Six Scripts for Managing Up
Managing up is not sucking up. It is making sure your manager represents you with your information, rather than their guess. Here are the emails.
A few years ago I sat in a routine one-to-one and my manager asked, pleasantly, “so what are you working on at the moment?”
It is a harmless question. It is also the moment I understood, with a small cold lurch, that this person genuinely did not know. Not because they were negligent, they had eight reports and a job of their own, but because I had told them almost nothing. I had kept my head down, done the work, and assumed that the doing of it was self-evidently visible. It was not. I was sitting across from the one person whose entire job included representing me in rooms I would never enter, and I had handed them almost no data to do it with.
That manager was going to go into a calibration meeting in a few weeks and advocate for me, or fail to, on the basis of whatever they happened to know. And whatever they happened to know was whatever I had bothered to tell them, which was nearly nothing, which meant they would improvise. People improvise from defaults. The defaults are rarely in your favour.
Managing up is the practice of fixing this. It has a bad reputation because it gets confused with flattery, with politicking, with being the person who laughs too hard at the skip-level’s jokes. That is not managing up. That is just being tiring. Managing up is narrower and more boring and far more useful: it is controlling the inputs your manager runs on, so that when they represent you, and they will, constantly, in your absence, they do it with your version of events instead of a guess.
And the medium for almost all of it is writing. Specifically, writing your manager can forward. Because the sentence you write in an email is the sentence that gets pasted, unedited, into the calibration doc, repeated to the VP, dropped into the planning thread. Your manager is a distribution channel, and the scripts below are just you giving the channel something accurate to distribute.
Six of them. Steal whichever you need.
1. The Receipt
Situation: Your manager cannot represent work they do not know about. Send the update before they ask, in language they can forward without rewriting.
Subject: [Project] — where it landed this week
Quick note so you’ve got it ahead of [planning / calibration / the leadership sync].
This week I shipped [specific thing], which means [outcome in their language, risk removed, time recovered, the fire that didn’t happen].
Next week I’m focused on [thing]. The one I’d flag as at risk is [thing], because [reason]. Shout if you want to weigh in.
Why it works: the line “[specific thing], which means [outcome]” is the sentence your manager copies straight into the document that decides things. You have written your own metadata instead of leaving it to be written by someone with less interest in getting it right.
2. The Flare
Situation: A blocker you swallow in silence becomes your fault the moment it lands. Raise it early, and name the ask, not the anxiety.
Subject: Blocked on [X] - need a decision by [date]
I’m blocked on [thing]. To clear it I need [the specific ask: a decision, an introduction, sign-off, an hour of someone’s time].
If I don’t have that by [date], the knock-on is [concrete consequence, with its own date].
My recommendation is [your proposed fix]. Happy to go another way if you’d prefer.
Why it works: it converts a vague worry into a dated, owned decision with a default attached. Managers act on asks, not on ambient dread. And it is on the record, so the timeline cannot later be rewritten into a story where you sat on it.
3. The Reconciliation
Situation: You have been handed more than fits. Do not silently absorb it, and do not silently drop one and hope nobody notices. Push the trade-off back up to where it belongs.
I want to make sure I’m pointed at the right things. I’m currently holding [A], [B] and [C], and I don’t think all three land at the quality we’d want on this timeline.
If I’m protecting one, I’d protect [A], because [reason]. Which of the others would you rather I let slip, or take off me entirely?
Why it works: it refuses the trap where you either burn out trying to hit all three or quietly fail one and own the failure alone. Prioritisation is your manager’s decision. This hands it back to them in plain sight, with your recommendation already attached, so the default outcome is the one you wanted.
4. The Pre-Read
Situation: Your work is about to be discussed in a room you are not in. Give your manager the accurate version before someone hands them an inaccurate one.
Subject: For [meeting] - quick arming note on [topic]
Before [meeting], the short version so you’re covered:
What it is: [one line]
Where it stands: [one line]
The thing likely to come up: [the hard question, and the answer]
What I’d want represented: [the single sentence you want said on your behalf]
Why it works: you are writing the sentence that travels into a room you cannot enter. Supply it, and your manager carries your version. Don’t, and they improvise under time pressure, which defaults to whatever is easiest to say, which is almost never the version that serves you.
5. The Flag
Situation: You think a decision is wrong. Saying so only in your head helps nobody. Saying so only in the corridor afterwards helps nobody and costs you your credibility. Put it in writing, once, cleanly, then let it go.
I want to flag a concern on [decision], on the record, and then I’ll commit either way.
My worry is [specific risk, and why]. If we’re taking that on knowingly, I’m genuinely fine to proceed. I’d just rather it be visible now than discovered later. What’s the thinking?
Why it works: “on the record, and then I’ll commit either way” is the phrase that lets you disagree without becoming the person who relitigates a closed call. You register the dissent, you don’t block the team, and if it does go the way you feared, the record shows the risk was named, which is the entire difference between a team that learns and a team that goes looking for someone to blame.
6. The Runway
Situation: Your manager is not a mind reader. If you want a promotion, a different kind of work, or more scope, they cannot build toward it while they don’t know it exists.
I’d like to be working towards [staff / lead / owning a domain] over the next [timeframe].
I’m not asking for it today. I’m asking what the gap looks like from where you sit, and which work over the next couple of quarters would close it fastest. I’d rather aim at the real target than guess at it.
Why it works: it turns a private hope into a tracked objective your manager is now implicated in. Ambition you have stated is something they can sponsor. Ambition you have kept to yourself is something they will quietly assume you don’t have, and the career-making work gets allocated to whoever did say it out loud.
The thing underneath all six
None of these is flattery. None of them asks you to laugh at a joke that wasn’t funny or to spend your evenings cultivating anyone. They are all the same small, unglamorous move: making sure the accurate version of events reaches your manager before an inaccurate one does, in a form they can pass on without effort.
Your manager is going to represent you whether or not you help them. They are going to describe your work, weigh your priorities, defend your timeline and speak your name in rooms you will never see, using whatever inputs they happen to have. The only question these scripts answer is whether those inputs are yours, or a guess assembled in your absence.
Head down and hope is also a strategy. It is just the one where someone else writes your inputs for you, and you find out what they wrote at the same time everyone else does.
So practical, I'll be using most of these!
Absolutely logging these for when I'm gainfully reemployed.