Managing Up
The relationship that shapes your working life most is often the one you have thought about least.
Most leaders pour their attention downward. Into their team, their people, the work getting out of the door. The relationship with their own boss gets treated as the weather. Something that happens to you, that you adjust around, that is simply the condition you work in.
And when managing up does come up, it arrives with a bad reputation. It sounds like flattery. Like office politics. Like learning to handle someone’s ego so you can get on with your job.
It is none of those. Managing up is a working relationship that two people are responsible for. You are one of the two.
Why it is harder than it looks
Part of what makes this difficult is structural, not personal.
You sit in the middle. There are people above you with expectations and people below you with needs, and the pull in both directions is real. You become the one who absorbs, who translates, who carries what does not fit neatly in either direction.
What is easy to forget is that your boss is standing in the same place. They have a boss. They are being pulled from both sides too. Almost everyone in an organisation is somebody’s middle.
The relationship with your boss is one of the few in working life that most people assume will take care of itself. It rarely does. Left unattended it drifts toward whatever the more senior person happens to prefer, and that is not the same thing as what works.
This is why the discomfort so many capable people carry about their boss is not a character flaw. It is what happens when an important relationship is left to chance.
The six dimensions of Managing Up
Across the leaders I have coached, the same six things keep deciding whether this relationship works or quietly wears people down. Together they spell ATTUNE.
Awareness: How you respond to authority, and whether you can see it happening while it happens.
Their World: What your boss is actually carrying, and how they take in information.
Trust: The ground everything else stands on.
Understand the System: How decisions really get made here, beyond the org chart.
Navigate: The rhythm of working together, and who takes responsibility for setting it.
Exchange: What you offer that they value, and what you are holding back.
None of these is a fixed personality trait. Each one can be worked on. And in my experience it is rarely all six that need attention. It is usually one or two, and finding out which ones changes what you do on Monday morning.
ATTUNE is my synthesis of decades of leadership, systemic and negotiation research. The underlying thinking is not mine. The way it comes together here is.
See where you stand
The ATTUNE Check is a short self-assessment tool. Eighteen statements, about four minutes, answered privately. At the end you see your own shape across the six dimensions and where your strongest ground and your growth area sit.
It is a mirror, not a verdict. It is not a validated psychometric and it does not tell you who you are. It reflects back what you have said about a relationship that matters, in a form you can actually look at.
Working on this together
Seeing the picture is the part you can do on your own. Changing it is usually harder, because the patterns that shape this relationship are old and they are rarely only about your boss.
This is work I do with leaders. Sometimes it is one uncomfortable dimension that has been quietly costing someone for years. Sometimes it is a new reporting line and the chance to set it up well from the start. Sometimes it is a leader who has become very good at managing everyone except the person they report to.
What I see happen is a quiet shift toward confidence. People stop treating the relationship as weather that cannot be changed and start feeling they have a hand in it. The shift is often a subtle one. A little more ease in a difficult conversation, a little less energy spent bracing. And that subtle shift tends to change the relationship for the better on both sides.
