What Gets in the Way of Managing Up? 6 Common Barriers
Six barriers that can get in the way of Managing Up
You’ve probably come across a high-performing leader who delivers excellent work, cares deeply about the organization, and consistently gets results, yet their ideas do not always gain traction, their contributions are sometimes overlooked, or they are brought into important conversations too late. Maybe you’ve experienced this yourself.
If performance is not the problem, what is getting in the way?
And if managing up is so valuable, why do so many professionals struggle to do it effectively?
Done well, managing up can help your work become more visible, strengthen your relationship with leadership, improve alignment, increase your strategic contribution, and create better outcomes for the organization.
Through writing The Art of Managing Up and working with professionals and leaders across organizations, I have seen six barriers appear repeatedly.
Not all of these barriers come from the same place. Some are rooted in mindset, including what we believe about visibility, authority, and our own ability to contribute. Others reflect skills that become increasingly important as we take on greater responsibility, such as communicating with impact and seeing beyond our own role or expertise. And some are relational, shaped by the relationships and thought partnerships we build, or fail to build, across the organization.
This is also why high performance alone does not automatically eliminate these barriers. You can be exceptionally excellent in your role and still encounter one or more of them.
Understanding what may be getting in your way is the first step. Let’s explore each of the six barriers.
1. The visibility barrier
Sarah is an accomplished leader who values humility and teamwork.
She does excellent work, gives her team credit, and rarely talks about her own contribution.
When someone recognizes something she led, her instinct is to say:
"It was nothing."
"The team did everything."
"I was just doing my job."
Sarah believes she's being humble.
But over time, something happens.
Her work remains strong, while her individual contribution becomes increasingly difficult for senior leaders to see.
This is the visibility barrier.
Sometimes what gets in the way of managing up begins with what we believe.
“My work should speak for itself.”
That belief often come from a good place.
You may value humility.
You may believe strongly in merit.
You may want your work to be judged on its quality rather than on how well you talk about it.
None of those are problems.
The problem begins when humility is interpreted as staying silent about your contribution, when merit is assumed to speak for itself, or when talking about your impact is treated as the opposite of doing meaningful work.
That creates a false choice:
Either I do excellent work, or I talk about it.
Either I am humble, or I make my contribution visible.
But those are not opposites.
You can do excellent work and help others understand its value.
You can be humble and still clearly name your contribution.
You can give credit generously without erasing yourself from the story.
In The Art of Managing Up, I share a quadrant that illustrates how to manage up with greater awareness and integrity.
If your contribution is never named, over time the impact can become less visible to the people making decisions about responsibility, trust, and opportunity.
Humility is not the problem. Self-erasure is.
2. The authority barrier
Imagine a meeting where a decision is being discussed and you see a risk others have not raised.
You have relevant experience. You understand the issue. You may even have an idea that could improve the decision.
But then a thought enters your mind:
“I’m not senior enough to say that.”
So you wait.
You assume that if leadership wants your perspective, they will ask. Or you tell yourself that someone more senior probably sees what you see.
No one asks.
The meeting ends, and the decision moves forward without the perspective you could have contributed.
This is the authority barrier.
Many professionals unconsciously associate contribution with position. They assume that greater authority gives someone greater permission to question, challenge, recommend, or influence.
Formal authority matters. Roles and decision rights matter.
But your title does not determine whether you can add value.
As your career progresses, your contribution is increasingly measured not only by how well you execute what is asked of you, but by whether you can recognize what matters, raise what others may be missing, and contribute thinking that helps the organization make better decisions.
The authority barrier creates another false choice:
Either I respect the hierarchy, or I speak up.
Either I stay in my lane, or I contribute beyond my role.
But those are not opposites.
You can respect decision-making authority and still offer perspective.
You can disagree without being disrespectful.
You can challenge an assumption without challenging someone's authority.
When leaders continually wait for permission to contribute, organizations lose access to insight that already exists within the room.
Managing up requires understanding that having something valuable to contribute to a decision does not require having the authority to make that decision.
And contributing your perspective does not mean demanding that it be adopted.
You can offer an insight, challenge an assumption, or make a recommendation while remaining open to information you may not have and detached from whether your recommendation is ultimately implemented.
Your responsibility is to contribute what you see. The decision-maker’s responsibility is to decide.
You do not need to be the decision-maker to help improve the decision.
3. The self-trust barrier
Aisha has worked hard to earn her seat at the table.
She has the experience. She has delivered results. Other people recognize the value she brings..
But she is not always as convinced.
In a room with more senior leaders, she sometimes wonders:
“Who am I to be here?”
When an opportunity comes up, she questions whether she is ready.
When she succeeds, she may attribute it to timing, luck, or the support of others.
And when she makes a mistake, it can feel like evidence that perhaps she did not belong there in the first place.
So she prepares more.
Checks one more time.
Waits until the idea is fully formed.
Looks for more evidence before speaking with conviction.
Sometimes that makes her exceptionally prepared. But sometimes it keeps her from contributing at the level she is already capable of contributing.
This is the self-trust barrier.
The self-trust barrier can take different forms.
For some people, it sounds like imposter thoughts: “Maybe I don’t really belong here.”
For others, it shows up as perfectionism: “I need to know more before I’m ready.”
And sometimes it is quieter. You have spent so much time focusing on what you still need to improve that you have never fully taken stock of what you already know, what you have accomplished, and the value you consistently create.
This is what makes the self-trust barrier difficult to recognize. Your growth can outpace your belief in yourself.
You may already be operating at a higher level while still seeing yourself through an outdated picture of who you are and what you are capable of.
And that matters when managing up.
Because if you do not fully trust the value of your own experience, judgment, and contribution, you may unintentionally minimize them before anyone else has the opportunity to see them.
Self-trust does not mean believing you have nothing left to learn. It does not mean believing you are always right.
It means being able to recognize what you already bring to the table while remaining open to growth.
Sometimes the gap is not between where you are and where you need to be. It is between what the evidence says about you and what you have come to believe about yourself.
4. The Perspective Gap
Susan leads an important function.
She knows her team's challenges intimately and advocates fiercely for what they need.
When leadership doesn't approve a request, she becomes frustrated:
"They don't understand how important this is."
What Susan may not see is that leadership is balancing her team's needs against five other priorities, limited resources, risk, and organizational trade-offs.
She has a Perspective Gap.
The Perspective Gap happens when we become so focused on our own role, specialty, team, or department that we begin to treat what is most urgent to us as what should be most urgent to everyone.
This is understandable.
The closer we are to a problem, the more visible, immediate, and important it feels. Our expertise can also reinforce the belief that we are seeing the issue most clearly.
But leaders often have to consider a much broader system: other departments, staffing and budget constraints, organizational risk, competing initiatives, long-term priorities, and the downstream impact of one decision on another part of the organization.
The Perspective Gap can show up when we:
optimize for our own area without considering the effect on other teams
treat a departmental priority as the organization’s highest priority
see an issue primarily through our own technical or functional expertise
focus on immediate operational needs without considering longer-term consequences
assume leaders have the same information and vantage point we do
measure success primarily by what improves our own area of responsibility
In our Managing Up programs, we see these patterns when professionals frame an issue primarily through the needs of their own role, team, or department, or focus on technical or functional correctness without fully considering broader organizational context and trade-offs.
The consequence can extend beyond whether the request is approved. When someone consistently approaches decisions from a limited vantage point, they may unintentionally create the perception that they are not yet thinking at the broader level required for greater leadership responsibility.
Effective managing up requires us to lift our perspective beyond our own area of responsibility and understand the broader context in which decisions are being made.
Managing up requires us to widen the lens and ask:
What might they see that I don’t?
How does what I am proposing connect to the priorities they are responsible for?
That shift in perspective changes the conversation.
5. The Communication Gap
Daniel knows his work.
He has good ideas, understands the issues, and regularly communicates with his leader.
But something isn't working.
Some of his emails go unanswered.
He explains an issue in a meeting and walks away thinking he was clear, only to realize later that others understood the message differently.
He makes recommendations he believes are strong, but they rarely move forward.
And when he finally gets time with a senior leader to discuss an important issue, he provides the background, explains the details, and carefully lays out his reasoning.
A few minutes in, the leader asks:
“Daniel, what do you need from me?”
Daniel is communicating.
But his communication is not consistently creating the understanding, response, or action he intended.
This is the Communication Gap.
The communication gap is not necessarily about being a poor communicator.
It can show up in different ways: messages that don't get responses, ideas that aren't understood, recommendations that don't gain traction, or conversations that end without a clear decision or next step.
Managing up requires more than sharing information.
It requires communicating in a way that helps the other person quickly understand what matters, why it matters, what you recommend, and what you need from them.
Sometimes that means getting to the bottom line faster.
Sometimes it means adapting your message to the person receiving it.
Sometimes it means making the ask explicit.
And sometimes it means recognizing that sending a message is not the same as communicating successfully.
Leaders respond faster when the point is clear, the ask is explicit, and the relevance is obvious. Being heard is often less about persistence and more about precision.
Managing up requires learning how to translate what you know into what others need to know in order to understand, decide, and act.
6. The Relationship Gap
Mohammed is focused, efficient, and very good at what he does.
He doesn't spend much time networking internally.
His view is straightforward:
"I'm here to work, not make friends."
So he skips conversations that don't appear immediately relevant to his work and focuses on execution.
Then an important initiative begins taking shape.
By the time Mohammed hears about it, many of the conversations that shaped the direction have already happened.
His expertise wasn't the problem.
He simply wasn't part of the relationships through which context, ideas, and opportunities were moving.
This is the Relationship Gap.
Some professionals believe relationships should have little to do with whether good ideas succeed.
And they are right about one thing.
Managing up is not about collecting friendships.
But organizations do not make decisions in isolation.
Ideas are tested through conversations.
Context travels through relationships.
People seek perspectives from colleagues they trust.
And leaders often look for signals of alignment, support, and readiness before making consequential decisions.
That is why productive relationships with leaders, peers, thought partners, mentors, and sponsors matter.
Thought partners help us pressure-test our thinking, challenge our assumptions, and see perspectives we may be missing.
Mentors can help us make sense of experiences, navigate unfamiliar situations, and learn from perspectives beyond our own.
Sponsors play a different role. They can advocate for us, bring our name into conversations we are not part of, and help others see our readiness for opportunities we may not yet have access to.
These relationships are not simply about friendship or networking. They expand what we can see, what we can learn, and sometimes the rooms in which our work and potential are discussed.
Your expertise matters.
But relationships help you understand the organization beyond your immediate role, expose you to perspectives you may not otherwise encounter, and allow you to contribute to conversations where decisions and opportunities are taking shape.
Doing excellent work matters. But relationships often determine whether your expertise, ideas, and potential are mentioned in the conversations that matter.
Your Gap May Not Be the Same as Someone Else's
There is no single reason professionals struggle with managing up.
The six barriers we have explored tend to fall within four broader gaps:
Mindset. Perspective. Communication. Relationships.
Identifying the gap matters because the solution depends on what is actually getting in your way.
If your challenge is mindset, another communication technique may not solve it.
If your challenge is perspective, speaking more confidently may not solve it.
If your challenge is communication, working harder may not solve it.
And if your challenge is relationships, expertise alone may not solve it.
You have to work on the gap that is actually getting in your way.
If you want to better understand where you may need to focus, take the Managing-Up Assessment.
The assessment goes deeper across six areas of managing up, helping you identify where you are already strong and where you may need to focus.
Because awareness tells you where the gap is.
What you do next is what begins to close it.
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This article is part of The Art of Managing Up Series, a practical guide designed to help professionals create alignment, increase strategic contribution, and become the CEO of their career. If you are just joining the series, start with What Is Managing Up? A Practical Guide.
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Organizations use The Art of Managing Up to help leaders strengthen alignment, communicate more strategically, increase organizational awareness, and contribute more effectively across levels.
N-BAC brings this work to organizations through Managing Up workshops and masterclasses, assessments, and leadership development programs.
If you are exploring Managing Up for your leaders, team, or organization, start a conversation with N-BAC.
