined as strategically navigating relationships with those who have more positional power than you, namely your boss.
When you hear “managing up,” you might think of outdated advice from the 1980s about sucking up and knowing your boss’s coffee order. But in today’s increasingly complex workplace, managing up has become more crucial than ever – just not in the way you might think.
In my new book Managing Up: How to Get What You Need From the People in Charge, I discuss how to master this essential skillset and why it unlocks greater freedom, authority and confidence at work.
The “visibility gap is widening”
With hybrid work here to stay, we have fewer organic opportunities to build relationships with decision-makers. Gone are the days of casual elevator conversations or impromptu coffee chats where you could organically build rapport with senior leaders. The “water cooler” has been replaced by scheduled Zoom meetings and asynchronous messages, making it harder to showcase your strategic thinking or build the kind of trust that leads to bigger opportunities. This visibility gap hits especially hard when you’re competing for resources, advocating for your team, or positioning yourself for promotion.
When your boss only sees you through the lens of project updates and status meetings, they miss the nuanced contributions that make you valuable. They don’t see how you mentor junior team members, defuse conflicts before they escalate, or spot problems before they become crises. That’s why mastering managing up isn’t just about doing good work – it’s about strategically communicating your impact and building influence in every interaction, no matter how brief or seemingly routine.
Whether it’s turning a quick Slack message into an opportunity to demonstrate strategic thinking, or using your limited face-to-face time to build deeper professional connections, every touchpoint becomes a chance to shape how decision-makers perceive and value your contributions.
Leaders are more stressed and distracted than ever before
They’re juggling multiple teams, often across time zones. They’re dealing with constant reorganizations, shifting priorities, and pressure from above them. All that stress and uncertainty trickles down to you.
- Your boss’s calendar is packed with back-to-back meetings, so you get vague feedback in hurried Slack messages.
- Strategic discussions get replaced by tactical fire-drills where you’re trying to rush through checklist items.
- That promotion conversation keeps getting pushed back. Your requests sit in limbo because your boss “needs to think about it more.”
Your success, peace of mind, and professional happiness doesn’t just depend on your performance anymore – it depends on your ability to get clear direction when your boss is scattered. To make your ideas heard when everyone’s overwhelmed. To get buy-in for resources when budgets are tight. To turn that occasional work-from-home into a permanent arrangement.
AI can handle tasks, but not human dynamics
It’s getting better every day at tactical skills like writing code, analyzing data, drafting documents. So what sets you apart isn’t going to be their technical expertise alone for much longer. It’s going to be your ability to communicate and navigate complex human dynamics.
AI can write a report, but it can’t read your boss’s non-verbal cues in a meeting. It can analyze data, but it can’t persuade a skeptical senior leader to take a risk on your innovative idea. It can schedule meetings, but it can’t build the kind of relationship that turns your boss into your biggest advocate. The ability to navigate complex human dynamics, build strategic relationships, and influence decision-makers is becoming the true career differentiator.
The most successful people in your organization are likely not just technical experts, but masters at understanding and navigating workplace dynamics. They know when to push for their ideas and when to hold back, how to frame proposals in ways that resonate with different stakeholders, and how to build coalitions of support for their initiatives.
Your “boss” isn’t just one person anymore
Today’s matrix organizations mean you’re constantly navigating relationships with multiple stakeholders who have influence over your work. Your success at work no longer depends on just one person. Sure, your direct boss matters a lot, but now many people impact your work. For example, the client whose feedback shapes your reputation, the VP who controls the project budget, and even that peer in another department whose support you need. Each of these people has their own way of working and their own idea of what success looks like. Success requires understanding these intricate power dynamics and knowing how to influence across them effectively.
This makes getting things done (and getting results) more complicated than ever. You might have your boss’s full support for an idea, but without buy-in from that director in Operations, it’s going nowhere. You could be knocking it out of the park with your manager, but if that senior stakeholder isn’t happy, it could complicate your chances for a promotion.
How Will You Choose to Navigate the New World of Work?
Work isn’t getting any simpler. The days of having just one boss to please or a clear path to success are behind us. In this new reality, managing up isn’t just another skill – it’s your competitive advantage.
You can’t control when your boss will dump that last-minute project on your desk, or when that senior leader will make decisions without consulting you, but you absolutely can control how you navigate these situations.
The future belongs to those who can navigate these complex workplace dynamics with skill and strategy. Which path will you choose?
