Managing up effectively means framing your team’s needs in terms of what your senior leader actually cares about, not what you care about. Lia’s approach is to translate burnout and morale concerns into concrete risk-and-mitigation language that speaks directly to a leader’s bottom-line priorities. This episode is most useful for managers, team leads, and founders who feel squeezed between their team’s needs and leadership’s demands.
This episode is part of the Managing Up series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…managing up is how do you influence people that are more senior to you…”
“We have to negotiate in terms of what the other person cares about. This is managing up.”
“That argument is not going to get you any more resources. That argument’s not going to get you more headcount.”
“She got three more head count. Literally this works, my friends.”
“…micromanaging is really not about our team. It’s about us, right? It’s about our own anxieties and the pressure we’re under.”
Episode highlights
The direction most managers forget to look
Most managers get good at looking downward (what does the team need?) and outward (what are the priorities?). But there is a third direction that gets overlooked because it looks different in every organization: managing up. Managing up means influencing people who are more senior than you, your own manager, VPs, executives, board members, investors, or even clients. Lia’s point is direct: when you get this right, managing down and managing outward get dramatically easier.
Why leading with burnout does not get you more resources
Your team is spread thin. People are getting sick. Everyone is complaining. You feel the weight of it, so you go to the VP or the CFO and say the team is on the brink of burnout. And they look at you and essentially say, it is a tough economy, what do you want me to do?
Lia is blunt here: in the current environment, employee wellbeing is not typically the reason financial decisions get made. That does not mean leaders should not care. It means that argument is not an influencing strategy. If the person holding the budget already knows the workload is brutal and has not acted, more evidence of stress is not going to move them.
The reframe that actually unlocks headcount
Lia coached a design manager in big tech whose team of four was doing the work of twenty. The manager wanted to go to the VP of engineering with the burnout argument. Lia redirected her.
The reframe: this is a risk management conversation. Four people, each carrying 25 percent of the workload. Two are already showing signs of strain. If they go out, you lose 50 percent of delivery capacity overnight. That is the framing, not wellbeing, but business risk.
The design manager used it. She got three additional headcount.
The principle behind it comes straight from Dale Carnegie: negotiate in terms of what the other person cares about. Before any upward ask, ask yourself what matters to that executive, that investor, that board member. Hitting the deadline? Beating a competitor? AI capability? Lower turnover? Frame the request around that, not around what you wish they would care about.
When your own manager undermines your delegation
You have built a strong delegation practice. Your team is owning work and thriving. Then your own manager starts asking for daily updates, pulling you into the middle, and treating you as a relay station for every question. The pressure lands on you, and suddenly you start micromanaging the same people you worked so hard to empower.
Lia has been there. She had a manager who on paper trusted her but, under pressure, would grab hold of every detail and ask constant questions about projects that were going fine. Micromanaging, as Lia says on the show, is about the manager’s own anxiety, not about the team’s competence.
The managing-up move for protecting delegation
When a higher-up starts breathing down your neck about delegated work, the answer is not to abandon delegation. It is to give your manager the information they need to feel safe letting go.
Lia’s example: she was overseeing a team member planning an event, a genuine strength of that person, not Lia’s. She went to her own manager and spelled out exactly what had been delegated, why that person was the right owner, what the review cadence looked like, and when updates would land. That one conversation stopped the micromanagement before it trickled down.
If the pressure is not going to ease no matter what, you manage back down. You tell your team member honestly that the project has high visibility across the company, so the communication cadence is going up. You make clear it is not about their competence. You give them the context so the extra check-ins do not feel like distrust.
Two situations, one skill
Managing up comes down to two moves:
1. Speak in terms of what matters to the decision-maker, not what matters to you. Connect every request to company priorities, competitive risk, or delivery outcomes. 2. Set clear context on what you have delegated, how you are monitoring it, and when you will report back. Give the person above you enough visibility that they do not feel the need to go around you.
Both moves signal strategic thinking. They free up your team, reduce the middleman trap, and build credibility with the people who control your operating environment. When you manage up well, managing down gets easier. That is the whole point.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 155: Where you go wrong managing up, and what to do instead. Managing up effectively means framing your team’s needs in terms of what your senior leader actually cares about, not what you care about. Lia’s approach is to translate burnout and morale concerns into concrete risk-and-mitigation language that speaks directly to a leader’s bottom-line priorities. This episode is most useful for managers, team leads, and founders who feel squeezed between their team’s needs and leadership’s demands.
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Full transcript (click to expand)
As a manager, we’re really, really good at looking downward and outward. When we talk about downward, that’s what our team members need. Do we have the right people in place? Have we load balance? Do folks have the right projects to be working on? And outward, what’s coming down the pipe? What are the priorities? What are the goals we have? How do we fit within the bigger picture? Hey, if we’ve nailed those two, we’re doing pretty good as a manager, but we might be missing one more direction we’ve got to be looking.
And this is a place we don’t talk about a lot because it’s something that might look different in every organization and it actually can be overlooked because we are so focused on that looking down and out. And that is managing up and managing up. I got to tell you is one of those skills that when you get it right, it actually makes the managing down and managing outward so much easier because managing up is how do you influence people that are more senior to you?
Now, if you’re a manager in a big company or in the corporate world, you know what this means. This is your own managers, your VPs, your executives, the folks up the chain. And if you’re a business owner, this might be influencing your investors or your board or the VC or even your clients. So we all have to be doing this really, no matter what, what our situation is managing, because this is one of those things that it’s overlooking it.
It’s making our jobs harder. And what are we about on this podcast? How to make your job easier. I’m Leah Garvin and this is the new manager playbook podcast where truly I am on a mission to make managing your team the easiest part of your job. And again, that’s why when we’re missing this one, managing up influencing people with more authority than you or who have some sort of power over you, I guess I would say for lack of a better word, when we’re missing that, well, you can imagine you’re missing a huge opportunity to be able to get what you want to be operating in a more strategic way to get your team what you want.
And I’m going to talk about two places where I see this matter the most. And that’s with getting more resources for your team. So that’s securing more money. Again, even if it’s from investors, we’re securing more headcount if you’re needing to hire more folks. And right now we’re in a moment where industries far and wide, we are all having to do more with less. So we don’t want to get more resources from folks that are holding the resources.
We really need to know how to do that. Now the other piece is around being able to delegate and that’s where it helps you build a stronger trust with your team and give them the responsibilities that they are eager for. They want to so that they can be leading, which is going to be taking work off your plate, which is going to make your job easier. So those two places, right? How to secure more resources and how to be delegating more effectively are two places that we really need to exercise these skills and managing up.
But I’m going to first talk about where do we fall short with these? The question came up last week when I was in Sydney, Australia, I was speaking at South by Southwest there and I did my keynote, how to be a manager people want to work for. This has been so fun to do both at South by Southwest Austin and in Sydney now really sharing with folks. What are those foundational skills that we need to deploy no matter if we’re new at managing or been doing it for decades so that our team members want to be a part of our team, right?
Because we talk about all the time, people don’t leave companies, living managers, how managers are, you know, are, are what drives engagement, all the things I talk about on the show. But we don’t always say like, well, when we’re a kick-ass manager, what does that mean? It means people stay. It means people are more motivated. It means people do better work. All that makes your job easier. It makes HR’s job easier. It means it makes executives jobs easier.
So we want to be a manager people want to work for because it actually creates this flywheel of engagement of retention of results that improves any business. I digress. So the question came up in the audience of, well, where does managing up come into play and how does this fit within the puzzle? And so as I was answering the question, I talked a little bit about both situations. One around the delegating is actually a piece of the talk.
So I’ll share that example here, but around how are we influencing stakeholders? And I’ve seen us go wrong in, in presenting the wrong information to someone that actually has the decision making power. And let me explain. So when we are looking at our team and folks are spread so thin and they’re on the brink of burnout and they’re so stressed and everyone is coming to you and complaining every single day and saying, Oh my God, there’s always so much work and there’s so many priorities and I don’t want to do this.
And everyone, and it’s weighing on you because you love your team and you want them to feel supported and you want them to be happy and you want them to have the resources that they need, um, to make sure that, you know, they’re, they’re thriving. So you want to escalate that problem. Feels like something you need to say something about, right? So you go to your own manager or maybe you go to the VP or you go to someone that’s controlling the budget.
Maybe it’s, you know, the CFO or your head of finance or whoever it is and you go to them and you say, gosh, my team, they’re at the brink of burnout. Everyone is struggling. I’m so worried about the wellbeing on the team. We’ve got to do something about it. And they look at you and say, Hey, like it’s tough, tough economy right now. What do you want to say? And they don’t give you resources. They don’t give you budget and they don’t care.
And maybe they care like from a humanity standpoint, but they’re not able to do anything about it. And the reason they’re not able to do anything about it is because people being on the brink of burnout or people’s wellbeing being compromised is not always, not typically, to be honest, that’s not a reason people make financial decisions typically. Let’s just call it what it is. When we are in this race against AI and against, you know, figuring out all this stuff in the competitive market, the, the economy where jobs are going, doing more with less, all the stuff I’m talking about, like, let’s just be real.
Folks being spread too thin is not a concern around like the bottom line. Now doesn’t mean I agree with it. I think it should be because when people are burned out, they quit and then you don’t have resources. You need to be able to deliver on your priorities and then you can’t actually keep up on a competitive level. So I don’t agree with it, but I want to be really, really clear with you. That argument is not going to get you any more resources.
That argument’s not going to get you more headcount. And I know this because I’ve seen it firsthand. When I worked in big tech, I coached a design manager who shared that exact same thing with me. And she said, we have four people doing the workload of what would need to be like 20 people to give people relief. People are spread so thin. They’re getting sick a lot. They’re missing work. They’re, they’re completely feeling disillusion. And I, I’m going to go to the VP of engineering and say like, Hey, my team’s burning out.
What can we do? And I said, Hey, I, I, I get it. But that person, they’re aware of the workload and their teams are under that same stress and pressure. They’re aware that we have 50 million priorities to get done because we have this competitor in the market and we’re trying to catch up to them. They’re aware of all that. So they already know the situation we’re in and that’s not changing anything, right? They didn’t already lessen the workload.
They didn’t already give you more resources. They already know that. So that argument isn’t going to do anything. And again, we’re not in a moment where leading with employee wellbeing is getting us anywhere. I’m just being really honest. It doesn’t mean we don’t care about it. It means we, we speak in terms of something someone’s going to understand. And this is an influencing strategy that is as old as time. Dale Carnegie talks about in his how to win friends and influence people.
We have to negotiate in terms of what the other person cares about. This is managing up. We think to ourself, well, what is important to that VP? What is important to that VC? What is important to that investor? What is important to that person that I want to get resources from? Hitting the deadline, having the project be successful, beating that competitor, whatever it is, get in their head. That’s what we say. And I told this design manager, I gave her that advice.
And I said, Hey, listen, at the end of the day, what, you know, from his standpoint, what is this wellbeing issue actually create? It means we will be slow on delivering our work. We have, if we have four people on the team, each one carries 25% of the workload. So losing one person meets 25% of the workload gone. This is a risk management conversation. And I suggested she frame it that way, risk management. We have these priorities.
We need to get them done. This is the risks I’m foreseeing. Two people are starting to kind of become sick more often. And if we don’t have two people in the wings, we’re ready to take on work. We could compromise 50% of the workload in one day. That was the framing. She got three more head count. Literally this works, my friends. I have, I have negotiated this and coach folks on how to negotiate this in the most high stakes under resource environments.
And we do it by managing up. We think in terms of what that person wants and we may not, Oh, I don’t know my VC. I don’t know what they want, or I don’t know this executive. I don’t know like what they really care about, or they say they care about wellbeing. That should be enough. Okay. We’ll look at where the company’s going. What is the broader organization prioritizing right now? If you work in a big company, everyone wants to have something to do with AI.
Everyone wants every single employee to like have AR AI on their radar, to be working on it in some capacity. Most of us, okay, maybe not everyone, but this is a theme that’s becoming more and more pervasive. Maybe you frame it in terms of how you’re going to upskill folks on AI. Maybe you frame it in terms of how you are going to lower turnover. If that’s a piece, how you’re going to do more with less, turn up the heat on deliverables, frame it in terms of whether what that person cares about.
And if you can’t quite tell where the company in the broader, sort of like where the tide is turning, frame it in terms of that, not what you care about, not what you wish people would care about. That’s not an influencing strategy, right? Talking about like, what would matter to us. It’s just not like, no, it doesn’t work. So that’s the first way we manage up. That’s the first place. I should say that it’s really important to be framing terms in terms of what folks want on their end, right?
What are the influencer person wants? What’s the decision maker? That’s how we manage up. Now the second place I talked about comes up with delegating. So you’ve, you’ve mastered all your skills delegating. You have delegated work on your team. You’ve built a really great flywheel of trust. Your team members are taking stuff on and they’re really knocking out of the park and you’re handing off more stuff and people feel really excited about it. That’s going on for a while.
And then you have a manager that, your own manager, your own higher up, who, when you delegate something, they’re asking you questions all the time about it and they want all the details and they want a daily update and they want to know this and that and the other. And it makes all the delegating that you’ve been doing a lot harder. And so you start getting a little bit more involved in the projects your team members are working on that they were doing really well on because you’re getting pressure from your own manager and your manager’s breathing down your neck and they’re asking you a million things.
And they’re like, Hey, I need to know what’s going on with this. Like you got to tell me. And they’re going to you instead of that team member treating you as a middleman and you’re having to figure this out. That is the other biggest place we’ve got to be managing up. And I know that one too, because I’ve been there. And that’s why it’s part of my talk because it is. And it’s, and it’s in the new manager playbook as well, because this is one of the places we like all the good behaviors that we learned around delegating and practice.
They go out the window. We’re getting pressure from our own manager, our own executives, our own board, our VCs, whoever. And we throw all the skills away and we start micromanaging our own team members. I’ve been there. I had a manager that like sort of on paper trusted me for a lot of things, but she was extremely kind of controlling about things. And when the pressure was on her, she would grab hold so, so tight and she’d need to know every single detail about a project.
And it was really hard on me because I was a high performer. I was managing a team that was doing well. There was really no reason for that behavior. But like we talked about on the show, micromanaging is really not about our team. It’s about us, right? It’s about our own anxieties and the pressure we’re under. So this manager, she was under pressure from her higher ups and she just put it right onto me and she would ask me questions and a million things about something.
And, and it, you know, of course, yeah, it made me feel like, well, what happened? Like, why don’t you trust me? And it was frustrating as the employee, but as a manager, okay, I’m a manager managing folks and have my own manager. This is where I had to manage up. And in one instance in particular, when I was overseeing a team member that was planning an event on our team, where event planning was that team member’s real strength.
And it wasn’t even my strength. That’s where I had to manage up and tell my own manager, Hey, here is what I’ve delegated and why this person is fantastic at events. She loves doing it. We have this cadence figured out. We’re going to review things on Wednesday and I will give you an update after that meeting. Uh, we’ll have kind of a status report. We send out every Friday. And if you need, need updates between that, let me know.
But you know, if like, I want to really empower her to own this and that conversation, if I didn’t have it, I would have just thrown away all my good delegating skills and been like, Hey, where’s the status of this? Or I just got asked about that. And, and I would have been breathing down her neck because it was happening to me. Now I say this because this really can be the Achilles heel with delegating that we were all good and well doing it.
But if someone starts to kind of get in the way of that and ask us, we, we throw all of it away. So what we have to do in that situation is manage up, say to our own managers, our own executives, whoever we’re dealing with saying, Hey, I, I trust my team. I have offloaded this project to this person because they can handle it. X, Y, Z, share. What is the plan? How are you delegating? How are you making sure that it’s going to go well?
What are the safeguards you put in place? You know, give them that sense of relief so that they aren’t doing that. So that they do let up a little bit. And then if they’re just not going to let up now, you manage back down and you tell your team or, Hey, you know, I, I trust you on this. I know that you’ve got this. This is one of those really high visibility projects that are getting a lot of eyes from all over the company.
And so this is something that we’re going to need to kind of up the level of communication. We might have more reviews on it. It’s not about you and your competence. It is about this, you know, the visibility of this or the high stakes nature of this project. So then just give your team member that context, right? If it’s something that you know, you’re not going to get a lot of relief around. Okay. Just like make it more transparent what’s going on behind the scenes.
So these two situations, when we are trying to influence someone that has the holder of the resources, so we can get a little bit of those resources. And when we are delegating and we got someone that’s breathing down our neck and is like getting in the way of all the good things that we’re trying to do, those are where you really want to exercise these skills and managing up. And what are those skills? They are communicating in terms of a, what matters to that person, what matters to that stakeholder, where the company’s going.
And B setting real clear context on what you’ve delegated, how you’ve done it, how you’re monitoring it, when you can inform that person. Those are the ways in which we manage up. And like I said, in the beginning of this conversation, when you do that, it makes your job so much easier because you find with the first example, you are speaking in the same language as that executive that’s controlling the resources. They feel her, they feel like, Hey, this person’s strategic.
They’re thinking about the right things. You get more resources, which is, you know, the whole reason you’re asking is to take the load off folks, make things easier. And the second, you’re able to actually hand off this thing that you believe this other person should be working on, right? This frees you up. It frees you up from being the middleman. You’re not the go-between. You’re not relaying every question and you’ve shown your own manager. Again, I’m being strategic.
I have identified the right person to work on this. This is how we’ve set it up for success. Both of those really show your competence as a leader. And that’s why, again, on this show, it is not a show for new managers. It’s tools for managers dealing with new and evolving situations, right? It’s for any manager day one to day a thousand day, 10,000, because this job is hard. And we are always in new situations being pushed to our edges.
And so we need tools to feel like, okay, I’ve got this. All right. You’ve got this manage up. It will make your job easier. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I ask my boss for more headcount when the answer is always no?
Stop leading with employee burnout or wellbeing. That argument rarely moves decision makers, especially when budgets are tight. Instead, frame the conversation as risk management. Figure out what your leader actually cares about, hitting a deadline, beating a competitor, delivering on a key initiative, and connect your staffing gap to that. If you lose one person on a four-person team, you lose 25% of your delivery capacity overnight. Present it that way. Speak in terms of what is at risk for the business, not what feels hard for your team.
My manager keeps asking me for constant updates on work I already delegated. How do I handle that?
You need to manage up before you start micromanaging your own team. Go to your leader and explain clearly what you delegated, who is handling it, why that person is the right fit, and exactly when and how you will give updates. Offer a specific cadence, like a Friday status report, so they know information is coming. That gives them enough confidence to back off. If they still need more visibility, be honest with your team member about the high-stakes nature of the project rather than silently hovering over their work.
What does managing up actually mean and why does it matter?
Managing up means influencing people who have more authority than you, whether that is your own manager, an executive, a board member, or an investor. Most leaders focus on managing their team and tracking priorities, but skip this direction entirely. When you manage up well, you get the resources your team needs, you protect the work you have delegated, and you come across as a strategic thinker rather than someone who just escalates problems. Skipping it makes everything else harder than it needs to be.
How do I frame a request for more resources without sounding like I'm just complaining about workload?
Think about what the person controlling the budget actually cares about, and anchor your request there. If the company is focused on AI, frame your ask around upskilling. If retention is a concern, connect understaffing to turnover risk. If delivery timelines are the pressure point, show how gaps in capacity create real project risk. The key is to translate your team's situation into the language that person already uses to make decisions. That shift from 'my team is overwhelmed' to 'here is the business risk' is what gets you a yes.
How do I stop my own manager's micromanaging from ruining the trust I've built with my team?
The moment you start getting pressure from your own leader, do not pass that pressure straight down to your team. Instead, have a direct conversation upward first. Share what you have delegated, explain why that person is capable, and offer a clear update schedule so your leader feels informed without needing to chase you. If your leader is still not going to ease up, then bring your team member into the context honestly. Let them know the project has high visibility and that more check-ins are coming, making it clear it is about the project stakes, not about their performance.