357: How to Manage Up When Your Boss Is Not Giving You What You Need

Your boss is not a mind reader, and hoping they become a better manager is not a career development strategy.

When your one-on-one meetings keep getting canceled, priorities change without warning, and the only feedback you receive comes after something goes wrong, it is easy to feel unsupported, frustrated, and resentful.

But a disappointing boss cannot be the thing that dictates the direction of your career.

In this episode of The Mid-Career GPS Podcast, I break down how to manage up with clarity, confidence, and self-respect. Managing up is an essential leadership and communication skill for mid-career professionals who want more direction, stronger feedback, greater visibility, and better opportunities for advancement.

Managing up is not about flattering your boss, participating in office politics, or becoming responsible for your manager’s job. It is about building a more effective working relationship by understanding what your supervisor needs to make decisions, how they prefer to communicate, and what pressures influence their priorities.

I share practical strategies you can use to take greater ownership of your side of the relationship. You will learn how to bring a focused agenda to your one-on-one meetings, ask directly for the feedback you need, communicate your career goals, and explain the impact of your work so your visibility does not depend on luck.

I also share a communication protocol I created with an overwhelmed executive leader. This simple fail-safe follow-up process helped me get timely decisions, protect my team, and close communication loops without creating unnecessary tension or drama.

We also examine the limits of managing up. No communication strategy can fix retaliation, unethical leadership, repeated disrespect, or a toxic workplace culture. Part of leading your career is recognizing when a working relationship can be improved and when the environment itself is the problem.

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

• The common signs of an ineffective manager include canceled one-on-ones, constantly shifting priorities, and feedback that only comes when something goes wrong
• What managing up means and what it should never require you to tolerate
• How to treat the employee and supervisor relationship as a shared responsibility
• Why owning your side of the relationship does not mean carrying responsibility for your manager’s behavior
• How to ask for specific feedback instead of waiting for your boss to provide it
• Why bringing an agenda to your one-on-one meetings can improve communication and accountability
• How to tell your manager directly that you want to be promoted
• How to communicate the results and business impact of your work
• Why psychological safety, clarity, and manager quality affect engagement, performance, and burnout
• What mid-career professionals can learn from strategic executive assistants about anticipating needs
• How to create a fail-safe follow-up ladder that helps you get decisions and unblock your team
• The red flags that indicate managing up is no longer an effective or appropriate solution

Three Questions to Consider After Listening:

1. What are you currently known for within your organization?
2. What do you want your manager and senior leadership to know about your career goals?
3. What conversation have you been avoiding because you are waiting for your boss to initiate it?

You do not need to become manipulative, political, or inauthentic to manage up effectively. You do need to communicate clearly, establish reasonable ground rules, advocate for your professional development, and stop expecting your manager to automatically know what you need.

Listen to this episode to learn how to take greater ownership of your career, strengthen your relationship with your manager, and get the feedback, support, and visibility you need to move forward.

After you listen, share this episode with a colleague who needs it. Subscribe to The Mid-Career GPS Podcast so you do not miss an upcoming episode, and leave a rating and review to let me know what part of this conversation resonated most with you.

Remember, how you SHOW UP matters.

Transcript

Welcome And Who This Helps

John Neral 0:03

Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Mid-Career GPS Podcast. I'm your host, John Narrell. This is a show for mid-career professionals who feel stuck, undervalued, or unsure what's next, and know that doing more isn't the answer. Here we focus on how you show up, how you make clear decisions, build influence, and take control of your career. Let's get started. Hey

When Your Boss Lets You Down

John Neral 0:33

there. I hope you're having a good day and a good week. Thank you for joining me today. Now, let me just say this. I have struggled with what to name this episode. I've been wanting to do this episode for a while, and admittedly, the working title was Um, Everyone Has a Crappy Boss, Get Over It. But the reality is you got work to do. If you have a boss who isn't showing up for you the way you want, or even in the way they are capable of doing, you are going to be faced with having to manage up. Now, admittedly, you're doing good work. You meet deadlines, solve problems, support your team, you do everything the organization is asking of you, but you are not getting what you need from your boss, and it's bugging the heck out of you. For example, your one-on-one meetings are consistently being canceled. Priorities are changing without warning. You are receiving little feedback, if any, unless something goes wrong. And then you get called out on the carpet and chewed out for it. Or maybe you have a manager who tells you that they support your career, but they're never giving you opportunities. They're never introducing you to decision makers within the organization. Your visibility is essentially stifled. And they're never talking about you when you're not in the room. And so you may find yourself saying, okay, why don't they see what I need? Why are they not being a better manager or supervisor for me? After all, that is their job. Why do I always have to chase after them? Why am I always working so hard and giving it my all and never getting anything in return? Are you with me on that? Are you feeling this? Because these are all fair questions. Your manager has a responsibility to lead you. They should be providing direction, feedback, resources, and support. But you and I both know, and this, my friend, is the uncomfortable truth. We do not always get great managers to lead us. And waiting for your manager to lead you in the exact way you want to be led may leave you waiting for a very, very, very long time.

What Managing Up Is Not

John Neral 3:23

So today, we're talking about managing up. More specifically, talking about how you can show up to manage up without being manipulative, political, overly accommodating, or afraid to have the intentional conversation and speak honestly. Because managing up does not mean flattering your boss. It doesn't mean kissing their proverbial behind, and it certainly doesn't mean you doing their job. And let me just be really clear with this: managing up never means tolerating disrespect, abusive, discriminatory, or unethical behavior. But managing up is about being more intentional about one of the most important professional relationships you have. That is managing the relationship that you have with the person who is evaluating your performance, who is allocating resources, approving opportunities, and may very well be the person who influences what happens next in your career, whether it is inside or outside of your current organization. So there's a lot of information out there about what it means to manage up. You can find tons of things on YouTube and any kind of AI tool. There's a plethora of books that are out there. I like to think of managing up as a practice.

Your Side Of The Relationship

John Neral 5:05

It is a practice of building an effective working relationship with your immediate supervisor by understanding their priorities, their communication style, their expectations, their pressures, their stressors, and their decision-making process. Here's the thing I see most mid-career professionals miss. This is a shared relationship. You must take responsibility for your side of it. Now, you are not taking on responsibility for your manager's behavior, but you are taking responsibility for how you communicate, what you clarify, what you suggest or recommend, and what you allow. Managing up is not saying, How can I make my boss happy? It's asking how can we work together more effectively so I can produce the best results, solve the right problems, and receive the support I need to develop and grow my career. Managing up is not passive. This is the mistake I see so many mid-career professionals make they get into a new working relationship or they're dealing with an existing working relationship with their immediate supervisor, and they think, oh, they're my boss, my manager, my supervisor, my director, my VP, whomever that is. They are going to know what to do. And then they don't. And somehow they let you down and you get frustrated and you get angry, maybe a little resentful. And now you're wondering why they're treating you like crap. When the reality is you could avoid all of that if you just manage the relationship differently. That is not your fault. You are not taking on their crappy behavior. But you are responsible for your end of the relationship. You cannot spend the next six months wishing your boss would give you better feedback while never asking for more specific feedback. They are not mind readers. They may not be capable, they may not have the skill set to give you the feedback you actually need. You cannot complain that your one-on-ones are a waste of time if you constantly arrive to those meetings and never share an agenda or come with questions or things to discuss. Here's a big one. You cannot assume that your boss knows you want to be promoted if you have never clearly stated, I would like to be promoted. You also cannot expect your manager or supervisor, whoever that is, to recognize every contribution you make if you never help them understand or more importantly, communicate the impact of your work. And you might be listening to this and say, Yeah, John, that sounds like an awful lot. And it actually sounds a little unfair because they're at a different level than me and they're getting paid to do all those things. Why should I have to do it? Shouldn't a good manager already be doing those things? Absolutely yes. But your career cannot depend on whether you are fortunate enough to get a superior or stellar manager. It doesn't always happen. Look, I have been extremely fortunate to work with some incredible leaders and managers and supervisors in my career. But I've also been extremely fortunate to work with ones who weren't. Because

Why Manager Quality Changes Everything

John Neral 9:35

I got to learn what managing up really means. When we look at the leader member exchange, when you think of that relationship between your supervisor and yourself, what the research shows is that higher quality relationships have been associated with things like greater trust, clearer deliverables, stronger engagement, higher job satisfaction, less burnout, less psychological withdrawal. And Gallup has also reported that managers account for a substantial portion of the differences in engagement between teams. Look around your organization. You know who the good managers and leaders are. You know the ones that are spending time developing talent on their team and the ones who are not. Google has done research into effective teams identifying psychological safety and structure and clarity as two important team dynamics. People need to know expectations and believe that they work in an environment where it is safe enough for them to ask questions, acknowledge mistakes, or raise concerns without being embarrassed or punished. But come on, you and I both know that you have either worked in or currently worked in or know someone who is working in or on a team where they're not allowed to fail successfully, or there's a screw up and they're never handled professionally. They're yelled at, berated, demeaned. Again, you cannot control your boss's personality. You do have influence over how you communicate with them. And I don't want to be ageist here and say, oh, the older you get, the more you know how to handle certain situations. Because the reality is we can handle these situations appropriately and show up for them at any age, at any level, because of the ground rules we set for what that relationship is supposed to be. I have been in rooms in my career where someone has talked down to me and been disrespectful to me, and I have said, you are trying to make a certain point. Make the point. Don't try to belittle me in the process. That is not going to be good for our relationship. I have taken my lumps. I have I have owned when I have made mistakes. Those are all important

Set Ground Rules And Respect

John Neral 12:35

things to do. But I have set a ground rule for myself that I would never, because it had happened, I would never again sit in a room and have someone belittle or berate me in a power trip because they wanted to feel superior to me. That will not happen. What I have learned, and this is where I truly believe executive assistants do not get enough credit. So if you're an executive assistant and you're listening to this, my friend, my hat is off to you. Okay. A strategic executive assistant does so many things to make that leader successful. They understand that executive's priorities. They know the information the executive needs before making a decision. They anticipate conflicts and potential obstacles. They know what their priorities are. They determine what's urgent, what can wait, and what can't. They protect the executive's time while also helping them follow through on all the deliverables they need to do throughout the day. But where they really shine and where they're exceptional, and I'm talking a really, really good executive system here, okay, is they learn what matters to that executive. Take a page out of their playbook. Know what matters most to your manager. Know when they need details, know when they just need the headline. Come with solutions to problems you're identifying. Close any communication loops that exist. One of my favorite stories is, and experiences in all honesty, was um reporting to a leader within an organization. I was new to the organization. I was there probably uh about a month, six weeks maybe. And and what I learned about this leader was that they were extremely busy and overwhelmed. They were also exceptionally talented. And the reason why they were so busy and overwhelmed was that everybody was trying to pull them in so many different directions. And when they asked me to take over leading the team, I needed to know how to get in touch with them. So I set up a very clear communication protocol. And the communication protocol

The Email Protocol Fail Safe Story

John Neral 15:15

was when I need information from you in order to help the team, what is the best way for me to get an answer? And they said to me, email me. Great, I will do that. Now, we might think the relationship there is good, but I know we have to go a little deeper. So I said, Great. So look, I I know you're busy. I know you're pulled in a lot of different directions, and I know it very easily my email could drop to the bottom of your inbox and you wouldn't see it. So when I don't hear from you within a business day and I need an answer, what would you like me to do? And they looked at me and they said, I'll answer your email. I said, Yeah, but when you don't, because you just happen to forget or time gets away from you, what do you want me to do? They said, Well, email me again, but this time highlight my name in the email. And I'll know that's the second time you've emailed me. Great. I can absolutely do that. And you might be sitting there going, Great, you think it's done. It's not. Go a little deeper. I said, Great, when you don't answer that email, how do I get a hold of you? How do I get your attention to respond? And they said, John, I will answer your email. They said, Yeah, but just in case you don't, then what? Because now we're two business days out. And so we had a little bit of a laugh and everything. And they said, um, okay, go ahead and email me again. And this time put the red exclamation point in Outlook, and I will know that is the third time you're emailing me about the same issue. And I promise you I will respond. Great, I can do that. But listen very carefully. We're not done. Again, go a little deeper. Great. That's all well and good. So I understand I'm gonna email you. If I don't hear from you within a business day, I will email you again and highlight your name in the email. And if that doesn't happen, then I will email you again. And this time I'll put the red exclamation point in the email. Um, when that doesn't happen, what do you want me to do? And they said, John, that'll be the third time you've emailed me. I will be sure to answer your email. I said, Great, I really appreciate that, but we need to put in another layer. And that is to help you and to help me, but more importantly, help the team get what they need. So here's what I'm gonna propose. If after that third email, I haven't heard from you within 24 hours or one business day, I'm gonna come down to your office. And obviously that means we're working in the same building. And I said, I'm gonna come down to your office and I'm gonna knock on your door. And unless you're meeting with the president of the company, I'm gonna say to you, I need five minutes. That means you drop everything and you give me five minutes because now we're at a critical stage in getting this information to the team, and I really need you at that point. Can we agree to that? Now, a couple interesting things happen here. One, I proposed a solution, essentially a fail-safe, if I didn't get my answer. And secondly, I gave her something to react to. And their response to me was, um, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine. It's not gonna happen, but it's fine. Well, guess what happened? Two weeks later, I walked down to her office, I knock on the door, and I say that I say, I need five minutes. And they looked at me and they go, Oh, come on, what the heck? I get it, you're busy. I need you for five minutes. And we were able to get done and get that work done. And I got the answers I needed, and the team got the support that they needed. But that's such a good example I can share with you about personally how I have managed up because in managing up, it's a partnership. They're an amazing leader, but they were also overwhelmed and over-allocated. So I'm not trying to add work to their plate. I'm trying to take work off of their plate. And in doing so, we have to establish some ground rules for what that relationship's going to be. So I can get the information I need to help the team. And it frees them up to do the things they need to do at their level. But that doesn't happen if we don't have the conversation. Both parties need to be willing to come to the table to have that conversation and appreciate what a managing of scenario may look like. But notice how I said, can we agree to that? You get buy-in, you get permission. I say all the time when we talk about showing up, when we show up and we set ground rules and we agree to those ground rules, we never have to walk on eggshells. Now we know how to behave, we know how to act. We don't have to second guess things, right? A clear framework for how you manage up, that's what you get to build. There are plenty of models that are out there. What I want to be really certain with you on this is that in managing up, we are coming from a genuinely authentic and clear place about the work, the objectives, the goals, what needs to get done. And we make an agreement around that ground rule so we get the information we need. That's the power in managing up. The power is managing up to build the relationship that you are showing up as an equal partner in those conversations. But let's

Limits Of Managing Up

John Neral 21:40

be clear managing up has its limits. There are certain things managing up cannot or will ever do. For example, managing up cannot transform every bad boss into a good leader. It cannot fix a Manager who retaliates when challenged. It cannot create integrity when someone behaves unethically. It cannot make an organization value employees when the culture repeatedly demonstrates otherwise. And this is a big one managing up should never become a professional development topic or phrase that organizations use to blame employees for ineffective management. You, however, can improve your communication. You can have intentional conversations, you can set ground rules, you can document expectations and decisions, you can ask directly for feedback and support, but you cannot define the entire relationship indefinitely. This is why managing up is a continuous process and partnership. Both parties have to be willing to participate in order for this to work. Managing up is a strategy, it is not a requirement to tolerate organizational

Three Questions To Get Unstuck

John Neral 23:21

dysfunction. Question one What does your manager currently know you for? Not what they hope for, but what does your behavior consistently demonstrate? Second question, what do you want to be known for? Do you want to be known as the person who always executes and gets things done? Do you want to be known as the person who handles difficult conversations? Do you want to be known as the person who anticipates risks? Are you someone who's developing other talent within the organization? And thirdly, what conversation have you been avoiding because you were afraid of how your manager might respond? You need to have trust that you can have that conversation. If you don't believe you can safely have that conversation with your manager, don't do it. But if you feel like you're not being seen or you're not being heard, maybe you need clear priorities or you need more useful feedback. Maybe you need that one-on-one time that keeps getting canceled, protected a little bit better. Maybe you need to talk about your workload and why you feel like you're over-allocated when other people are not. Maybe you need to have an intentional conversation with your manager or supervisor to see how willing they are to advocate for your career and your advancement within that organization. Avoiding the conversation does not protect the relationship. That is where you have to decide what managing up really means to you. So

How To Share And Work Together

John Neral 25:25

a couple of things here before before we wrap this all up. If this episode was helpful, if you enjoyed something about this episode, do me a favor, email me, John at johnner.com, J-O-H-N-N-E-R-A-L.com. You can message me on LinkedIn. Let me know what you liked about this episode, too. Share this with somebody, right? Share this with somebody who you believe needs to hear this episode. This podcast continues to grow because of organic reach of you simply sharing this episode with someone in your network and more people find out about it. But thirdly, who in your organization needs to hear this message? Maybe it's a particular team, a unit, maybe it's the entire organization as a whole. But managing up is a powerful strategy for you to build an intentional relationship that has one particular goal in mind. We get to define what success looks like. Success for the organization, success for your clients, success for you, for the team. So if there is a way I can help your organization, as a keynote speaker and facilitator, I work with organizations to help them show up more impactfully. Managing up is one of the things that I help organizations do. And I'd be happy to talk with your organization about bringing an event or supporting your next event and what that may look like. So you again email me at john at johnnarrell.com, J O H N N E R A L, or you can find a whole bunch more information on my website at johnnarrell.com. Hope you enjoyed this episode. And my friends, remember this you will build your mid-career GPS one mile or one step at a time. And how you show up matters. Make it a great rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, don't keep it to yourself. Kindly share it with someone who needs it. And if you're tired of feeling stuck, overlooked, or underutilized in your career, go to my website, johnner.com to get started. There you'll find free resources, ways to work with me, and details about the Show Up Leadership Lab, my signature membership for mid-career professionals who want to lead better, get noticed, and elevate their career. All the links are in the show notes. You can grab what you need right there. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. And if you're getting value from the show, take 30 seconds to leave a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform. Remember, how you show up matters, and I'll see you next time.