Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

How engineering managers can build a strong partnership with their boss and use upward influence to gain success for themselves and their teams. 

As engineering leaders, we’re taught to support our teams, but many of us neglect turning our attention in the other direction: managing up. Whether it’s due to a lack of time, confidence, or clear expectations, this skill often goes underdeveloped until it’s too late. 

Early in my career, I didn’t know what managing up meant. I assumed my job was to run my team well and get along with my boss.

For years, I reported to one of the company’s founders. We spoke once a month, having casual conversations about how I was doing, and I never thought to ask for more. I didn’t use these 1:1s as a sounding board for my decisions, and never shared when I was overwhelmed or disagreed with upper leadership decisions. 

As an engineering leader, it can be tempting to just soldier on and hope to figure things out on your own, but managing up is as critical as supporting your own team, regardless of whether your manager makes it easy or hard for you. 

Help them help you

The term “managing up” can mean many things. Personally, I like Kellan Elliot-McCrea’s definition of it best:

“Managing up is making it easier for your manager to support you in doing great work.”

For an engineering manager, “great work” isn’t just your own output. It’s enabling your team to have an impact on the business while sowing seeds for their professional growth.

When you manage up successfully, you are able to clarify mutual expectations, give and receive feedback, and ask for help before you need it. It doesn’t mean saying yes to everything, keeping your boss happy at all costs, or making a scene when they fall short. But it does mean you avoid missing out on recognition, opportunities, or clearer paths to work you care about. 

Few managers do this consistently well, which makes it a competitive advantage. Especially if any of these sound familiar:

• You are frustrated about being left out of the loop.
• Your manager insists on reviewing every message or plan.
• Your team’s impact is not visible to the rest of the org.
• Your 1:1s with your manager get canceled, postponed, or stuck in repetitive status updates.

Get your house in order first

Managing up is far easier when your team is on solid ground. Your manager is more likely to listen, trust, and act on your input when you know your domain and your wider org impact, you and your reports deliver reliably, and people are truly engaged in their work.

Trying to manage up without that foundation is like asking for a promotion in the middle of a missed deadline. It’s not impossible, but a tough sell. 

Know your manager’s style

Once the basics aren’t in question, the next move is to understand the person you’re managing up to. It’s one thing to want a better working relationship. It’s another to build it. That begins with knowing your manager’s working style and preferences.

Do you know their top three priorities? How busy or stressed are they? What has recently changed for them? Is there something you could take off their plate?

You don’t need to guess. Listen carefully in meetings, read between the lines in their communication, and ask direct but open questions in your 1:1s.

The best managers I know translate their needs into what the other person cares about. They frame change as evolution to cautious leaders, or highlighting inefficiencies for those who like to challenge the status quo. 

Ask yourself:

• Do they focus more on tasks and timelines or on people and relationships?
• What are their hidden weak spots?
• Do they prefer concise updates or detailed reports?
• Do they decide quickly or take time? 
• Do they prefer recommendations or options?
• Do they welcome open disagreement or avoid it? 

If you already know the answers to these questions, great; you’re one step closer to managing up. If not, work on cultivating a productive relationship with your boss. To do this, focus on trust and purposeful support – not arbitrary agreement.

Show you’re dependable: follow through on commitments, flag risks early, and deliver. Create value for both. Take ownership when they struggle to delegate. Filter and summarize information when they’re swamped.

Try to:

• Augment their capacity: Ask, “What’s a big burden on you right now, and how can I help?” 
• Help them make better decisions:  Present choices, pros and cons, outline trade-offs.
• Bring a problem-solving mindset: Raise issues early, bring options with pros and cons.
• Advocate for them: Find sincere, quiet ways to acknowledge their wins to others.

When you reduce their cognitive load and help them shine, you build trust. Once that is in place, make every interaction count.

Communicate with purpose

You might get around 30-45 minutes of 1:1 time each week. Those short minutes should be treated as strategic time.

Be curious, listen, take notes. Capture action items and execute on them. Focus on context, risks, and opportunities. And, at least twice a year, share your professional goals and growth areas so they can connect you with the right opportunities.

As much as possible, keep project status updates separate from your 1:1s. Use shared artifacts like dashboards, spreadsheets, or documentation to your advantage and proactively update your manager on any changes to them – make sure they’re never caught off guard. 

In doing so, you create rapid awareness, give them historical context, and open the door for deeper discussions during your 1:1s.

Another tactic I recommend is to send blurbs that show how you think, not just what you do. This might be a short paragraph outlining a key decision you’ve made or a conclusion you’ve come to about your current work. Occasional updates can give your manager insight into your decision-making process, especially helpful if you’re remote. For example: “Just a heads-up. Working on problem X. Trying Y before committing to Z,” or “Dependency X is delayed, validating a workaround to keep us unblocked. Will share results by Thursday.”

These short messages complement your 1:1s by showing your judgment, giving your manager the chance to form a well-rounded perspective of you, your thinking, and your skills.

Finally, make sure skip-level conversations between your manager and your reports actually happen. Encourage your boss or your team to prioritize them. These conversations give your manager a clearer picture of your team’s health and results, and they help create more advocates for your work.

When your manager makes it hard

Managing up can already be a daunting prospect for some, never mind if you have a manager who makes the process all that much more tricky by being an absent, unclear, or simply unsupportive individual. That’s when managing up becomes about making the best of a less-than-ideal setup.

Here’s an important caveat, though: your manager is also a human being. It’s easy to get frustrated when they put you in a tough spot, miss a follow-up, or forget to tell you something important. But in most cases, they did it with the best of their intentions.

Give them room to be imperfect, and pay attention. Learn to spot the difference between someone under pressure, someone having a bad day, and someone who actually isn’t showing up for you or their skip-reports. That doesn’t excuse the impact on your work. But it can help you respond more constructively.

Here are some common scenarios you might run into with a “difficult” manager and how to tackle them. 

1. Your manager is consistently unavailable

Everyone gets busy, but if you’ve noticed a trend where your manager is rarely checking in on you, keeping you out of the loop, delaying their feedback, and responding only when things escalate, you’ve got slippery terrain to navigate. 

The remedy? Proactivity. Address the communication gap directly. Be kind, positive, and respectful – but do it. 

Before every 1:1, create a small list of important updates and share them in advance, ideally in a shared document, email, or direct message. The goal is to limit the status portion of the 1:1 to a few clarifying questions, rather than letting it dominate the conversation.

If they only want to discuss status updates, shifting the pattern will take time. One approach that has worked for me was gradually introducing other topics, such as org-wide priorities, long-term opportunities, career goals, or opportunities for growth. We eventually moved from 100% status to a balanced 50/50 split with an agenda that worked for both of us.

2. Your manager doesn’t give feedback

Some managers rarely offer useful feedback. They might only say “good job” without specifics, avoid tough conversations, or leave you guessing about how you’re really doing.

Let them know feedback matters to you. Explain that you’re looking for both strengths to build on and areas to improve. If they know you’ll ask regularly, they’re more likely to start thinking about it between conversations.

Another tactic is to ask for advice, not feedback. People like to be asked for advice. Advice puts the attention back on them rather than you.

If your manager’s feedback remains vague, you will need to look for signals somewhere else. Seek input from peers, stakeholders, or skip-level leaders. Build a network of trusted sounding boards. A good place to start is by reaching out to people you’ve worked well with in the past, or considering a mentor at enough distance in the org chart to ensure their only interest is helping you.

3. Your manager falls short sometimes

Some managers avoid making decisions or fail to give clear direction, leaving their reports stalled and guessing priorities. Others struggle to advocate upward, or they get lost in execution details instead of enabling their reports to succeed.

If you find yourself in this situation, focus on what you can control. Capture decisions in writing so there’s a record. If you’re not getting the direction you need, fall back on relationships you’ve garnered with peers or a mentor. Always keep your manager in the loop on key decisions and progress you’re making – especially if these developments came about through discussions with peers or mentors – but don’t rely exclusively on them to drive action. 

If they struggle to advocate for you or your team, prepare short, fact-based updates they can use in leadership discussions. The easier you make it for them to represent your work accurately, the more likely they are to do so.

Over time, these actions will also strengthen your reputation as someone who can deliver in imperfect conditions. If the situation doesn’t improve, you will have built both the credibility and the network to explore opportunities elsewhere in the same company. 

Final thoughts

Management breeds unseen vulnerabilities. We don’t know what we don’t know. As managers ourselves, we’re juggling priorities, making fast decisions, and often missing context. That’s why the best managers don’t just expect to be managed up – they actively invite it.

Now flip the lens: How can you make it easier for your own reports? 

The more you show openness to a real two-way dialogue, the more your team will open up about what they need, what they see, and where they want to grow.

And here is a bonus challenge: Take your own advice and try something new in your relationship with your manager. Start small. Pick one tactic every few weeks. See what lands. Build on what works. 

Experiment. Evaluate. Adapt. Repeat.

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