Managing Up
A one-to-one is your meeting, and most people waste it
The regular catch-up is the highest-leverage half hour you get, and it is usually spent reciting a status…
· 3 min read
Managing Up
What a manager is actually paid to do
Most friction with a manager comes from a wrong model of their job, and the real one is narrower and more constrained than it looks from below.
By Julien Perrot · · 4 min read
Managing Up
Raising a problem so that it reads as information rather than complaint
The same facts land completely differently depending on their framing, and the difference is mostly about…
· 3 min read
Managing Up
Most of what your manager knows about you arrived secondhand
Believing that good work speaks for itself misunderstands how information about junior employees actually…
· 3 min read
Managing Up
Some managers are simply bad, and that changes the calculation
Advice about managing up assumes a competent counterpart, so it is worth being able to tell an overloaded…
· 3 min read
Managing Up
Disagreeing with a decision that has already been made
Once something is settled the useful question is no longer whether it was right, and confusing the two is…
· 4 min read
Managing Up
Being handed work that does not fit in the time available
The moment you are given something you cannot finish is a decision point, and the way most people handle it…
· 4 min read
Managing Up
When your manager has less experience than you do
Reporting to someone who knows the work less well than you is common, awkward and mostly navigable…
· 4 min read
Managing Up
A new manager resets almost everything you had built
When the person you report to changes, the informal credit you had accumulated does not transfer…
· 4 min read
Managing Up
A skip-level meeting is not a shortcut past your manager
Meetings with your manager’s manager exist for a specific organisational purpose, and misreading that…
· 3 min read
Managing Up
Giving your manager feedback without it costing you
Upward feedback is genuinely asymmetric, the invitation to give it is often sincere and unreliable at the…
· 4 min read
Managing Up
Saying no to a request from someone senior
Refusing work is rarely the actual skill required; what matters is making a capacity problem visible in a…
· 3 min read