What Gets in the Way of Managing Up?
Four Common Gaps That Can Limit Your Effectiveness
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 managing up is so beneficial, 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.
So what gets in the way?
Over the years, through writing The Art of Managing Up and working with professionals and leaders across organizations, I have seen the same patterns appear again and again.
They show up differently for different people, but they tend to fall into four recurring gaps.
1. The Mindset Gap: Meet Sarah
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 Mindset Gap.
Sometimes what gets in the way of managing up begins with what we believe.
“My work should speak for itself.”
“I don’t want to seem like I’m promoting myself.”
“If leadership needs something from me, they’ll ask.”
“Managing up feels political.”
These beliefs 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 describe several versions of this gap, including naïveté, imposter syndrome, and self-erasure in the name of humility.
Consider someone who consistently does excellent work but believes that good results should naturally get noticed.
Or someone who values humility so deeply that when their contribution is recognized, they immediately redirect the praise:
“It was nothing.”
“The team did everything.”
“I was just doing my job.”
The work may be strong.
But if the 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 Perspective Gap: Meet Susan
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.
Susan doesn't necessarily have a commitment problem.
She has a Perspective Gap.
You can be excellent at your job and still see an issue primarily through the lens of your own role, team, or expertise.
"My department needs this."
"This is clearly the right solution."
"Leadership doesn't understand the problem."
But leaders are often balancing priorities, resources, risks, and competing needs that we may not see.
The perspective gap appears when we advocate for what matters to us without connecting it to what matters to the broader organization.
In our Managing Up programs, we see this when professionals frame an issue only through their own role, advocate for one need without recognizing trade-offs, or focus on technical correctness without considering organizational context.
Managing up requires us to widen the lens.
Not simply:
"Why doesn't leadership see what I see?"
But:
"What might they see that I don't?"
And:
"How does what I am proposing connect to the priorities they are responsible for?"
That shift in perspective changes the conversation.
3. The Communication Gap: Meet Daniel
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.
4. The Relationship Gap: Meet Mohammed
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.
"I'm here to work, not make friends."
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.
As we teach in our programs, thought partners are not about friendship. They help us pressure-test ideas, build shared context, and reduce risk before decisions are made.
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.
Your Gap May Not Be the Same as Someone Else's
This is why there is no single reason professionals struggle with managing up.
In The Art of Managing Up, I originally explored six common barriers: naïveté, self-erasure in the name of humility, imposter syndrome, lack of the right relationships, low-impact communication, and not being at the right place at the right time.
Through continued work with leaders and organizations, I have come to see these barriers as part of broader patterns:
Mindset. Perspective. Communication. Relationships.
Identifying the pattern matters because the solution depends on the gap.
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.
Which Gap Do You Recognize?
Think about the four gaps:
Which one most often gets in the way of your ability to manage up effectively?
Perhaps you recognize yourself in more than one.
That's okay.
The goal is not to fix everything at once.
The better question is:
Which gap is limiting my impact the most right now, and what will I begin doing differently?
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 specific beliefs, behaviors, relationships, or skills may be limiting your effectiveness.
Over the next articles in The Art of Managing Up Series, we will go deeper into these gaps and, more importantly, explore the practical shifts, skills, and strategies that can help you close them.
Because awareness tells you where the gap is.
What you do next is what begins to close it.
Continue Your Managing Up Journey
If you are just joining the series, start with What Is Managing Up? A Practical Guide, then explore A Practical Guide to Managing Up with Integrity.
Join the Managing Up Community to receive each new article, practical leadership insights, and exclusive resources in your inbox. Join the Managing Up Community
Ready to Go Deeper?
Read The Art of Managing Up Book by Nejat Abdurahman
Organizations that want leaders to think and operate at this level often explore this work through private masterclasses, leadership offsite, or cohort-based development experiences.
If you are interested in bringing Managing Up to your team or organization, I welcome the conversation.
