# Managing Up and Down: What It Really Means at Work Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/managing-up-and-down/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/managing-up-and-down.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 Managing up and down means working deliberately with your boss and with the people around you. What each direction involves - and which one actually pays off. ## Key facts - Title: Managing Up and Down: What It Really Means at Work - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Influence, Communication - Primary keyword: managing up and down - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/managing-up-and-down/ ## What this page covers - Managing up and down means working deliberately with your boss and with the people around you. What each direction involves - and which one actually pays off. - Practical guidance for managing up and down - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation You report to someone whose priorities you often have to infer, and you depend on people you can't instruct. Managing up and down is the practice of working deliberately in both directions at once: managing up means understanding your manager's goals, constraints and style well enough to keep the two of you aligned, and managing down means giving the people whose work you rely on clear expectations and real support. Almost every source stops there. The more accurate version of the model has four directions rather than two — and the two in the name aren't the two that carry the most weight. ## What managing up and down actually covers The phrase comes out of middle management. It was written for supervisors who owe one thing to the layer above them and something quite different to the layer below, and Wikipedia dates the popularization of these ideas to management literature of the 1980s, with managing up traced back to a 1980 Harvard Business Review article. That origin explains both the shape of the model and its blind spot. Look at how the practice is actually taught and it separates into four dimensions, each running on a different mechanism. ### Managing up Managing up is the deliberate half of the relationship with the person you report to. It means learning what your manager is genuinely accountable for, what constraints they're working under, and how they prefer to receive information — then using that to stay aligned instead of waiting to be told. The tactics that recur across the guidance are narrower than the concept sounds. BetterUp and Tempo land on much the same three: take ownership so your manager can hand you something without briefing it in detail, tell them early about changes that will actually affect them, and ask for feedback rather than waiting for the review cycle. To those, add the two this framework treats as central — agreeing explicitly what you're allowed to decide on your own, and making your results visible instead of assuming they get noticed. What distinguishes this direction is that the other person holds formal authority over you, so instruction is never the lever; alignment and visibility are. And the EBSCO reference entry supplies the half that usually gets skipped: managing up means *hearing* what senior people expect, not just reporting upward at them. ### Managing down Managing down is guiding and supporting the people whose work you're accountable for. The fundamentals named in the EBSCO entry are unglamorous and hard to improve on: be firm, be straightforward, be fair. Underneath them sits one recurring failure point. Nearly every source ties this direction to expectations — making sure people know precisely what's being asked, on the grounds that ambiguous instructions produce confusion and rework. A surprising amount of what looks like an attitude problem downward turns out, on inspection, to be an instruction nobody ever made explicit. The listening rule applies here in reverse. Managing down means actually hearing what your team reports back, not issuing direction and assuming it landed. ### Managing sideways Almost every serious treatment of this topic quietly expands the pair into a trio. Managing sideways is getting cooperation from peers and colleagues in other functions — people who neither report to you nor outrank you. Teamly and Stratford both tie its growing importance to a structural shift rather than a personal preference: as organizations move from strict hierarchies toward interconnected, cross-functional networks, more of anyone's work depends on people outside their reporting line. This is the one direction with no authority running either way. It works on credibility, reciprocity and reputation, which take longer to build and are much harder to fake than either of the other two. ### Managing yourself Several sources add a fourth direction. Teamly's version of the 360-degree model names four targets rather than three — boss, colleagues, team, and yourself — and this is the only one with no counterparty at all. It covers regulating your own reactions, noticing how you come across in each of the other directions, and choosing a response rather than defaulting to one under pressure. It tends to get listed last, and it's usually what decides whether the other three get handled deliberately or reactively. ## Which direction actually pays off The two-direction framing implies the halves are symmetrical. The available research says they aren't. McKinsey's leadership work found that managing upward and horizontally were roughly 50 percent more important than managing subordinates for business success — 45 percent against 30 percent — and well over twice as important for career success, at 47 percent against 19 percent. The mechanism is reach. Managing down well improves what one team produces. Managing up and sideways determines whether that output gets resourced, noticed, and connected to what the organization actually rewards. Good work that nobody upstream knows about doesn't travel on its own. None of which is an argument for neglecting the people you work with daily. Lighthouse makes the point that the directions reinforce each other: a team that's clear on what's expected and delivering generates fewer escalations, which turns the upward relationship from firefighting into something more useful to both of you. Getting better at one direction really does make the other easier. ## Managing up and down when nobody reports to you Here's the mismatch most readers run into. Practically all the material on this topic assumes you're a supervisor with direct reports — and a large share of the people searching the phrase have none. That doesn't make the model useless; it changes which parts apply. The upward half applies immediately and in full. Nothing in it requires a title: taking work off your manager's plate, flagging problems early, asking for feedback rather than waiting for it. All of that is available to someone in their first year. The downward half needs translating. If nobody reports to you, "down" is really the work you depend on from other people — a colleague's input, a junior's draft, another team's sign-off. You can't set expectations there by instruction, so you set them by being specific: what exactly you're asking for, by when, and what finished looks like. In practice it's the peer version of the same sentence — "can you" rather than "I need you to" — asking for the identical thing without borrowing rank you don't hold. Sideways, meanwhile, isn't a nice-to-have for this reader. It's usually where most of the work actually sits. If one of these directions is reliably where things go wrong for you, that's worth identifying rather than guessing at — the free Job Skills Test gives you a straight read on [where your working relationships stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), and every part of it is learnable from wherever you're starting. ## What makes each direction easier Read the four directions back and the differences between them shrink. Each one is a relationship you're maintaining with very little formal power, and the same few behaviors keep doing the work across all of them. **Working with Your Manager** is the upward half in full, and its central move is treating the relationship as a partnership with a shared purpose rather than a reporting line. That looks like meeting one-on-one every week or two and turning up prepared, understanding your manager's style well enough to adapt to it, agreeing where your own decision-making authority ends, making your results visible, and being honest with them even when honesty carries some risk. It also includes disagreeing openly — which is a normal part of the relationship rather than a threat to it, provided you commit to the decision once it's made. **Influence** is what the downward and sideways directions actually run on when you can't instruct anyone. It's built by delivering consistently until you're known for something specific, taking responsibility beyond your own slice of the work, and setting the agenda by volunteering to prepare, write or organize the thing nobody's claimed. When you need someone to act, it works as a sequence: understand what's in it for them, keep the ask simple and honest about the drawbacks, then follow up until it's actually done. This is the opposite of politics — it's the credibility that makes people say yes to you without being told to. **Communication** is the switch between two audiences that want opposite things. Your manager wants the headline and the risk first; a colleague needs a concrete, unambiguous ask. That means adapting to whoever you're talking to, leading with your main point instead of building up to it, choosing a conversation over a message whenever the subject is sensitive, and disagreeing without letting it turn personal. The fix is almost never more communication — it's better-calibrated communication in each direction. None of the three is a personality setting; each is a set of behaviors, and most people are considerably further along in one than in the other two. **Influence** happens to be one of twelve such skills the free Job Skills Test scores you on, which makes it a quick way to see [which of the three to build first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) instead of working on all three at once and moving none of them. Some of this may already describe how you operate — the person who mentions a problem before it lands on their manager's desk, or who asks a colleague for something specific rather than something vague. The rest gets learned the same way it always does, in ordinary weeks, without turning you into someone more political than you are. And you went looking for how this works instead of picking it up through trial and error, which is how most people end up learning it — slowly, and usually after something has already gone wrong. The demands in each direction don't ease off from here, either. More people get involved in your work, and more of it comes to depend on cooperation you can't require, which is exactly why these are worth building while the stakes are still small. What's left is an honest read on which direction is costing you most. ## Which direction to work on first You don't have to guess at that. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of where your work skills currently stand — twelve of them, the three above among them — and it ends with a plain answer about which one would change the most if you put some work into it next. It takes seven minutes, there's nothing to prepare, and your results appear the moment you finish. One sitting, one clear picture, and you decide what to do with it from there. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, seven minutes, and your results appear right away.* ## 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? Managing up and down means working deliberately with your boss and with the people around you. What each direction involves - and which one actually pays off. ### 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/managing-up-and-down/ Preferred summary: "Managing up and down means working deliberately with your boss and with the people around you. What each direction involves - and which one actually pays off." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.