Managing Up Effectively: How to Build Strategic Relationships with Leadership

Most people read that framework from the manager's perspective. Here's how to flip it and use it to prepare for your next 1:1 with your boss.

Performance on job requirements. Before your meeting, know your numbers. Not a vague sense of "things are going well," but the actual metrics your role is measured against and where you stand on each one. If a metric is trending down, say so before your boss has to ask. If it's trending up, connect it to a specific action you took so they can see the cause, not just the result.

Relationships with peer groups. Your boss cares about this more than you think. Campbell's coaching emphasized that what your peers think of you matters more than what your manager thinks. Come to your 1:1 ready to discuss cross-functional work: where collaboration is strong, where there's friction, and what you're doing about it. A director who can't work across teams never becomes a VP.

Management and leadership. If you manage people, your boss wants to know about your team's health, not just their output. Who's performing? Who's struggling? What are you doing about retention risks? Showing leadership maturity in how you develop your team signals readiness for bigger scope.

Innovation. This doesn't mean pitching moonshot ideas. It means showing that you're evaluating how your team works and actively looking for better approaches. A simple "I noticed we're spending 10 hours a week on X, and I'm testing a way to cut that in half" demonstrates the forward-thinking perspective senior leaders value.

Campbell also used a preparation technique worth stealing: before each meeting, both the manager and the person they coached would independently write down five topics they wanted to discuss. They'd compare lists at the start. Significant overlap meant alignment. Gaps meant the meeting just got more valuable, because now you're surfacing the things that might otherwise go unsaid.

Try this before your next 1:1. Write your five topics. Then ask yourself what your boss would write. If you can predict three out of five, you understand their priorities. If you can't, that's your signal to spend more time learning what keeps them up at night.

The Status Update Most People Get Wrong

Here's a pattern I've seen repeatedly across large organizations: someone sends a status update that lists what they did this week. Their manager reads it, acknowledges it, and moves on. No strategic conversation happens. No advocacy gets built.

The problem isn't frequency. It's framing.

A useful status update answers four questions: what you accomplished and why it matters (not just what you did), what you're focused on next and how it connects to the team's priorities, what risks or blockers exist and what you're already doing about them, and where you need your manager's input or air cover.

That last one is critical. Managers who manage up well know exactly what to escalate. Early in my career managing a $20 million capital program, I made a point of keeping my leader consistently informed, including transparently sharing where the budget was trending over plan. Because we'd built that rhythm of proactive updates, we identified a likely overrun early enough to secure additional funding before it became a crisis. No surprises. No confrontations. The relationship between transparency and trust isn't theoretical. It plays out in real budget conversations and real career consequences.

Bad news does not age well. The director who flags a risk in week three gets support. The one who surfaces it in week ten gets questioned.

Understand the Context Your Boss Operates In

Managing up doesn't happen only in 1:1s. It requires understanding the broader context your boss operates in.

Who influences your manager's decisions? What initiatives currently have executive support, and which are quietly losing priority? Where is budget flowing? What language does the leadership team use when they talk about strategy? These aren't political games. This is context that lets you position your work in terms your boss can immediately relay upward.

McKinsey's research on middle managers found that more than 90% of U.S. employees report to a middle manager, and the single most important determinant of their performance and satisfaction is that manager. Your boss is a middle manager too, even if their title says VP. They have pressures coming from above, just like you do. When you understand those pressures, you stop bringing them problems in isolation and start bringing them solutions framed in the language their boss uses.

Use AI to Walk Into Every Meeting Prepared

This is where managing up gets a modern upgrade. Most professionals spend zero minutes preparing for 1:1s with their boss. They show up and react. AI tools change that equation entirely.

Here's a practical weekly prep workflow that takes about 15 minutes:

Review your accomplishments. Before your meeting, ask an AI assistant to help you review what you shipped, decided, or unblocked in the past week. It's easy to forget the small wins when you're buried in execution. A quick AI-assisted review turns a scattered memory into a clear narrative of impact.

Get a read on your team's pulse. This one's underrated. If you manage people, use tools that help you synthesize what your team is actually talking about: what concerns are surfacing in standups, what's getting energy versus what's dragging. Walking into a 1:1 with a sense of team sentiment, not just their output numbers, shows a level of leadership awareness that stands out.

Track what's top of mind for your boss. Pay attention to what your manager is posting, commenting on, or sharing in channels like Slack. AI tools can help you spot patterns in what topics they keep returning to, which tells you where their attention (and their boss's attention) is focused. When you align your talking points with what's already on their radar, your updates land differently. I've been surprised how much signal you can pick up just by scanning a week's worth of a leader's Slack activity.

Rehearse the hard conversations. If you need to surface a risk, push back on a decision, or ask for something uncomfortable, practice it first. AI coaching tools let you role-play scenarios, refine your framing, and stress-test your arguments before the stakes are real. This isn't about scripting a performance. It's about walking in with clarity instead of anxiety.

The Career Audit can also help you step back and assess how well you're managing these relationships overall. Sometimes the issue isn't one conversation but a pattern you haven't noticed. The audit takes about 10 minutes and gives you a structured view of where your career relationships stand.

Building Relationships Beyond Your Direct Manager

Skip-level relationships matter, and they're easier to build than most people assume.

Accept every skip-level 1:1 invitation. Volunteer for cross-functional work that gives you visibility with senior leaders. When you're in all-hands meetings, ask a question or share an insight that demonstrates you think beyond your immediate scope. Be responsive and helpful when senior leaders reach out, even for small things.

The goal isn't visibility for its own sake. It's building a network of leaders who know your judgment and your work ethic firsthand. When promotion conversations happen, your boss shouldn't be the only person in the room who can vouch for you. If you're not sure what your career values actually are, it's harder to know which relationships to invest in.

Your Move This Week

Pick your next 1:1 with your boss. Before that meeting, write down five topics you want to cover. Then, using Campbell's four dimensions, check yourself: are you addressing performance, peer relationships, your team's development, and at least one way you're improving how work gets done? If your list only covers status updates, rewrite it.

Managing up isn't a one-time skill you learn and check off. It's a practice that compounds. The trust you build in week five makes the hard conversation in week twenty possible. The pattern of transparency you establish when things are fine is what saves you when things aren't.

If you want to assess where you stand in your career relationships and leadership presence more broadly, the Career Audit gives you a structured starting point. Managing up well requires the same composure and clarity that defines executive presence. And if you're aiming for VP or above, it's worth understanding why strong directors often stall, because the gap is rarely about skill.