Upward Communication: What to Tell Your Manager and How to Say It

Upward communication is the information you pass up the hierarchy, to your manager and the leaders above them: updates on your work, problems and concerns, ideas, feedback and opinions, and requests. It works when each message is brief, honest, well-timed, sent through the right channel and framed around what the receiver cares about.

If you choose your words more carefully with your manager than with anyone else at work, that is a normal response to talking with the person who evaluates you. The trouble is that care can quietly turn into silence, and what gets held back is rarely the routine update. Each type of upward message carries its own risk and needs its own handling, and the one that feels hardest to send is often the one your manager most needs to hear.

The five types of upward communication

Upward communication is not one kind of message. It is five, each with its own purpose, its own level of risk and its own best channel. Organizations offer plenty of routes for it, from one-on-ones, team meetings and reports to emails, surveys, suggestion schemes and formal grievance procedures. Early in your career, though, most of it goes to one person: your direct manager. That makes it less an organizational system than a working habit you build with one person, week by week.

Updates and reports

Updates are the routine backbone: what you have finished, where a task stands, what the results were. They carry the least risk and the most volume, and their value depends almost entirely on how quickly the receiver can use them. Managers juggle competing priorities, so an update that opens with the main point and keeps only the facts that matter gets read and acted on. A chronological account of your week does not.

A useful test is whether your first sentence alone would be enough. “The client report is on track for Friday; the one risk is that the sales figures arrive late” gives your manager the status and the open question in a single line, and everything after it is support. Regular updates built this way do something else as well: they make your results visible without you ever having to announce them.

Problems and concerns

This is where upward communication gets hard. In the study of employee voice, raising concerns about practices, incidents or behavior that is causing harm is called prohibitive voice, as distinct from promotive voice, which offers ideas for improvement. The two land differently. A suggestion looks forward and reads as an opportunity. A concern points at something already going wrong, which implicitly questions the way things are done, and often a decision someone above you made. That relational risk is why concerns are the upward messages most easily swallowed, even though a problem raised early is usually far cheaper to fix than one discovered late.

Raising a problem without sounding like a complainer comes down to three moves. Describe what is happening in facts rather than frustration. Say what it affects: a deadline, a customer, the quality of the work. And bring a possible next step, even a rough one, so the conversation turns to what to do rather than who is to blame. A concern belongs in a conversation, not a chat thread, and while timing matters, a genuinely urgent problem does not wait for a good moment.

Ideas and suggestions

Ideas are the promotive side: proposals for doing the work better, raised in a meeting, a one-on-one or a suggestion scheme. They feel safer to send than concerns, but for someone new they come with a catch. A 2025 study titled When newcomer voice is (not) endorsed found that whether a newcomer’s suggestions are endorsed by others depends on organizational socialization, meaning how far the newcomer has learned the organization’s ways, its people and its goals.

That is not a reason to keep your ideas to yourself. It is a reason to ask why something is done the way it is before proposing a change, and to pick the few ideas worth pursuing rather than offering a stream of them. An idea that shows you understand why things are the way they are is much easier to say yes to.

Feedback and opinions

Upward communication also carries your views: on a decision, on a way of working, on how the working relationship itself is going. This includes disagreement, and it is the type that depends most on honesty. Flattery is easy to send and useless to receive. What a manager can work with is a view delivered respectfully and straightforwardly, including a plain “I don’t know” when that is the truth.

Disagreeing well follows a simple pattern. Raise it with your manager privately and first, not in front of the team and not with their manager. Give your reasons once, clearly, tied to the shared goal rather than your preference. Then accept that the decision is theirs. Said that way, disagreement reads as commitment to the outcome rather than a challenge to their authority.

Requests and grievances

The fifth type asks the receiver to act on your behalf: for resources, support, clearer expectations or a change in your workload. Requests work best when they are specific about what you need, why and by when, so your manager can either say yes or explain the no. For serious issues that an ordinary conversation cannot resolve, such as mistreatment, organizations have formal grievance procedures, so that the most important messages still have a route when the normal one is blocked.

Why upward communication is harder than it looks

If upward communication were only a matter of technique, everyone would do it well. Three barriers get in the way, and none of them is about vocabulary.

The first is fear: of saying the wrong thing, of stepping on toes, of being judged by the person who evaluates your work. Silence driven by fear of consequences has a name, defensive silence, and what loosens it is psychological safety, the belief that you can speak up without being embarrassed or punished. Your manager shapes much of that climate, but not all of it. How and when you raise something also changes how safe it feels, for both of you.

The second is distance. Where the gap between employees and management feels large, people lower down are more likely to feel intimidated or to assume their input does not matter. New employees tend to feel it most, because they are both new and at the bottom of the hierarchy, often straight out of an education where approaching the people in charge was part of the routine. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work described the adjustment like this:

I was brought up to believe that everyone is equal. I’ve always been able to talk to my teachers, even professors, more or less as equals. But in that particular job, I experienced that their time was far more important than my interrupting their work. I found that incredibly hard to navigate.

The third is futility. When suggestions get no response and nothing visibly happens, the motivation to speak up fades fast. The sender can do more about this than it seems: follow up on what happened to a suggestion, and remember that a “no” with a reason is not the same as not being heard.

None of these barriers means you lack something permanent. Part of the hesitation is the situation, and part is simply not having learned a method yet, and the method can be learned. If you want to tell the two apart, checking your work skills shows whether there is a skill gap behind the hesitation, and if so, which one.

Three habits that help every upward message land

Across all five types, three habits separate the messages that get acted on from the ones that get lost.

Put it in their terms. Upward messages often fail not because they are wrong but because they arrive in the sender’s language rather than the receiver’s. Early in your career you may not yet share the business vocabulary and context your manager works with, so the translation is your job. Frame the point around what your manager is responsible for, whether that is a goal, a deadline, a customer or a risk, and it lands where they make decisions.

Match the channel to the message. Writing suits updates, information your manager needs to read in their own time, and anything that should be on record. Conversation suits concerns, disagreement and anything sensitive or complicated, because tone and follow-up questions do work that text cannot. Serious matters belong in a one-on-one rather than in chat. Treat regular one-on-ones as the default home for everything in between, and pick moments when your manager is not distracted or under pressure.

Go through your manager first. Messages meant for senior leaders often pass through an immediate supervisor, who may reshape them to reflect their own view, an effect known as upward filtering. Going around your manager is rarely the fix for someone early in their career, and it usually costs more trust than it gains. Align with your manager first, and keep your messages concise and self-contained so their core survives being passed on.

What makes speaking up easier over time

Look back across the five types and the three habits, and a pattern shows: almost none of it depends on being a gifted speaker. It depends on how you handle the relationship with your manager, how you shape a message, and how you move someone to act on it.

Working with Your Manager is what turns upward communication from a daunting event into a routine. It treats your manager as a partner with a shared purpose rather than an audience to impress, which is why honesty, even when it feels risky, is part of the deal. It gives upward messages a regular home in one-on-ones, and it builds two habits that change how concerns are received: bringing a possible solution along with the problem, and aligning with your manager before anything goes further up.

Communication covers the craft of the message itself: the main point first, brief and clear, adapted to how the receiver likes to take in information. It includes choosing between a conversation and a written note, and it prepares you for one of the trickiest upward situations, expressing disagreement without it turning personal. None of it calls for a stiffer, more deferential way of speaking; the principles you use with peers still apply, with extra respect for the receiver’s time.

Influence matters the moment you want a decision-maker to act on an idea. It starts with preparation, understanding what is in it for your manager and how decisions actually get made, then a simple pitch with a concrete example and the drawbacks stated honestly, a smaller first step when a full yes is unlikely, and follow-up afterward. Underneath sits reputation: messages from someone known for delivering results and talking straight are heard differently.

The free Job Skills Test measures all three as part of a wider set of twelve work skills, and it can turn a vague wish to communicate better upward into one specific skill to practice in your next one-on-one. Each of them is built through practice rather than handed out at birth, so whatever the result shows is a place to start, not a verdict.

Start with the message you keep putting off

You may recognize some of this from your own better conversations with your manager, the ones where you said the thing plainly and it went fine. The rest can be built the same way, one message at a time, and you stay yourself while you do it. If you have ever typed a message to your manager, deleted it and told yourself you would bring it up later, you already know which message to practice with. As your responsibilities grow, more decisions will depend on what you choose to pass up the line, and the habit is far easier to build now, while the stakes are still small.

The only thing left is to find your starting point. The Job Skills Test is a free self-assessment of your work skills across twelve areas, from communication to working with your manager, and it takes 7 minutes. You’ll see which skills are already strong and which one would make the biggest difference to how your messages land.

Take the skills test