Tara’s manager reads emails on his phone between meetings. He skims. He never opens attachments. He responds to bullet points and ignores paragraphs. Tara spent her first six months sending detailed, well-structured emails with attachments. None of them were read fully. She thought her work wasn’t being valued. Her work wasn’t being received.
Managing up is not sycophancy. It is the practice of understanding how your manager processes information, what they care about, what pressures they’re under and how to deliver your work in the format most likely to be received. It is a translation skill. The work doesn’t change. The delivery does.
John Gabarro and John Kotter’s Harvard Business Review research on managing the boss identified a core insight: the most effective professionals don’t wait for their managers to manage them well. They learn to manage the relationship actively. This means understanding your manager’s goals, not just your own. Their reporting pressures. Their career anxieties. Their communication preferences. These aren’t things they’ll tell you. They’re things you observe.
Managing up isn’t about what your manager wants to hear. It’s about how they need to receive information in order to act on it. Get the channel right and the content takes care of itself.
Three practical moves. First: learn their information format. Some managers process verbally. Schedule five-minute walk-ins. Some process visually. Send one-page summaries. Some process in writing. Email with structured headers. The format is not your preference. It’s theirs. Second: anticipate their questions before the meeting. Every manager has a pattern of what they ask. Learn the pattern and address it before they raise it. This doesn’t just save time. It builds trust in your judgment. Third: protect them from surprises. No manager wants to learn about a problem from their manager. If something is going wrong, tell your manager before it escalates. The message “I want you to know about this before it reaches leadership” is the most trust-building sentence in corporate life.
Indian professional culture complicates managing up because the hierarchical dynamic encodes deference. “Managing your manager” can feel presumptuous. But deference that results in miscommunication serves nobody. Tara wasn’t being disrespectful when she switched to bullet points. She was being effective. Her manager started responding within hours instead of days. The relationship improved because the translation improved.
Tara now formats every communication to the receiver, not to herself. It takes an extra three minutes per email. It saves weeks of misalignment per quarter.
Do you know your manager’s preferred communication format and have you been delivering in yours instead?
Tara sent paragraphs. Her manager read bullets. Six months of lost signal. What format does yours read? careers.deliberx.com