Managing Up Summary and key ideas

Managing Up, by Mary Abbajay.

Work is often described as a meritocracy: do excellent work and opportunity will follow. But your boss has a hand in deciding whose work is trusted, who earns greater responsibility, and who is considered for promotion. Technical skill alone may not secure advancement. The relationship therefore affects both the daily experience of work and the opportunities available to you. When that relationship is damaged, the effects can reach beyond an unpleasant week and hinder your contribution and career.

Mary Abbajay calls this managing up: a deliberate effort to build effective relationships with people higher in the chain of command. Its aim is cooperation and collaboration that benefit the employee, boss, and organization. The employee is an active follower who manages their own relationship, career, and workplace experience instead of waiting passively for a better boss. That does not mean every failure is the employee’s fault. Organizations can promote people for technical skill without preparing them to manage, or ignore damaging behavior. Individual influence has limits, but there is still a local choice about how to respond.

A practical starting point is that bosses may not change their styles just because those styles frustrate someone who reports to them. A supervisor’s habits may have helped them gain or keep the role. That leaves three broad choices: work to change the situation, accept and adapt to what cannot readily change, or leave. Changing the situation means improving the working relationship and the parts you can influence, not assuming you can remake the boss. Adapting means choosing behaviors that help you work together; it need not mean denying your personality or values. The book acknowledges a cost: adaptation may reinforce a boss’s bad habits without teaching better management, while resistance is unlikely to teach that lesson either. The decision is about where your effort can matter.

Consider an Outie employee paired with an Innie boss. The Outie may draw energy from conversation and seek open exchange, while the Innie may prefer less interaction and private reflection. The employee can experience this quiet as disconnection or lack of access. Yet a mismatch in energy and communication preferences does not by itself prove rejection or poor management. The book treats these preferences as a spectrum, and neither end is better. This may be a problem of fit that can be managed once it is recognized as a difference in preference. Discomfort alone does not decide whether to stay, adapt, or try to improve the arrangement.

There are important boundaries, and they concern different things. Whatever you choose, the book says, never do anything illegal, immoral, or unethical. Separately, if your boss is abusive or discriminatory, it says you have to leave. If you cannot leave immediately, adapting may help you survive intact while you look for another job. That is a short-term response to your constraints, not a promise that you can change the boss. Approaches that help with an ordinary mismatch cannot resolve every kind of harm.

Between a strong relationship and an intolerable one lies a continuum. At one end, a trusting, motivating boss may require little deliberate effort. In the middle, frustrations or bad habits may leave room for improvement if the work and relationship are worth the cost. Toward the exhausting end, managing up may become a matter of coping or survival, and leaving may become the sounder choice. These points are not verdicts on a whole person. They help match a response to severity: an annoyance need not be a crisis, and a persistently destructive pattern should not be mistaken for a minor mismatch.

To place the relationship on this continuum, first assess the boss through patterns rather than a single irritating moment. Notice how the boss communicates, shares information, sets priorities, responds to pressure, delegates, and describes expectations. Consider the boss’s experience and the demands around the role. The same behavior can mean different things in different contexts, so curiosity can reveal what the boss is trying to accomplish or protect. Describe what happens before assigning a motive. If direct observation leaves gaps, questions or other people’s observations can help fill them.

Then assess yourself with equal honesty. Ask what kind of interaction and independence you need, what strengths and weaknesses you bring, whether the role fits, and how reliably you have met its expectations. Look at your attitude and contribution, including whether resistance or assumptions have added friction. If you are the only person experiencing the problem, consider what your performance or behavior may be contributing. This is not an invitation to accept blame for someone else’s conduct. It is a way to separate what you can change from what belongs to the boss or workplace, and to make a decision with a clearer view of yourself.

Finally, ask what constraints shape the choice. How much do you need this job or its income? What opportunities for development or advancement does it offer? What stress is the relationship creating, and what does the organization reward? Some systems promote people for technical skill, provide little management training, or fail to hold managers accountable. An employee may not be able to repair that culture alone, though they can decide how to navigate it. Weigh these realities against the effort adaptation would require and the outcome you want: to thrive, improve the arrangement, or survive for now. Managing up begins with an honest choice about what can improve, what you can reasonably tolerate, and what you need to leave.