Managing Up

Managing Up

Before Starting

Check for EM context first. If .agents/em-context.md exists, read it.

If .agents/em-context.md does not exist, ask for a minimal manager profile first and save it before giving detailed advice: role/title, team size, team mission or ownership area, and current challenge or priority.

If a specific person is central to the conversation and .agents/reports/[name].md does not exist, ask for a minimal profile for that person first and save it before giving detailed advice: title/level, tenure, strengths, and current challenge or growth area.

If the conversation reveals durable new context later, update .agents/em-context.md or .agents/reports/[name].md automatically. Save stable facts and patterns, not guesses, transient frustration, or unresolved interpretations.

Response Style

Keep the first answer concise and useful. Do not dump the whole framework unless the user asks for depth.

Default to:

• State the likely diagnosis or recommendation first
• Ask at most 2-3 targeted questions only if the missing context changes the advice
• Give the next concrete action and, when useful, exact wording the manager can use
• Mention the relevant framework briefly, but do not explain every part of it
• Offer a deeper version only after the direct answer

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How to Use This Skill

Identify the situation first:

• Building or repairing the reliability of your relationship with your manager → Reliability Is the Foundation of Managing Up
• Got a difficult performance review from your manager → When Your Own Review Goes Badly
• Need to communicate a decision you disagree with to your team → Communicating Decisions You Disagree With
• Delivering bad news or giving feedback upward to senior leaders → Communicating with Senior Leadership
• Your manager doesn't know what you need from them → What Your Manager Wants from You

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Default Response Shape

When helping someone manage up, focus on reliability and leverage:

1. Manager need: what the user's manager likely cares about or fears.
2. Current gap: surprise, trust, disagreement, credibility, or unclear ownership.
3. Update / ask: exact message to send upward.
4. Prevention loop: cadence or mechanism that avoids repeating the issue.
5. Boundary: what not to absorb if the manager is being unreasonable.

For disagreements, separate "I need to be heard" from "I need the decision changed."

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Reliability Is the Foundation of Managing Up

"Managing up" is often described as a political skill. It isn't. At its core, it's about one thing: not making your manager look unreliable to their manager.

Every time you miss a deadline without warning, you put your manager in an impossible position. They committed that deadline upward. Your late delivery — especially when delivered as a surprise — damages their credibility, not just yours. Managers talk to each other. Repeated surprises end careers.

The rule: warn early, not late. As soon as you know you can't hit a commitment, say so. "Tuesday isn't happening — it'll be Friday" on Monday morning is recoverable. "Oops, it'll be next week" on Tuesday afternoon is not.

This applies upward at every level. The EMs who build durable relationships with senior leadership are often not the most talented — they're the most reliable. They follow through. They don't make promises they can't keep. They surface problems before they become surprises.

Manage your manager intentionally. Your manager often knows less than you about what the right decision is. When you bring a problem, also bring the decision you want them to make. "I want you to make the decision" is almost never the right ask — "here's what I think we should do, and here's what I need from you" is.

Respond promptly to anything that might be blocking your manager. The same standard you hold for your team — respond within an hour to anything blocking — applies upward. And follow up on 100% of manager requests, even if just to say "I'll get back to you."

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Communicating Decisions You Disagree With

When leadership makes a call you don't fully buy into, how you communicate it to the team matters more than people realize.

First: engage properly with the decision before communicating it. Distinguish between types:

• Non-material (e.g., which lunch day): give feedback and move on. Debating small things wastes everyone's time.
• Material (important but recoverable if wrong): make sure your concerns are genuinely heard. If they are, you can honestly tell the team: "I raised concerns, they were considered, and the people with the most context made the call."
• Critical (company-trajectory-level): actively push to change it. If you're certain it's catastrophic, you may need to consider whether this is a team you want to stay on.

The key principle: you're almost never as certain as you think you are. Most decisions that feel clearly wrong turn out to have context you didn't have.

What to tell the team: describe how you engaged with the process, not just the outcome. "I had concerns, I raised them, this is what was decided and why" is more credible than "leadership wants this." The first version maintains your integrity. The second erodes it every time.

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