Upstream: How to Become Your Boss’s Favorite by Managing Up

Why your boss is your most overlooked client, and what helping them does for your career. Best suited for misaligned expectations, team conflict, and navigating politics.

Picture this. No matter what you do and how hard you try, your job is to appease other people’s expectations all day long, criticized for almost everything, and thanked little for what goes right. Head down, keep going.

Welcome to the glamorous life of the manager, where team members assume you know more than you do, and start filling the grapevine with advice on what you should be doing, based on information you were never actually given by those above you.

If living by other people’s expectations is generally a bad idea, for managers, it’s an existential paradox no one bothers to explain. Most people end up in the role for the dumbest of reasons.

If you’re great at the craft, the assumption is that you’re ready to lead others doing the same, but being skilled at something and being good with people are two completely different jobs. Yet, one is often treated as the natural progression of the other.

Managing people is a different beast, one that most of us aren’t equipped for when they start, and rarely receive the training to handle well. Support only shows up once the damage is done, when teams unravel and results dip. Until then, managers are tossed into the lion’s cage with little or no preparation, which is the logic that sets them up to fail.

Getting things done through the work of other people is a counterintuitive art form that takes time to master, because we all work differently. You’re used to doing things your way, but now you have to recreate your killer cheesecake with seagull eggs, fermented yak milk cheese, bat nectar honey, vanilla bark shavings, and melted whale blubber fat. And still, you’re expected to make it taste the same.

But even once you’ve made peace with the ingredients, a different problem kicks in. Eventually, someone on your team will say something like, “You know, I’d rather you tell me you don’t know anything than have me guessing you might know something when you don’t.”

When direction is missing, people start speculating and create their versions of the truth to answer questions like where are we going, why am I pushing this hard, and what’s in it for me.

Being a manager in that void often means trying to motivate both yourself and your team out of thin air, with just enough information to stay afloat, like a castaway lost at sea, rationing what little you have without knowing if rescue will ever come.

And some days, you might even suspect that those above you—the ones who are supposed to provide direction—are just as lost as you are.

So what do you do? You play mom and dad, protecting your team by standing between them and your bosses, deciding what to pass along and what to hold back, trying to keep people from spiraling, losing faith, and asking questions you can’t answer.

But when you start shielding adults from reality, even with the best of intentions, you build doubt and create distance, and what begins as protection quietly becomes the very thing that breaks the relationship.

Being a manager is exhausting. And for everyone around them, the real work is learning how to relate to them.

Managers are individuals who are expected to have almost everything figured out. They acquire mythological status in many conversations, given their enormous influence on professional lives and future outcomes.

We often talk about toxic bosses, what to do when they’re narcissistic, avoidant, or overbearing. Sometimes, we celebrate the rare mentor. But mostly, the boss is a figure we endure or quietly measure ourselves against, someone we sometimes want to become, or run away from, if only we could.

Whether we like them or not, our boss is one of the most critical relationships in our professional life because they are our internal client, the closest and most consequential one we have.

Why Managing Up Matters for Your Career

It doesn’t matter if the relationship is warm or cold, frictionless or frustrating, because we’re part of it, and our trajectory largely depends on how well we manage this bond. It may not be exciting, and we may not even like the boss as a person, but that doesn’t change how central the relationship is in shaping our working life.

Like any other client, bosses have unspoken expectations, shifting priorities, and internal pressures we’re not always privy to. Too often, we expect them to be the ones doing the managing, to give direction, clarity, and feedback while we perform, as if we were still in school.

But the truth is, the most successful professionals, especially those who make significant strides in an organization, are the ones who learn to manage up with care, precision, and humanity, because they know how much is at stake when this relationship turns sour.

Managing up means knowing what your boss values, how they operate, what keeps them up at night, and what makes them feel supported. It means recognizing when they are overwhelmed and adjusting your approach to stay effective.

Some bosses need updates in real time, others only want to hear from you when something breaks. The work is in paying attention, not waiting for a manual.

If you are handed five priorities, you ask which one matters most. If a deadline feels shaky, you flag it before it fails. When something feels off, you speak up early instead of remaining calm while waiting for chaos to confirm your instincts. You don’t sit around waiting for communication to improve.

Above all, managing up means understanding that your boss is someone caught between the hammer and the anvil, the expectations of those above and below. You protect their time when you can, their credibility when it counts, and their attention when it drifts, because when their world runs better, so does yours.

If your boss thrives, you do too. If they fall apart, chances are your reality gets messier. And if you know how to make their path smoother, more transparent, and aligned, what you’re doing is designing your context rather than waiting for one to be handed to you.

PAUSE. LEARN. MOVE ON.

In the field of organizational behavior, managing up is often reduced to tactics: tailor your communication, anticipate needs, and show initiative. But beneath all that is the deeper recognition that power flows in multiple directions, and that leadership, at every level, is an act of service.

Leader-member exchange theory (LMX), first studied by Fred Dansereau, George Graen, and William Haga in the 1970s and expanded by Mary Uhl-Bien, shows that high-quality relationships between supervisors and employees boost individual performance and shape the health and trust of the entire system.

LMX theory differs from other leadership models because it sees each manager-employee relationship as a unique interpersonal bond.

When the relationship with the boss works, everything around it works better, too. So the question isn’t whether your boss is good, but how intentionally you’re treating the relationship as the strategic alliance it’s meant to be.

You can reach Stephen at stephen@alygn.company