Why Managing Up Starts With Helping Your Boss Succeed

In a recent LinkedIn post, Justin Wright discusses how understanding a manager’s priorities can help employees build trust and grow in their careers. This article reports on Wright’s perspective, which draws on a 1980 Harvard Business Review article by John Gabarro and John Kotter and on his experience as a senior technology executive.

“You and your boss depend on each other. Your boss needs your help and your honesty as much as you need theirs.”

Managing up as a working relationship

Wright says “managing up” is often mistaken for flattery or office politics. He argues that the idea described by Gabarro and Kotter is more practical: employees should learn what their bosses are accountable for and help them deliver. In Wright’s view, that approach is based on mutual dependence, rather than trying to influence a manager through insincerity.

Wright connects the idea to his own career, saying that helping others has long been central to his understanding of success. He describes serving as CIO of the Americas at a company with a reported $4 billion in revenue, where he answered to three leaders: a global CIO and the chief executives of the North American and Latin American businesses.

Balancing competing priorities

That reporting structure required Wright to understand each leader’s challenges and priorities, while also considering how they aligned with the company’s broader goals. He acknowledges that the roles and personalities sometimes created tension. His account presents relationship-building and a shared commitment to each leader’s success as ways to navigate those competing demands.

“I stayed focused on the relationships, and on making sure each of them knew I wanted them to be successful.”

Wright’s example makes his argument concrete: managing up can involve translating among leaders’ needs and helping a team focus on work that serves them and the organization. He says he believed that supporting his managers’ success would also help him succeed in his own role.

Turning trust into daily habits

Wright also cites Gallup findings that managers account for at least 70% of the difference in team engagement, and that about half of workers have left a job to get away from a manager. The post uses those figures to underscore how consequential the manager relationship can be, though the figures are presented as Wright’s citations rather than independently examined evidence here.

His suggested practices are specific: send a weekly update, raise problems early, and bring two or three possible responses when flagging an issue. Wright argues that these habits can help an employee become someone a manager trusts with greater responsibility.

“Bring 2 or 3 options when you raise an issue.”

Wright closes by asking whether a weekly email update is helpful or excessive. The question leaves room for different workplace norms, while the broader point of his post is that consistent, honest communication can make a manager relationship more effective for both sides.