Managing Up: Take Charge of Your Career

Managing up is the practice of proactively building and maintaining a productive working relationship with your manager—understanding their priorities, communication preferences, and working style, and adapting your approach to make their job easier while advancing your own career goals. It is not about manipulation or flattery; it's about strategic relationship management that creates mutual benefit. Professionals who manage up effectively become the employees their managers rely on most, which translates into greater autonomy, more interesting assignments, stronger advocacy during performance reviews and promotion decisions, and better access to information and resources. As organizations become flatter and more dynamic, the ability to build strong upward relationships—with direct managers, skip-level leaders, and cross-functional stakeholders—is increasingly a differentiating career skill at every level. Aurora Training Advantage's Managing Up webinar provides professionals with the mindsets, strategies, and communication tools to take deliberate charge of their career trajectory by mastering this often-overlooked professional competency.

Understanding a manager's communication and work style is the foundation of managing up effectively. Key dimensions to assess include: does your manager prefer detailed written updates or brief verbal summaries? Do they want to be involved in decisions early or only at key milestones? Are they data-driven or relationship-oriented in their decision-making? Do they prefer proactive outreach or expect you to handle problems independently until they escalate? Gathering this intelligence requires both direct observation and explicit conversation—asking your manager 'what does success look like to you for this project?' and 'how would you prefer I communicate updates?' are simple, well-received questions that accelerate alignment. Style-matching your communication—adjusting your level of detail, format, and frequency to match your manager's preferences—dramatically reduces friction and improves how your work is perceived and valued. Aurora Training Advantage's Managing Up webinar provides frameworks for assessing manager styles and adapting your approach to build the kind of alignment that drives career advancement.

One of the most counterintuitive but powerful career strategies is making your manager look good—because your manager's success is directly linked to your access to resources, opportunities, and advocacy. Strategies include: anticipating what your manager will need before they ask, delivering work that exceeds the expected quality level so they can present it with confidence, flagging potential problems early enough that your manager can address them proactively rather than reactively, and sharing credit generously so that your manager's team is seen as high-performing. Managers who trust that their direct reports will consistently make them look good in front of their own leadership are far more willing to advocate for those employees, assign them to high-visibility projects, and recommend them for promotions. This creates a virtuous cycle where strong performance and relationship management reinforce each other. Aurora Training Advantage's Managing Up webinar explores this dynamic in practical detail, giving professionals the specific behaviors and mindsets that drive career momentum through upward relationship excellence.

Professionals who take charge of their career development share a common orientation: they treat their career as a project they are managing, not a process that happens to them. Active career ownership involves setting specific development goals and sharing them with your manager, proactively identifying and volunteering for assignments that build targeted skills, seeking feedback regularly rather than only during formal reviews, building a professional network both inside and outside the organization, and investing in continuous education that keeps skills current and marketable. Managing up is a critical part of this orientation—because your manager has the most direct influence over your assignments, visibility, performance evaluations, and sponsorship. Professionals who wait passively for recognition, promotion, or development opportunities consistently fall behind those who actively manage their careers with intention. Aurora Training Advantage's Managing Up webinar provides a practical framework for taking deliberate, proactive ownership of career trajectory through stronger upward relationships and strategic professional positioning.

The most common managing up mistakes undermine the very relationships they are intended to strengthen. Over-communication is a frequent error: bombarding a manager with unnecessary updates, seeking approval for every minor decision, or checking in so frequently that you signal a lack of confidence rather than proactive engagement. The opposite—under-communication, especially about problems—is equally damaging; managers who are blindsided by issues lose trust in the people who didn't warn them. Another common mistake is attempting to manage up through flattery or political maneuvering rather than genuine performance and transparency, which erodes credibility when discovered. Prioritizing your own preferred working style over understanding and adapting to your manager's creates unnecessary friction. Finally, many professionals treat managing up as a one-time adjustment rather than an ongoing, relationship-based practice that requires continuous attention and recalibration. Aurora Training Advantage's Managing Up webinar identifies these pitfalls specifically and provides professionals with the authentic, sustainable approaches to upward relationship management that actually accelerate career growth.