How authority, information and trust flow between you and the person above you, and how to work that structure well.
The person above you controls your resources, your evaluation, your scope and much of your visibility, and everything you produce reaches the rest of the organization through their interpretation. Managing up is the skill of working effectively inside that structure. Starting from John Gabarro and John Kotter's 1980 Harvard Business Review argument that boss and subordinate depend on each other, this collection treats upward management as a structural competence rather than a personality trait. Across five modules and 25 sessions it covers the mechanics of the relationship, how to read a manager's incentives and decision style, how information and framing shape your reputation, what to do when the relationship is structurally broken, and how the practice changes in matrix, remote, founder-led and cross-cultural organizations. It is practical and even-handed: it shows where managing up serves both sides and where it slides into self-serving politics.
Why the relationship runs on mutual dependence, how authority and information flow unevenly, and what managing up means as a structural practice.
Reading your manager's decision style, hidden pressures and trust settings, including when they are new or know less than you.
What you tell your boss, when, and in what frame is the highest-leverage variable in the relationship.
Micromanagers, absent managers, credit-takers, conflict-avoiders and failing bosses, treated as structural problems with structural responses.
How managing up changes in matrix, remote, founder-led and cross-cultural organizations and in skip-level relationships, and what stays constant.
“Managing up, treated as a question of structure rather than charm.”
Starting from Gabarro and Kotter's mutual-dependence insight, the collection maps how authority, information and trust move between boss and subordinate, then applies that map to difficult bosses and to matrix, remote, founder-led and cross-cultural settings. Practical throughout, and careful about where influence ends and politics begins.
Your manager depends on you for information, execution and capacity they lack. That dependence is where upward influence starts.
Most people see only half of the relationship: what they need from the boss. The other half, what the boss needs from them, is where a subordinate has leverage, and using it well means making the manager more effective rather than more dependent.
How things get done through people, systems, and decisions. The Lever unpacks the real mechanics of management — from leading teams to designing organizations — for anyone who wants to understand how the world's work actually works.
Ranked by semantic similarity
The people who own institutions and the people who run them are no longer the same people. Learn to see the difference.
Why most organizational changes fail, what the ones that work have in common, and what the research actually says about leading people through transitions.
Why organizations fail when they confuse the two — and how to tell which mode you are in.
