Managing up without losing yourself
There’s a particular kind of tension senior leaders rarely admit out loud
You’re experienced enough to see the gaps in executive thinking. You’re close enough to the work to understand the real constraints. You’re senior enough to feel accountable for outcomes you don’t fully control. And you’re self aware enough to know that pushing too hard, too fast, or in the wrong way can backfire.
This is the quiet, unspoken reality of managing up. Not the text book version, but the lived version. The version where you’re constantly calibrating:
How honest can I be here,
How much context do they actually want,
How do I challenge this without triggering defensiveness,
How do I protect my team without looking obstructive, and
How do I influence this decision without overstepping.
Managing up is not a soft skill. It’s not a “nice to have.”
For senior product and transformation leaders, it’s a core leadership competency, a political skill. One that determines whether your work gets the sponsorship, resourcing, and organisational alignment it needs to succeed.
But here’s the part most leaders struggle with: how do you manage up effectively without losing yourself in the process? Let’s break it down.
Managing up is not about impressing executives
It’s about protecting the work.
When leaders avoid managing up, it’s rarely because they don’t know how. It’s because they’re trying to protect something:
Their integrity,
Their authenticity,
Their team,
Their boundaries,
Their reputation, or
Their emotional energy.
But the irony is that avoiding managing up doesn’t protect any of those things. It erodes them.
When you don’t shape the environment above you, the environment shapes you, and not always in ways that serve your leadership or your team.
Managing up is not about pleasing executives, performing alignment, being agreeable, selling yourself, or playing politics for the sake of it.
Managing up is about creating the conditions for your work to succeed. It’s leadership, not self promotion.
Why managing up is especially complex for product and transformation leaders
Most leaders manage up to one executive. You manage up to an ecosystem. You’re accountable to strategy, delivery, technology, operations, finance, customer, risk, culture, and more. And each executive sees the world through a slightly different lens.
This means you’re not just managing up, you’re managing multiple interpretations of reality.
You’re the connective tissue between functions that don’t naturally align. You’re the translator between teams that speak different languages. You’re the person executives look to when they want clarity, but the person they challenge when clarity requires trade offs they don’t like.
That’s why managing up feels so emotionally loaded. You’re not just influencing decisions, you’re navigating identity, power, and perception.
The real reason managing up feels draining
It’s not the conversations. It’s the constant calibration. You’re always reading the room:
What’s their appetite for risk today,
What’s their emotional state,
What’s happening politically behind the scenes,
What’s the real question underneath the question,
What’s the cost of pushing here, and
What’s the cost of staying silent.
This is the emotional labour. The invisible, unacknowledged, and absolutely essential work. And when leaders don’t have the language for this labour, they internalise it as stress, frustration, self doubt, exhaustion, or resentment.
The problem isn’t you. It’s that you’re doing high stakes influencing work without a framework. So let’s build one.
The four anchors of managing up without losing yourself
Clarity of intent
Before you walk into any executive conversation, ask yourself:
What am I actually trying to achieve?
What outcome matters most?
What am I protecting?
What am I willing to flex on?
What am I not willing to compromise?
Leaders lose themselves when they enter conversations without a clear internal anchor.
Clean framing
Executives don’t want a download. They want a decision frame. High impact leaders use:
“Here’s the situation…”
“Here are the options…”
“Here’s my recommendation…”
“Here’s what I need from you…”
Clean framing signals maturity and reduces friction.
Boundaries with backbone
Managing up doesn’t mean saying yes. It means saying yes intentionally. High impact leaders hold boundaries like:
“We can do that, but here’s what we’d need to deprioritise,”
“We can move faster, but quality will drop,” or
“We can take this on, but we’ll need sponsorship to unblock X.”
Boundaries are not resistance. They’re helpful in shaping where and how you ask for help as well as understanding what help you need with. That’s leadership.
Emotional neutrality
Not emotional suppression. Emotional neutrality. It sounds like:
A calm tone,
Steady pacing,
No defensiveness,
No urgency leakage or desparation, and
No emotional spikes.
Executives interpret your emotional tone as a signal of your leadership readiness.
Neutrality is not detachment. It’s objective authority.
The three mistakes that erode your influence upwards
Over explaining. When leaders feel insecure, they add detail. Executives interpret excessive detail as uncertainty,
Escalating too late. By the time you escalate, the problem is already political, and
Protecting your team at the expense of transparency. Shielding your team is noble, but executives can’t support what they can’t see.
The leaders who manage up well do this one thing consistently
They make the invisible visible. Early, calmly, and without drama. They surface:
Risks,
Trade offs,
Dependencies,
Constraints,
Organisational friction, and
Decision points.
Not to complain. Not to justify. Not to cover their ass. But to create shared reality.
Shared reality is the foundation of executive trust.
If managing up feels hard, it’s because you’re doing the real work of leadership
You’re navigating power dynamics. You’re shaping decisions you don’t fully control. You’re absorbing emotional and political complexity. You’re protecting your team whilst influencing your executives. You’re carrying responsibility without always having the authority to do so.
This is not a sign you’re failing. Far from it. It’s a sign you’re operating at the level where leadership becomes relational, not operational. And it’s a skill you can strengthen without losing yourself.
If you want to manage up with clarity, confidence, and integrity, let’s work on this together. Here are three ways:
Influencing for Impact: This practical 2-day workshop is for you if you want to influence a decision maker, influence a change in customer or colleague behaviour, or influence someone to buy something from you,
Executive and Leadership Team Coaching: Work directly with Lai-Ling to problem solve for your specific situation in a confidential setting. This is for you if you want to develop and execute on a game plan that is 100% tailored to you, or
Leadership Development: Invest in the product and transformation leaders in your company with leadership development that is customised for their role. This is for you if you want your people to learn about people and politics.