When your team is stretched thin, leading with burnout and wellbeing rarely unlocks resources. The move that actually works is reframing every request in terms of what the decision-maker cares about, whether that is deadlines, competitive risk, or delivery capacity. This episode is most useful for managers, founders, and operators caught between team needs and executive expectations.
This episode is part of the Managing Up series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…one of the biggest skills that we actually, I think we don’t talk about enough in managing teams is the need to manage up.”
“The more emotional, heightened state I’m in, the more the person’s like not interested in engaging and the worse I look like.”
“…when you kind of tease apart the emotions from the rational needs, now you can have a conversation where you’re kind of talking about trade offs and it just goes a lot better.”
“…framing things in terms of what their biggest concern is and then the risks and the trade offs, that is going to get you so much further.”
Episode highlights
The squeeze every manager knows
Your team is maxed out. Deadlines are tightening from above. You feel like a diamond being compressed from all sides. That pressure is real, and the instinct is to bring it straight to your boss. Lia’s argument: that instinct, if you follow it unchecked, will backfire.
The alarmist trap (and why it makes you look bad)
When you walk into a senior leader’s office in a heightened emotional state, sounding the alarm about burnout and people quitting, two things tend to happen. The leader shuts down and stops engaging, or they start to wonder whether you can handle the situation at all. Lia is direct: “The more emotional, heightened state I’m in, the more the person’s like not interested in engaging and the worse I look like. It looks like I can’t handle the situation as a leader.” She’s been burned by this herself, taking on her team’s anxiety and carrying it upward, only to have it land badly.
Speak the language of the person you’re managing up to
Before you walk into that conversation, ask one question: what does this person actually care about? Is it budget? Hitting a launch date? Not blowing a resource plan? That answer tells you exactly which risk to name. Most managers default to talking about morale and team happiness, which are things leaders often do not prioritize in the room. Translate your real concern into the currency that lands with this specific person.
The resource conversation that actually worked
Lia coached a manager at a large tech company who needed more designers on a product with severely imbalanced ratios (four designers to roughly fifty engineers). The manager’s instinct was to go to the engineering VP and talk about burnout, sick days, and people losing steam. Lia reframed the entire ask.
The pitch became pure risk math: with four people each carrying 25% of the load, losing one team member meant immediately dropping to 75% of deliverables. One additional resource brings everyone to 20% ownership and creates real buffer. Two resources and the launch is genuinely protected. The VP heard a risk-to-ship-date conversation, not a morale complaint. He approved the resources immediately.
From the manager’s side, more resources meant less burnout and a clear signal to her team that she had gone to bat for them. Win on both levels, because the framing matched the audience.
Separating emotions from the rational ask
Lia is not saying morale does not matter. She is saying that emotional investment in your team can actually get in the way of articulating what you need. The rational ask underneath the stress is almost always concrete: more people, more budget, a change in scope or schedule. When you strip the emotion from the ask, you can have a real trade-offs conversation and that goes a lot more smoothly.
The framework in one sentence
Frame the problem as a risk, name the mitigation, and connect both to what your leader cares most about. That is managing up. It works whether you are a manager inside a company, a founder talking to a board, or a leader reporting to investors.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 202: How to manage up when your team needs more support. When your team is stretched thin, leading with burnout and wellbeing rarely unlocks resources. The move that actually works is reframing every request in terms of what the decision-maker cares about, whether that is deadlines, competitive risk, or delivery capacity. This episode is most useful for managers, founders, and operators caught between team needs and executive expectations.
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Full transcript (click to expand)
0:00
One of the biggest skills that we actually, I think we don’t talk about enough in managing teams is the need to manage up. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less. I’m Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant for this show am I programs with small businesses and corporate teams. I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time money.
Most of all, stress doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realize that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Are a new manager learning the ropes, or are a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more. We leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing. Kind of hate it and everything in between.
Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. You know those days when things are coming at you from all angles, you got your team members asking you for help and help, figuring out problems and to do all this. And then you got your own leadership coming in. Turning up the heat on deadlines and you feel like, gosh, I can’t I can’t ask my team to do one more thing. They’re just gonna, like, explode and burn out and quit, and you feel like you are a diamond in a lump of coal just being squeezed from all angles.
And it feels like, what am I going to do? How are we to get through this? Well, that’s why today I want to talk about managing up, because for folks listening that work in a situation where they have their own manager or leadership to respond to, even if you’re a business owner or you have a board or you have stakeholders or investors, right, this might show up for you. They’re a One of the biggest skills that we actually, I think we don’t talk about enough in managing teams is the need to manage up.
So a lot of times we’re managing down. We’re managing our teams of people. But under us that we oversee and maybe we’re managing peers and kind of like stakeholders and we’re getting things, you know, like we’re collaborating with people horizontally. Then there is, well, what do we do to really set expectations with with people senior to us? Now I’m going to talk about where we usually go wrong. And then I’ll share what I, what I would suggest you do instead.
So a lot of times what I, what I see, and I frankly have experienced and done wrong in, in the corporate role as a manager was when I’m feeling like a lot under a lot of pressure and my team is coming to me complaining we can’t take more on and the deadlines are too tight and there’s too much work. Then I start feeling that emotional energy and I go to my boss saying like, this is impossible.
What are we going to do? People are going to quit and we go with this alarmist, you know, really emergency tone. Now, if we if we bring that, I’m just going to say it straight. If we bring this to a senior senior executive and we’re coming in complaining and a little bit like they’re just going to say, like it’s too bad that that typically shuts people down. Not saying it’s fair, not saying it’s right, but that’s what I’ve observed firsthand.
The more emotional, heightened state I’m in, the more the person’s like not interested in engaging and the worse I look like. It looks like I can’t handle the situation as a leader. And I’ve really been burned in that situation where I kind of take on the energy of my team, and then it looks like, well, I’m either not able to handle this situation or I’m actually making this more of an issue than even it is. And that’s not what you’re doing as a manager.
I’m not saying that, but that can be interpreted that way. So I want to help us avoid that. The other thing that can happen is not only to say, I’m going to shut it down, right? Like you’re not actually able to communicate the real problem, right? And so what do we want to do instead, my friends, is when we approach a leader about deadlines or timelines or resources or or project scope, whatever it is, we really want to frame the problem in terms of, hey, you know what’s going on and talk about risks, okay.
Talk about risks and mitigations. And what are the things this person cares about? Is this person’s biggest concern. This leader we’re going to is it budget. Are they like a stickler for numbers and hitting budget. Is it about resources. Is it that this schedule can’t be missed? We have this launch and it’s like sink or swim first thinking about that, because that’s the risk you’re going to speak to because that’s what that person cares about okay.
So this is big, right? Once we’ve thought about that because frankly, what we usually do wrong, I’m to add another one. We think about what we’re concerned about, which honestly usually is that more morale of the team folks quitting, folks complaining of you folks being freaking out. That’s not what the leader thinks about. They’re thinking about higher level things like, is this thing going to happen or not? And we’re going to be spending too much money or not, like really like bottom line type of things.
So you have to come to them with the thing they care about. Do you want some hands on support for all of the topics I talk about on this show? Like a team expert who has worked within tech giants like Apple and Google, as well as small businesses on hand to help you delegate and get out of the weeds, handle tough conversations with team members within your hiring strategy, and get your teams to help bring in more revenue.
Then it’s time to sign up for my team Whisper Consulting sprint for 90 days. You have me in your back pocket to help you navigate any and every issue happening on your team. DM me the word Sprint on Instagram or email me at [email protected] and let’s build your unstoppable team. Let me give you me, let me share a little story, okay, of how I coached a manager in a large tech company and how to do this.
So she came to me and said, oh my God, my, we need to get more resources on this project like we have for designers was a major, major product in this in this tech company that was had, I don’t know, was 4 to 5 designers, like 50 engineers. The ratios were really off. And she said if people are burning out there, they’re losing steam. Folks are calling in sick. If we lose a few team members, you know, like this, whole products can go down.
I got to go tell the engineering VP that, you know, hey, everyone’s burned out people to start quitting. And I said, gotta stop right there. This engineering VP, what he cares about is, is this product going to ship or not? That’s what he cares about. He doesn’t care about if your team is happy or not. Sorry to say it. Like we’ve seen this. This person in action doesn’t care. Now again, that’s a different issue that it’s for another day.
But we’re talking about what do what have we observed this person’s biggest priority and it was shipping the product or not. So I said well instead of talking about burnout and morale, which are things I love that you care about and you are going to still focus on, but we’re going to frame it in terms of what this guy cares about. And it was risks to the launch date and we said, okay, we have four people on the team.
Each person is caring 25% of the capacity of the load. So if one person goes down, we are already out of the gate, can only deliver 75% of the deliverables. We’re just like already unable to finish the work. So we’re asking for an additional resource to mitigate the risk to bring everyone’s kind of ownership load from 25% down to 20. And if we could get two resources, we’re really looking much better, right? Because now we have a level of buffer where people can load balance.
If someone calls in sick, if someone has a vacation, whatever it is that we can get this done. So this is risk management purely. Now from his point, he said, okay, I get it. And he gave her the resources right away. From her standpoint, getting more resources was able to alleviate the burnout and the stress and to show her team, hey, I am covering you. I am making sure we’re okay. So it really was a win win because we were able to speak the language of the person we were managing up to, and then when she managed back down to her team, she said, hey, I went and I fought for these resources.
Like, I really hear what you’re saying. And so again, this conversation is not about like, how do we get senior executives in our companies to care more about morale? Okay, that’s for another day. And I and I do do a lot of work on that too. But this is about how you when you’re in a position of feeling squeezed, how do you communicate really the needs. And that’s all about risk management. And it’s all about, you know, framing in terms of pros and cons.
What does that person care about? What have you already tried? Right. Really I understand. And again I said it. I get so emotionally invested in my team and like their morale that I can bring that right. Like, you know, I’m living it with them. But I have found that that heightened emotional state, it actually doesn’t allow you to kind of often it doesn’t. A lot of you explain what you’re actually asking for, and you’re asking for this risk that you foresee that you’re feeling and living and breathing to be lessened.
And that can be done through more people, more budget, a change in the schedule and things like that. And those are very rational asks and when you when you kind of tease apart the emotions from the rational needs, now you can have a conversation where you’re kind of talking about trade offs and it just goes a lot better, look a lot more smoothly. Okay, so that is my strategy for managing up, talking about the risks, mitigating the risks, really in terms of what that leader that you’re talking to cares about.
And again, it could be similar if you are a business owner or a founder and you’re talking to your investors or you’re talking to the VC that you work with, right? Whoever it is and, and your board framing things in terms of what their biggest concern is and then the risks and the trade offs, that is going to get you so much further. All right. And and I am so excited to share of the new manager playbook comes down to January 27th where I talk about all these things right.
How do you navigate feedback and set expectations and deal with conflict and have that not have to have that conversation about your team every promotion every two weeks? Right. Like these are the things that we have to wrestle with in order to really feel like we’re setting up our team well, but that this whole managing thing is a lot easier. Okay, so that comes out January 27th. I am so excited to share with that with you.
Head to liagarvin.com/newbook to get on the list for exclusive updates related to launch. So you’re not going to want to miss that, but I’m going to give out a lot of freebies, tools, tricks, things that are not even in the book. All right. See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.
With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.
Questions this episode answers
How do I ask my boss for more resources without sounding like I'm complaining?
Stop leading with morale, burnout, or team stress. Those concerns are real, but senior leaders are usually focused on higher-level outcomes like budget, timelines, and whether a project ships. Frame your ask around risks to the things they care most about. If they care about hitting a launch date, show them how your current capacity creates a real risk to that date, then present adding resources as a way to mitigate that risk. Keep the emotion out of it and focus on trade-offs. That approach gets you taken seriously and gets results.
Why does going to my manager emotionally about team problems backfire?
When you bring a heightened, urgent, or alarmist tone to a senior leader, it often signals that you can't handle the situation, even if the situation is genuinely hard. The leader disengages, and you leave the conversation without actually communicating what you need. The emotional energy you absorb from your team is real, but taking it straight to leadership usually makes things worse. Separating the emotion from the rational ask, like more headcount or a schedule change, lets you have a productive conversation about real trade-offs.
What is the right way to manage up when your team is overwhelmed?
Think about what the person you're going to actually cares about, whether that's budget, a launch date, or hitting a number. Then frame your team's situation as a risk to that specific concern. Show what happens if nothing changes, for example, if one person leaves you can only deliver 75% of the work. Then present a clear ask, such as one or two additional people, as a way to reduce that risk. This risk management framing speaks the leader's language and gives them a reason to act right away.
How do I tell my team I tried to get them help without overpromising?
Once you've had the conversation with leadership and advocated for your team's needs using risk-framing, go back to your team and tell them exactly what you did. Let them know you heard their concerns, you took those concerns to leadership, and here is what came from it. If you secured more resources or a schedule change, share that win clearly. This shows your team that managing up on their behalf is something you take seriously, which builds trust and helps reduce the pressure they are feeling.
Does managing up apply to founders talking to investors or a board?
Yes, the same approach applies. If you are a founder or business owner going to investors, a board, or a VC with a problem, lead with what they care about most, usually financial risk, return, or business viability. Frame the situation as a risk to those priorities and present the trade-offs clearly. Coming in emotionally or focused on internal team dynamics will not land the way you want. Talking in terms of risks and mitigations, in the language of the people you report to, gets you much further.