Most of us learned this job from underneath. You spent years with a manager above you, you formed strong opinions about what they got right and what they got badly wrong, and then you got the title and inherited the same relationship from the other side. Almost all the advice available to a new manager points downwards. 1-1s, feedback, hiring, delivery, the difficult conversation you have been putting off. The person you report to gets a paragraph about keeping them informed.
I became an Engineering Manager at the start of covid. The company was not hiring, the role genuinely needed filling, and I had no idea what it entailed or whether I would be any good at it. I went in blind, which I have since found is a familiar story rather than an unusual one. I was not prepared for how much of the job pointed upwards.
Shielding your team is not managing your boss
Ask a manager how they handle their own boss and most of them will describe a filter. They take the pressure, the reorganisation rumours, the dates that were agreed without them, and they keep all of it off the team so people can get on with the work. That is protective, and most managers stop there.
It is also how a team becomes invisible. Your boss builds their picture of your team out of whatever crosses that boundary. If the only things that get through are the problems you could not contain, your team exists in their head as a series of problems.
Protecting your team from your manager and managing your manager are two different jobs. Most of us only do the first one. Keep the filter, and change what else you send through it.
Your boss got the job the same way you did
The Chartered Management Institute, working with YouGov, found that 82% of workers entering management have had no formal management or leadership training. That number gets quoted at new managers as reassurance. It applies just as much to the person you report to. They were probably a good engineering manager who got handed more teams, and nobody sat them down and explained how to run four of you at once either.
You are not managing an institution with a process for you. You are managing one person with too many teams, a director asking them questions they cannot answer, and no more training than you got.
Lazear, Shaw and Stanton, in The Value of Bosses, found that replacing a bottom-decile boss with a top-decile one raises a team’s total output by more than adding an extra worker to a team of nine. It surprised me when I first read it. The person above you is one of the larger inputs into how your team performs, and you have more say in which version of them you get than you are using.
Send the update before anyone asks for it
I use the traffic light system for this. Red, amber and green against the milestones that matter, sitting at the very top of the update, with the detail underneath for anyone who wants it. Most people will read the colours and nothing else, and that is what it is for. It catches the glancers, which is most of your audience above you.
Underneath that, structure the detail so the high level comes first and there is a predictable path down into the specifics. I call it high level first nested wiki pages, which is not a catchy name, but the principle holds. A manager who has to dig will either stop digging or start digging the week before a deadline, when they need to explain your team to someone else.
Be careful about which numbers you send up. Anything you report becomes a target, and the metrics that are easiest to send are usually the ones that damage the team fastest. I have written separately about measuring engineering teams without breaking them, and the short version is that the numbers you volunteer upward should describe delivery and health, never individual output.
Your engineers are discussed in rooms you are not in
Promotions do not get decided in the 1-1 where you tell someone you are putting them forward. I have promoted engineers at every level from junior to principal, and I have sat in the calibration conversations where a staff promotion has to be signed off by other managers who have never worked with the person. What carries those rooms is whether the case can be made in a sentence by someone other than you.
When I go to promote you, I want other managers to question why we hadn’t done it already, and not be having to convince them.
The same is true one level up. Your boss will be asked about your team when you are not there, in a budget conversation, a headcount conversation, or a reorganisation. If they cannot say what your strongest engineer delivered last quarter without opening a document, that is not their failure. You had months to give them the sentence and you spent all of them on status.
So give them the sentence. Not a paragraph of context, one line they can repeat. Do it for each person on your team, at least once a quarter, in words that mean something to someone outside engineering.
Get your own expectations written down
I spent years of my career chasing promotions built on promises from people who could not themselves articulate what was expected of me. One manager greenlit an external training course for me in a 1-1 and then rescinded it a few weeks later with a line I still find astonishing to type out.
‘My promise is worth the paper it’s written on.’
I did not push back, because I was young and had no reference point for how any of this was supposed to work. You do have one. You are a manager now, and you can ask your own boss for the same clarity you give your reports.
Questions worth taking into your next 1-1 with them:
- What does good look like for me in six months, specifically enough that we would both recognise it?
- What would need to be true for you to put me forward for the next level?
- What are you being asked about my team that you cannot currently answer?
- What do you need from me that you have not asked for because you assumed I was busy?
Then write down what they said and send it back to them. Not as a trap, as a record. Spoken expectations drift, usually in whichever direction suits the person under the most pressure. This is the same work I would tell any new manager to do with their team in their first 90 days, pointed in the other direction.
Bring the decision, not the complaint
Escalating a problem without a choice attached wastes everybody’s time.
‘We’re not going to hit the date. The API work turned out to be much bigger than we scoped.’
That is true and it is useless. It hands the whole problem across intact, to somebody who knows less about it than you do.
‘We’re not going to hit the date at current scope. Two options. We cut the reporting screen and hit it, or we keep scope and land three weeks late. My recommendation is cutting the screen, because no customer has asked for it and support has not raised it once. I need a decision by Thursday.’
Same news. The second version gives them something they can act on, and something they can take upward without translating it.
They will sometimes pick the other option. That is the deal, and you have to be able to live with it, because a recommendation you would resent losing is not a recommendation, it is a demand with better manners.
That conversation is worth practising before it counts. Our AI Management Simulator drops you into it with a boss who pushes back, so you can get the wording wrong somewhere it costs you nothing.
Send the bad news yourself, early
Every new manager looks for a reason to delay a difficult conversation, and tells themselves they will give it another two weeks. That instinct does not only apply to the engineer who is struggling. It applies to the slip you have not reported yet, because you are hoping the next sprint absorbs it and nobody ever has to know it happened.
The escalation you delay is the one that reaches your boss from somebody else, usually a product manager, usually in a meeting where they cannot defend you because they are hearing it for the first time as well.
I do not need you to have fixed it before you tell me. I need to not find out about it from somebody else.
That is a lower bar than most managers set for themselves before they are willing to escalate.
Some bosses cannot be managed
There is a version of this article where every relationship upwards is fixable with better updates and clearer recommendations. I do not believe it.
I worked in France for a leadership figure who set the mood of the entire office. On good days there were pastries, long lunches, real conversation, workshops about where we were going. On the bad days, usually the hungover ones, everybody sat in silence and tried not to be noticed, because people were known to be fired on the spot when it got bad enough. No status update manages that.
At another company, a junior engineer asked to come in two hours late and offered to stay late to make the time up, so he could go to a doctor’s appointment. The boss said no, do it outside work hours or take a day of holiday. The junior explained it was to take his mum to a breast cancer screening. The boss held his position. I left within three months, and on my last day he said it to me directly.
‘I think in hindsight you will see you are making a mistake.’
The limit on managing up is the character of the person above you. If you have done this work honestly for six months and nothing has changed, you are not failing at a technique. What you have is information about the organisation.
Final Thoughts
It is possible to get good at this and become excellent upwards and thin downwards. You have met that manager. Their updates are immaculate, their director loves them, and their engineers cannot get a decision out of them. All of this can be done for your team. It can also be done instead of them.
I find this half of the job harder to write about than any other part of it, because the version that works is invisible. Nobody notices the reorganisation that did not touch your team, or the headcount you kept because your boss could argue for it without you in the room. You will not get credit for any of it, and your team will never know it happened.
This is not the full picture either. Managing a skip level, managing a boss you have inherited mid-project, managing one who was your peer last month, all of those deserve their own treatment. Start with the two that cost nothing: send the update before it is asked for, and give your boss one sentence about each of your engineers that they can repeat without you.
