Managing Up: How Leaders & Organizations Unlock More Value from Leadership

Part 3 of a 3-part series on managing up.

In the first article of this series, we explored why managing up matters and argued that it is one of the most overlooked drivers of organizational effectiveness. In the second, we shifted our attention to the individual, examining the practical behaviours that help professionals support better decisions, reduce friction, and build stronger relationships with the leaders around them.

Together, these two articles established the case for managing up and explored how individuals can develop the capability. This final article examines the third, and often overlooked, dimension: the role leaders and organizations play in creating the conditions that allow managing up to thrive.

Managing up develops within an environment shaped by leadership behaviours, organizational culture, and the systems that govern how work gets done. Employees build the capability through practice. Leaders influence whether that capability is encouraged, recognized, and sustained. Organizations determine whether it becomes an individual strength or a collective way of working.

To close this series, we move beyond the individual and explore what leaders and organizations can do to intentionally design cultures, leadership behaviours, and systems that encourage effective managing up.

1. Leaders Create the Conditions for Upward Communication

Managing up is a capability built on perspective-taking, and in practice, that means asking questions, surfacing risks early, offering recommendations, challenging assumptions respectfully, and communicating proactively rather than reactively. None of these behaviours are technically difficult. What makes them difficult is that they require people to take interpersonal risks.

This is where psychological safety becomes central to managing up.

Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Google's Project Aristotle reached a similar conclusion, identifying psychological safety as the strongest predictor of team effectiveness. Teams consistently performed better when people felt comfortable asking questions, admitting mistakes, and challenging assumptions early. These are the very behaviours that effective managing up depends upon.

In the first article, we also referenced Erin Meyer's work on power distance and how, across much of the Arab world, hierarchy naturally creates greater distance between leaders and employees. That context makes the leader's role particularly important when it comes to managing up. If employees are expected to proactively share concerns, offer recommendations, or challenge thinking before decisions are made, leaders must consistently demonstrate that those behaviours are welcomed. Managing up becomes far more natural when leaders actively invite it.

What leaders can do

• Ask, "What am I missing?" before finalizing important decisions.

• Invite recommendations before sharing your own opinion.

• Thank people who surface risks early, even when the message is difficult.

• Separate disagreement from disrespect.

• Recognize examples where speaking up improved an outcome.

2. Teach by Example

Managing up is often treated as something employees simply learn through experience. In reality, it is a capability, and like any capability, it develops through teaching, coaching, observation, and practice.

HBR research asserts that teaching is one of the most critical (yet often overlooked)responsibilities of leadership. Every interaction with a team teaches something: how decisions are made, what good judgment looks like, how stakeholders are managed, and which behaviours are valued. Leaders teach through the feedback they provide, the conversations they facilitate, and perhaps most importantly, the behaviours they model themselves. Managing up is no exception.

Organizations invest heavily in developing technical expertise, project management, delegation, communication, and feedback. Far fewer explicitly teach employees how to communicate upwards, prepare decision-ready recommendations, understand stakeholder expectations, or anticipate leadership needs. As a result, one of the organization's most valuable capabilities is often left to observation and trial and error.

The most effective leaders are teachers - and they make this capability visible. They explain how they prepare for board meetings, adapt communication for different stakeholders, seek feedback before major presentations, or build alignment before important decisions. In doing so, they demonstrate that managing up is not political behaviour reserved for middle managers. It is a leadership capability practiced at every level of the organization, from first-time managers to CEOs engaging boards, investors, clients, and regulators.

What leaders can do

• Explain why decisions are made, not only what was decided.

• Make your stakeholder thinking visible by sharing how you prepare for important conversations.

• Coach employees on how to prepare recommendations rather than simply present updates.

• Debrief major meetings and discuss what effective upward communication looked like.

• Ask your own leaders for feedback publicly, reinforcing that managing up remains important at every level of leadership.

3. Design the Organizational System

Culture influences behaviour, leaders reinforce behaviour, but systems sustain behaviour.

Managing up should never depend solely on confidence, personality, or individual initiative. It should be supported by the way an organization operates.

At Cosmic Centaurs, we often encourage leaders to view their organizations as interconnected systems rather than collections of individual people or teams. Through our work on organizational design, and conversations at our 2025 Cosmic Conference all around Systems Thinking, one idea has consistently emerged: organizations create better outcomes when they stop optimizing isolated behaviours and begin designing how information, decisions, and accountability move across the system. Managing up is part of that system.

Organizations often encourage employees to communicate proactively, escalate issues early, and bring recommendations rather than problems. Yet those expectations frequently sit alongside operating models that make those behaviours difficult. Meetings become information-sharing sessions rather than decision-making forums. Employees are unsure when to escalate a risk or what level of detail leaders expect. Updates vary significantly depending on who prepares them. As a result, upward communication becomes inconsistent, relying on individual judgment rather than organizational design.

The strongest organizations reduce this variability by embedding managing up into everyday ways of working. They establish predictable rhythms for communication, define clear expectations around executive briefings, create common approaches to decision-making, and reinforce behaviours that improve the flow of information across the organization.

What leaders can do

• Build regular briefing cadences into your team's operating rhythm rather than relying on ad hoc updates.

• Introduce consistent templates for executive updates and decision papers.

• Clarify escalation pathways so employees understand when to raise issues and what information leaders need.

• Use retrospectives to discuss not only project outcomes, but how information flowed throughout the work.

• Recognize behaviours that strengthen decision-making, such as surfacing risks early, anticipating stakeholder concerns, or preparing thoughtful recommendations.

Ultimately, managing up is about far more than improving the relationship between an employee and their manager. It is one of the mechanisms through which organizations learn faster, identify risks earlier, make better decisions, and navigate complexity more effectively. Like any capability that influences performance, it deserves to be developed with the same intentionality as leadership itself.

If you're interested in helping your middle managers extract the maximum value from the leaders they report to, we'd love to help. Get in touch to learn more about our capability development programmes.