Managing Up: How Great Operators Make Their Principal More Effective
Takeaway: Managing up means consciously working with your principal to get the best result for both of you, which starts with understanding how they operate and quietly covering the gaps rather than flattering them.
"Managing up" has an image problem. To a lot of people it sounds like political maneuvering, telling the boss what they want to hear, or angling for advantage. For a chief of staff it means almost the opposite. It's the disciplined practice of understanding the person you support well enough to make their time, attention, and decisions more effective. Done well, it's the core of the job.
The definitive treatment is still Gabarro and Kotter's Managing Your Boss, a Harvard Business Review classic. They define managing up as the process of consciously working with your superior to get the best possible results for you, your boss, and the company. Their central point is that the relationship is one of mutual dependence between two fallible people, and that leaving it to chance is a mistake that costs you both (HBR). For a chief of staff, whose entire value comes through another person, that dependence is the whole game.
Managing Up Is Not What People Think It Is
Start by clearing away the two common misreadings.
It's not flattery. Telling a principal what they want to hear makes you pleasant and useless. The operators principals actually rely on are the ones who will say the uncomfortable thing in private, precisely because they have earned the standing to be believed.
It's not manipulation. You're not steering someone toward your preferred outcome behind their back. You're making sure they have what they need to make good decisions, and removing the friction that keeps them from acting on them.
Gabarro and Kotter frame the real work as understanding both parties: your boss's goals, pressures, strengths, and blind spots, and your own reactions and tendencies, so that you can build a relationship that fits how you both actually operate. That's a practice, not a personality trait.
Understand Your Principal in Concrete Detail
You can't make someone more effective if you don't know how they work. Vague impressions aren't enough. Get specific, and where you can, ask rather than assume.
Working style and information diet
Some principals think out loud and want to talk through a problem. Others want a written brief and quiet time to form a view. Some read every word. Some want the recommendation in the first sentence and the reasoning underneath. If you send a three-page memo to someone who processes verbally, or corner a writer for an on-the-spot decision, you're creating friction and calling it communication.
Match the format to the person. This one adjustment, more than any other, determines whether your principal experiences you as a help or a tax.
Goals and pressures
Understand what your principal is actually accountable for and what is weighing on them this quarter, including the pressures coming from above them that they may not talk about openly. When you know what they're being measured on, you can prioritize your own work against it instead of guessing.
Strengths and gaps
Every leader has things they do brilliantly and things they consistently drop. Your job isn't to fix their personality. It's to notice the recurring gap, the follow-through that slips, the detail that gets missed, the relationship that goes cold, and quietly cover it. Watkins makes a version of this point in The First 90 Days: complementing your boss's weaknesses is more useful than admiring their strengths (Harvard Business Review Press).
The Practices That Make a Principal More Effective
Understanding is the foundation. Here is what you do with it.
Protect their time and attention
Executive calendars fill with meetings that could have been a document. Recall that in one HBR survey, 65 percent of senior managers said meetings kept them from doing their own work (Perlow, Hadley & Eun). A chief of staff who manages up well treats the principal's calendar as a scarce, defensible resource: declining what doesn't need them, converting standing meetings into written updates where possible, and guarding blocks of uninterrupted time for the thinking only they can do.
Bring decisions, not problems
The fastest way to become indispensable is to stop bringing your principal open-ended problems and start bringing them framed decisions. Instead of "here is an issue, what do you want to do," bring the issue, the two or three real options, the tradeoffs, and your recommendation. Now they can decide in two minutes instead of twenty, and they can override you when they see something you missed. This also trains your own judgment, because you have to actually take a position.
Give them a clear line of sight
Principals lose confidence when they feel out of the loop on things they're accountable for. A short, regular brief, what moved this week, what needs your attention, what is coming, gives them a reliable line of sight without pulling them into every detail. It also concentrates the small number of things that genuinely need their input, so they're not managing by interruption.
No surprises
Few things erode a principal's trust faster than being blindsided, especially in front of others. If something is going sideways, they should hear it from you early and in private, while there's still time to act. A chief of staff who reliably surfaces bad news early becomes someone the principal can stop worrying about, which is worth more than any individual project.
Tell them the truth
Because you sit close to the principal and often outside the formal hierarchy, you may be one of the few people willing to give them an unvarnished read. Use that carefully and privately, but use it. A principal surrounded by agreement makes worse decisions. The value of a trusted operator is partly that they will say "I think you're wrong about this, and here's why" when no one else will.
Adapt to the Principal You Have, Not the One You Wish For
A common mistake is to manage every principal the same way. The leader who wants tight control over decisions needs a different kind of support than the one who wants to delegate broadly. The detail-oriented principal and the big-picture principal need different briefs. Gabarro and Kotter are explicit that there's no generic formula, because the whole point is to fit the relationship to the two specific people in it.
Pay attention to how your principal reacts, and adjust. If a certain kind of update always prompts follow-up questions, you're leaving something out. If they keep re-deciding things you thought were settled, your framing isn't landing. Managing up is a feedback loop, not a fixed procedure.
Where the Line Is
Managing up has a healthy version and an unhealthy one. The healthy version makes the principal more effective and the organization better served. The unhealthy version optimizes for the principal's comfort or your own standing at the expense of the truth.
Two guardrails keep you on the right side. First, are you making them more effective, or just more comfortable? Comfort that comes from hiding problems is a debt that comes due. Second, would the practice survive daylight? If you wouldn't be willing to have your principal see exactly how you're handling something, it's not managing up, it's maneuvering.
FAQ
Is managing up just corporate politics? No. Politics optimizes for your own advantage. Managing up, as Gabarro and Kotter define it, means working consciously with your principal to get the best result for both of you and the organization. The test is whether the truth is being served. If you're hiding problems or flattering, you have crossed into something else.
What if my principal doesn't want to be managed up? You're not managing them, you're adapting to them. Most of the practice is invisible: matching your communication to their style, bringing them clean decisions, guarding their calendar, and flagging problems early. None of that requires their buy-in. It just makes their work easier, which they tend to notice.
How do I push back on a principal without damaging the relationship? Do it in private, frame it around their goals rather than your preference, and bring reasoning, not just objection. Trust is what buys you the standing to disagree, so it's worth building deliberately before you need to spend it.
How do I manage up to a busy or hard-to-reach executive? When the principal is time-starved, lower the cost of working with you. Match their format, the recommendation first and the reasoning underneath. Send a short weekly heads-up of what moved and what needs them, so they're not managing by interruption. Share early drafts rather than finished work, which lets them redirect you cheaply before you have overbuilt. Build on their thinking with "yes, and" rather than blocking it, so your input reads as help, not friction.
How do I handle a toxic or micromanaging executive? Separate difficult from toxic. A micromanager usually lacks confidence that things will get done, so over-communicate: surface plans early, close loops visibly, and let a steady track record slowly earn you room. A genuinely toxic principal, one who is dishonest or abusive, is a different problem. Managing up can't fix character, and this role ties you unusually close to one person. If the pattern doesn't shift, protect yourself and treat it as information about whether to stay.
If you want to put this into practice, our Weekly Executive Priorities Brief template gives you a simple, repeatable format for keeping your principal informed and surfacing what needs their attention. Join the email list to download it, along with future operator playbooks.
