I got told to "manage up"

Somebody said that to me a few weeks ago. Not a client — I don't coach employees, and I'll get to why that matters. Just a person who found out what I do and wanted to run something by me.

Here's what happened to them.

They went to their company's leadership coach. The company has one on staff, which is more than most places this size can say. They laid out the problem: decisions that don't hold, a boss who goes quiet when the news is bad, a meeting every week that produces nothing anyone can act on.

The coach listened. Then told them they needed to learn to manage up.

And it was delivered like a gift. There was a tone. This was an opportunity. A growth area. The thing the high performers figure out — and here they were, being let in on it early, because somebody saw something in them.

They told me they felt pretty good about it for most of an afternoon.

What they were actually told

Let me translate it, because it took them a few weeks and it shouldn't take you that long.

Manage up means: it's yours now. My moods are yours. My disdain for straightforward honesty is now a skill you need to develop around. Learn me. Anticipate me. Handle me. And do it quietly, because the one thing that cannot happen is this becoming my problem.

They were being asked to manage the person whose job was managing them. And they were being told it was a promotion in everything but pay.

The part I keep coming back to is who said it. Not a manager protecting themselves. The leadership coach. The one person in that building whose entire function is developing leaders looked at a leadership failure and assigned the work to the person underneath it.

And I've seen this enough to stop calling it a bad coach. The intentions are usually fine. A company brings somebody in, genuinely wanting to invest in their people — and then points that investment at the level where the symptoms show instead of the level where the problem lives. The coach gets hired by the people who need that work most, and gets sent to work on everyone else.

They didn't do anything wrong

I asked them to walk me back through it and find the failure that earned them that conversation.

There wasn't one. They hit their numbers. They covered for people. They stayed late on the thing nobody else would touch.

What they actually failed at was absorption. The person above them can't make a decision and hold it, goes quiet when the news is bad, runs a meeting that wastes eleven people's hour. They'd been carrying that for a year. And they didn't carry it invisibly enough — some of it showed, in a meeting or an email or the look on their face — so they got pulled aside and told to get better at carrying it.

That's the whole offense. The strain leaked.

Nobody says it that way, because said that way it's indefensible. So it gets called development.

What the next six months look like

I told them what was coming, because I've watched it enough times to know the shape. If you're reading this and it's already your life, you don't need me to describe it. Skip ahead.

You have the number by Tuesday. It's bad. You don't send it Tuesday. You hold it, because Tuesday is a bad day for your boss and Thursday is usually better, and you've learned that the same information gets a different reception depending on what happened to them in the parking lot that morning. So you sit on it. Two days where somebody could have been fixing it, and you were waiting for weather.

You write the email. Then you rewrite it, because the first version was accurate and the accurate version gets a response you don't want. So you soften it. Then you soften it again. By the fourth draft there's a sentence in there that isn't quite a lie, but nobody reading it would understand how bad this actually is. You send that one. You're proud of how careful it was.

You need a decision. You don't ask directly, because when you ask directly they say whatever gets you out of the office and then change it later. So you find the person they actually listen to this month and you get to them first, and you let it come back around as somebody else's idea. It works. You've gotten good at this.

You stop raising the thing that's been broken since spring. Not because you gave up. Because you raised it twice and both times it cost you something, and there's a running arithmetic in your head now about what raising a problem costs versus what living with it costs, and living with it keeps winning.

And the whole time, you're being told you're growing.

The part that actually hurts

You get good at it.

That's what nobody warns you about. You'll develop real skill here. You'll get sharp at reading a face across a room. You'll learn to shape information so it survives contact. You'll build genuine, hard-won expertise in the emotional maintenance of one specific difficult person.

None of it transfers. None of it goes on a resume. You can't put learned to time bad news around my boss's mood under skills. It makes you better at exactly one job, under exactly one person, and the day they leave or you leave, all of it is worth nothing.

You spend a year of your working life getting excellent at something that made you no more valuable than you were before. And you were told it was development.

That's the real cost. Not the stress, though there's plenty. It's the year.

The honest part

I told them this too, because it's true and because they'd have found it on their own eventually.

There is a legitimate version of managing up. Understanding how your boss takes in information. Giving them context before they ask. Communicating the way they actually absorb things. That's being good at your job, and every working relationship has some of it in it.

The difference is who it's asked of, and what it's being asked to fix.

Managing up as courtesy is fine. Managing up prescribed as the solution to a leadership problem is a leader outsourcing their own development to the people who report to them — and getting to call it their development while they do it.

What I actually told them to do

I can't fix their boss. I was a stranger at a table. But there are four things inside their control, and they're the same four for anyone in this.

Say it once, cleanly, in writing, to someone who can act. Not a complaint, not a list, no history. Two sentences:

I want to flag a pattern. [What keeps happening, stated as fact], and the cost has been [time, rework, money, or people].

Three rules make it land. No adjectives — "frustrating," "unclear," "toxic" all convert it from a fact into a feeling somebody can dispute. No names. And put a number on the cost if you have one, even a rough one, because a number is the only part that survives being repeated to someone else.

Then stop. You've made the problem visible exactly once, on the record, without becoming the person who's always upset.

Then watch the next thirty days. Not what anyone says in response — what changes. That's your answer. If the pattern moves, you're somewhere worth investing in. If it doesn't, you have real information you didn't have before, and it cost you two sentences.

Stop calling it development. Not to them — to yourself. The minute you name it accurately you can price it, and the minute you can price it you can decide whether you're willing to keep paying. Half the damage here is done by the label. It keeps people from noticing they're spending something.

Keep one real skill growing on the side. Something that transfers. Something that belongs to you and not to the arrangement. If the next year is going to include a lot of emotional maintenance, it should not be the only thing you got better at.

And if nothing moves after all that, the question stops being how to fix it. It becomes how long you're willing to fund it. That's not advice to quit. It's advice to stop pretending the decision isn't in front of you.

If you're an owner reading this, this part is yours

You may not be the boss in that story. That's the thing I need you to not hide behind.

You hired them. You've kept them. You've had the reports — maybe not in those words, but you've had them. A resignation that came out of nowhere. A manager who burns through good people and always has a reason. The thing somebody said on the way out that you decided was sour grapes.

And you've run the same arithmetic your people run. The conversation is expensive. They've been here a long time. The numbers are okay. So it stays.

That's the diagnosis. Not a bad manager — you can get one of those by accident. A company rotting from the inside because the one person with the authority to stop it decided the cost of stopping it was higher than the cost of letting it continue.

Rot doesn't announce itself. It happens under the floor while the numbers still look fine. Your best people are leaving over it right now and telling you they're pursuing other opportunities, and you're filing that, and it isn't true, and somewhere you know it isn't.

Here's the tell. Your people are very good at managing you. Every hour of that is skill and judgment spent producing nothing, and you're paying for all of it. The bill arrives as surprise: problems that reach you late and reach you clean, fully grown in your office in November, small in April, and somebody knew in April and did the arithmetic and decided it wasn't worth it.

That wasn't disloyalty. That was taught. Patiently, over months, one reaction at a time. And you signed the checks the whole way.

The training that doesn't exist

Last week I wrote about why I won't coach a client's employees — what it costs a team when the training lands and the leadership doesn't move.

This is the sharpest version of it I've seen. A company paid for a leadership coach. That coach got handed a leadership problem and sent the employee away with homework.

Nobody in that building ever got scheduled for a course on how to be a person worth telling the truth to.