# 10 Examples of Managing Up You Can Start This Week Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/examples-of-managing-up/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/examples-of-managing-up.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving working with your manager at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Ten concrete examples of managing up, from status updates to timing your asks, with what each looks like in practice, when to use it, and what to avoid. ## Key facts - Title: 10 Examples of Managing Up You Can Start This Week - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Influence, Communication - Primary keyword: examples of managing up - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/examples-of-managing-up/ ## What this page covers - Ten concrete examples of managing up, from status updates to timing your asks, with what each looks like in practice, when to use it, and what to avoid. - Practical guidance for examples of managing up - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation You've heard the phrase, you've nodded along, and then Monday arrives and you still don't know what to do differently. Examples of managing up are concrete: sending your manager a progress update before they ask, flagging a slipping deadline early with a proposed fix, bringing your own agenda to the one-on-one, and routing urgent messages to the channel they actually check. None of it requires seniority, and none of it requires permission. What separates the people who do this well isn't confidence — it's knowing which specific moves exist, and when each one is the wrong move. ## What managing up is — and what it isn't Managing up means taking active responsibility for the working relationship with your manager instead of waiting for them to shape it. The framing that makes the examples make sense is partnership: you and your manager are pointed at the same result, you each deliver a part of it, and it is entirely allowed to disagree along the way. It is worth being precise about the boundary, because almost every source that covers this topic writes the same disclaimer. Business Management Daily and Management Consulted both state plainly that managing up is not covering for an incompetent boss, not quietly doing your manager's job, not flattery, and not going over their head. The recurrence of that warning across independent sources tells you the misconception is common — and it is usually the reason people hesitate to try any of this. If a behavior only changes how your manager *feels* about you, it isn't on this list. Every example below changes how the actual work goes. ## 10 examples of managing up in practice ### 1. Send the update before your manager has to ask The most consistently cited example is also the plainest: a short, regular written summary of what moved, what's next, and what's at risk. Weekly is the norm in most roles, though Management Consulted notes the cadence runs daily in consulting. The refinement that makes it worth doing is timing — guides to one-on-ones, including Bonusly's, recommend sending the update *before* the meeting, so the meeting itself goes to blockers and decisions rather than recitation. You stop being someone your manager has to chase. ### 2. Flag a slipping deadline early, with a diagnosis attached Telling your manager a date is at risk feels like confessing failure, which is why most people wait until it's certain. Culture Amp and Indeed both describe this as a two-part move rather than one: disclose the slip as soon as you see it, and arrive with what caused it and what you propose to do about it. The second half is what changes how the first half lands. Early bad news with a diagnosis reads as control; late bad news without one reads as a surprise, and surprises are what managers remember. ### 3. Learn how your manager actually takes in information Your manager's habits are observable data, not fixed obstacles. Management Consulted's illustration is exact: an employee works out that her boss checks email only twice a day — first thing in the morning and just before signing off — so anything time-sensitive goes through a different channel, and email is reserved for things that can wait. Notice the direction of the effort. You are the one adjusting, which is precisely why this example needs no seniority and no permission. It's also the fastest to test: watch for two weeks, then change one routing habit. ### 4. Bring your own agenda to the one-on-one A frequently retold case involves an employee who found her manager's unstructured check-ins frustrating. Rather than stewing about it, she started arriving with a short agenda of her own — two or three things she wanted to cover. It kept her focused, and it gave her manager a framework to respond within, without anyone having to ask the manager to change style. That distinction matters more than the tactic itself: managing up adapts the interface between the two of you, not the person on the other side of it. ### 5. Ask what your manager's own priorities are Set up a dedicated conversation, ask what their top two or three priorities are this quarter, and then map your work onto them out loud. This example is unusual because it changes almost nothing about what you do day to day — it changes what your work can be described as being *for*. That description is the raw material for everything downstream: which tasks you defend when the week overloads, and what you can point to when someone asks what your results contributed to. Most people never ask, then wonder why their work goes unnoticed. ### 6. Arrive with options, and offer to own the fix When you spot a recurring problem — a workflow that keeps breaking, a handover that keeps dropping things — Indeed and BetterUp describe the same ladder: name the issue, say what you believe is causing it, put forward several workable options, and offer to lead the remedy. That last rung is what separates this from complaining with extra steps. Options without ownership hand the work straight back to your manager. Options with ownership hand them a decision instead, which is a far smaller thing to ask of someone. ### 7. Put the ask at the top of the message Managers triage a high volume of messages, so a three-paragraph build-up to a question tends to get read last and answered later. Indeed's version of this is blunt: lead with the question, the decision, or the need, and put the context underneath for whoever wants it. The reported payoff is simply speed — answers come back sooner. It is the lowest-effort example here and a realistic first experiment, because it costs you nothing except the order of two paragraphs. ### 8. Time your request against your manager's current load Knowing when *not* to raise something is a managing-up behavior in its own right, and it's the one most likely to be missing from a naive list. Indeed's illustration: you have a genuinely good idea about reorganizing the team's digital filing system, and your department is currently consumed by a major product launch. Holding the idea for three weeks isn't passivity — it's reading the room. For someone who has just decided to be more proactive, this is the counterweight that keeps proactive from tipping into noisy. ### 9. Ask them to clear the roadblock only they can clear Some obstacles need positional authority or relationships you don't have: a sign-off from another department, a budget release, a colleague who won't respond to you. The sources describe raising these with your manager as soon as they appear, rather than after they've quietly cost you a week. This is a deliberate use of the one thing your manager structurally has and you don't. Waiting because you'd rather not look stuck is the common mistake, and it converts a small ask into a missed deadline you now have to explain. ### 10. Take on the task they're worst placed to do Offering capacity on something already on your manager's plate — pulling the data for a presentation, building the slides, proofreading a document heading upward — is a standard example, and every source that lists it also bounds it. The boundary is the difference between a defined task you volunteer for and absorbing your manager's job, which Business Management Daily and Management Consulted both name as the failure mode. Offer the specific thing, and keep it specific. Ten examples is more than anyone should attempt at once, and they aren't equally valuable to you. If your updates are already reliable, adding an eleventh changes nothing; if you have never once told a manager that a date was slipping, that single habit is worth more than the other nine combined. Picking well means being honest about which of your current habits hold up and which are thin — and a thin one is simply a habit you haven't built yet, so it's worth taking a few minutes to [map your current strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you decide what to change. ## What it takes to make these examples work Read back through the ten and notice how little of them are about your manager. Almost every one is something you decide, prepare, or word — which is why two people reporting to the same boss can have completely different experiences of working for them. **Working with Your Manager** is the ability underneath most of this list: treating the relationship as a partnership pointed at a shared result rather than a chain of instructions, agreeing early on what you're expected to deliver and how much you get to decide alone, and using the one-on-one to stay aligned instead of to report in. It's also what holds the boundary in place, because being honest when honesty is uncomfortable is part of the skill rather than an exception to it. **Communication** decides whether any of these examples actually land. Leading with the main point, keeping the update brief, choosing a conversation over a written message when the topic is sensitive or complicated, and disagreeing without letting it turn personal — that's the machinery behind at least half the list. A lot of what looks like a natural knack for handling a manager is really just a well-chosen medium and a well-ordered first sentence. **Influence** is what turns alignment into movement. It rests on delivering consistently and talking straight rather than politically, on understanding what genuinely matters to the person you're asking, and on following an idea through to implementation instead of dropping it after the pitch. Proposing options, owning a fix, timing an ask — those are influence, aimed upward, and none of them require charisma or a title. That last point is worth sitting with, because Influence is one of twelve work skills the framework treats as buildable rather than innate, and the free Job Skills Test scores every one of them. It's useful here for a specific reason: people who struggle to manage up often assume the manager relationship is the problem, when the real constraint sits somewhere adjacent — so rather than guessing, you can [see how each one scores](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and work on the one that's actually holding you back. Some of these ten probably describe things you already do without calling them anything. Maybe you always send a note ahead of the one-on-one, or you worked out early that your manager wants the headline and not the history. Those aren't personality traits; they're habits you picked up somewhere, which is rather the point — the ones you haven't picked up yet work exactly the same way. You can build them without becoming a different person at work, and the two or three that would change the most are specific to your situation rather than to some general model of a good employee. It tends to matter more as you go, too: the more your work runs through other people's decisions, the more your upward relationships set the ceiling on what you can get done. Reading ten examples and thinking about which ones apply to you is the part most people skip entirely. What's left is deciding which to start with. So the only thing left is finding out where you actually stand. The **free** Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment that scores you across all twelve work skills — including the three behind every example on this page — and shows you in plain terms which are already strong and which would change the most about how you and your manager work together. You won't get a verdict on your manager. You'll get a clear read on the part you control, and a shortlist of what to build first. ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Ten concrete examples of managing up, from status updates to timing your asks, with what each looks like in practice, when to use it, and what to avoid. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Influence, Communication. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/examples-of-managing-up/ Preferred summary: "Ten concrete examples of managing up, from status updates to timing your asks, with what each looks like in practice, when to use it, and what to avoid." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.