Why managing up is a leadership skill, not a survival skill

I was talking to a leader recently whose chair would go quiet for weeks and then land a string of pointed questions with no warning, always about cash. What's the runway looking like, what happens if this contract slips, why hasn't this been flagged sooner. He'd read it as difficult behaviour, a chair who didn't trust him, and turned up to every catch up braced for it.

What was actually happening was much simpler. Nobody had ever given this chair a monthly cash position, pipeline coverage and a flag on anything that might move either of them, so every conversation started from scratch, and every scrap of new information landed as a shock rather than an update. Once that one page started arriving before he asked for it, the sharp re-entries stopped almost immediately, not because the relationship had improved, but because he wasn't finding things out the hard way anymore.

Most leaders manage up by bracing for the next difficult conversation instead of asking what specific piece of information would stop that conversation needing to happen at all, and I think that's because managing up gets treated as a survival skill, something you do to protect yourself from an unpredictable boss or board, rather than a leadership skill in its own right. It's a close cousin of a pattern I wrote about a few weeks ago, why leadership teams so often struggle to get decisions made, where the same breakdown happens in reverse, a board or CEO left in the dark rather than a team. It's worth separating this out properly, because the research behind it is much richer than most people realise.

The foundational work here is Cohen and Bradford's currencies model, first published in their book Influence Without Authority and still the reference point most serious writing on this subject returns to. Their core argument is that before you ask anyone for anything, your job is to work out precisely what they value, and most people get this wrong because they assume it's whatever they'd value themselves. A finance director on your board probably isn't moved by a compelling story, they're moved by seeing the numbers before they have to ask for them. A non exec who's building their own portfolio cares about being seen to have backed the right calls, so being credited by name in front of the wider board matters more than you'd expect. A peer who feels permanently overlooked will respond to being genuinely consulted long before you need their sign off, far more than to any amount of resource or information you could offer instead. Three completely different people, three completely different currencies, and offering the wrong one, even generously, mostly just misses.

The test Cohen and Bradford propose is simple. If you were in their seat right now, under their pressure, answering to who they answer to, what would make their week easier. Then push past the first answer, because it's usually the one that's obvious to you rather than true of them.

Alongside that sits Rob Cross's research on trust within organisational networks, which treats trust less as a feeling and more as something you can deliberately build and deplete, the way you would a bank account. Every commitment you deliver on, every time you're straight with someone even when it's uncomfortable, every piece of help you give without keeping score, that's a deposit. Every time you let someone down, overpromise, or only turn up when you want something, that's a withdrawal, and you can only make a significant withdrawal, the kind where you ask for something big or push back on a decision, if there's enough already sitting in the account to cover it. Cross's wider body of work on high performing networks makes a point that fits neatly here too, that the people who move things easily sideways and upward are rarely the most senior or the most persuasive in the room, they're simply the ones who invested in the relationship long before they needed anything from it.

That timing point matters more than most leaders give it credit for. The people who get backed easily when it counts aren't approaching their board or their chair for the first proper conversation in months with the ask fully formed. They're the ones who were straight about a problem three months before it became one, who shared something useful without expecting anything back, who turned up consistently rather than only when they needed a decision. None of that pays off in the moment it happens. It pays off much later, in the one conversation where they need someone to take a risk on their judgement, and that person already has enough reason to.

There's one more piece worth adding, because currencies and trust explain how to build the relationship, but not what to do once you're standing in front of the difficult thing you actually need to say. Ira Chaleff's work on courageous followership is built on a simple observation, that most organisational failures happen not because nobody saw the problem coming, but because the people closest to it didn't say so in time, or didn't say it in a way the leader could actually hear. Chaleff's point isn't that you should raise concerns more often. It's that how you raise them determines whether they land as support or as insubordination. Making clear you're on their side before you get into the substance matters. So does separating what you've observed from what you've concluded, saying I'm seeing X and my concern is Y rather than stating X is a problem as though it's settled fact. And arriving with a direction, even a rough one, rather than just a diagnosis, changes the whole tone of the conversation, because it turns you into someone thinking alongside them rather than someone handing them a difficulty to solve alone.

There's a practical thread running through all of this that's worth naming plainly. Managing up well isn't about becoming more political, more strategic in a calculating sense, or better at reading a room for its own sake. It's about doing the same thing you'd do for anyone whose support you need to do your job well, understanding what they're actually carrying, giving them what genuinely helps rather than what's easiest for you to offer, building the relationship before the moment you need to draw on it, and being willing to say the harder thing when it actually matters. The leaders who find this hardest are usually the ones who've decided that the person above them should simply trust them by default, without needing to be managed in any deliberate sense at all. In practice, nobody works that way, however senior they are.

If there's someone above you or across from you that you know you'll need firmly on side before the year's out, the account is still open now. It just won't be if you wait until the week you need the withdrawal.

Where does your own clear thinking tend to disappear, and whose crisis does it come back for?

Nicola Gunstone is an executive coach working with CEOs, MDs and leadership teams across the South East. If this is a live issue in your business, you can find out more about working with me or connect on LinkedIn.