“Managing up” is one of those phrases that tends to make people uneasy.

For some, it sounds like office politics. For others, it feels like self-promotion or maneuvering. And for many early-career professionals, it’s something they’re expected to understand without ever being taught.

But in my experience, managing up isn’t about power or personality. It’s about professionalism.

At its core, managing up is a leadership skill, one that helps organizations make better decisions, communicate more clearly and avoid preventable mistakes.

What Managing Up Actually Means

Managing up isn’t about controlling your supervisor or shaping outcomes behind the scenes. It’s about understanding how decisions get made and helping that process work better.

In practice, it often looks like:

• Anticipating what information leaders need and when
• Providing context, not just facts
• Communicating risks and tradeoffs clearly
• Respecting time, priorities, and constraints

This skill shows up differently depending on the environment, but the principle is the same: good decisions depend on good communication across levels.

A Newsroom Lesson: Speed Requires Trust

Early in my career in Bay Area newsrooms, the pace was relentless. Decisions were made quickly, often with incomplete information, and the cost of getting something wrong could be immediate and public.

Managing up in that environment meant learning how to:

• Flag potential issues early
• Share critical context without slowing things down
• Offer options instead of ultimatums

Sometimes that meant walking into a supervisor’s office and saying, “Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t, and here’s what could change in the next hour.” That kind of communication wasn’t about challenging my boss, it was about supporting it.

The faster the environment, the more leaders rely on teams to surface what matters most.

Managing Up Is About Service, Not Self-Promotion

One of the biggest misconceptions about managing up is that it’s about saying what leaders want to hear.

In reality, effective managing up is often about saying what leaders need to hear … clearly, respectfully and at the right moment.

In another newsroom leadership role, I learned how important it was to translate realities from the field into language decision-makers could use. That meant framing challenges alongside solutions and understanding the pressures leaders were juggling beyond my own team.

Managing up, done well, is a form of service. You’re not advocating only for yourself or your project. You’re helping the organization function more intelligently.

When the Environment Changes, the Skill Still Matters

Over time, I’ve worked in environments that look very different on the surface — from fast-moving newsrooms to larger, more complex institutions.

The pace changes. Decision-making becomes more layered. Timelines stretch. But the need for managing up doesn’t disappear, it becomes more nuanced.

In those settings, managing up often means:

• Understanding how information moves through multiple levels
• Being patient with process while still providing clarity
• Framing insights in ways that align with broader organizational goals

What I had to learn was that silence doesn’t equal agreement, and delay doesn’t equal disinterest. Managing up becomes less about urgency and more about translation and timing.

The lesson holds across sectors: leaders still depend on their teams to help them see around corners, even when those corners are farther away.

What Good Leaders Actually Need

From the leadership side, I’ve learned that most leaders aren’t looking for perfection. They’re looking for:

• Clear thinking
• Honest assessment
• Context they don’t have time to gather themselves

Managing up helps leaders synthesize information, weigh tradeoffs and make decisions they can stand behind. When teams communicate well upward, trust grows, and so does effectiveness.

Teaching the Skill We Rarely Name

One of the gaps I see in professional development — especially for students and early-career professionals — is that managing up is rarely taught explicitly.

We focus on technical skills, creativity and productivity. But navigating organizations requires communication fluency across levels, not just across platforms.

Learning to manage up isn’t about changing who you are. It’s about learning how to translate your work, your insights and your concerns into language that helps leaders lead.

That’s not politics.

That’s professionalism.