#53 - Why 'managing up' is bad advice
The uncomfortable truth about your most important work relationship
The relationship with your manager is still your biggest determinant of happiness at work, according to Lenny’s latest survey of tech workers. Those with an effective manager rate 65% higher job satisfaction, and substantially lower rate of burnout. The more interesting question is, what do you do if you don’t get on with your manager?
The standard advice is to ‘manage up’: understand their priorities, own your 1:1s, and adapt to their communication style. However, this avoids an uncomfortable truth: that you may not be able to change or improve the relationship with your manager, particularly if they don’t want to.
Your manager has a particular kind of power that you can’t access: authority. Authority comes one’s position in the hierarchy, not from expertise or trust, and works downwards through the organisation. However, authority must be exercised carefully because misuse will degrade performance: people will do what they're told, but they won't give their best thinking.
Many ineffective managers have the same issue at their core: they over-rely on their authority to get things done, which puts them into Parent mode. According to Eric Berne, a psychologist who created Transactional Analysis1, there are three ego states:
Parent: You think, feel and behave as your parents or authority figures did. This splits into Nurturing Parent (supportive, protective) and Critical Parent (judgmental, directive, rule-enforcing).
Adult: You respond to the present moment using facts, logic and rational assessment. This is the ego state that processes what’s actually happening rather than replaying old patterns.
Child: You revert to the thoughts, feelings and behaviours you had as a child. This splits into Free Child (creative, spontaneous, playful) and Adapted Child (compliant, people-pleasing, conflict-avoidant, shaped by the need to keep authority figures happy).
Now if your manager is in Critical Parent mode it will look like micromanaging, being overly-directive, and using feedback as a list of deficiencies. Arie Nadler2, a social psychologist who studied help-seeking and power dynamics, found that people in positions of authority tend to give dependency-oriented help: they provide the answer, give you the list of what to fix, or solve the problem for you. The alternative is autonomy-oriented help: helping you understand the principle so you can solve problems yourself. A manager who always gives you a shopping list of deficiencies without helping you understand the standard behind it is, whether they realise it or not, keeping you dependent.
Unfortunately, this behaviour can lead to you doubting your own competence. I’ve worked with clients going through difficult times with their manager, who end up developing unhelpful beliefs such as:
“If I ask for what I need, it will be seen as weakness or incompetence.”
“If I just work harder and get it right, the relationship will improve.”
“Their judgement of me is more accurate than my own.”
And these create changes in the behaviour of my clients: they start deferring their own judgement, filtering what they say to their manager, engaging in people-pleasing behaviour, and becoming perfectionists. All of these are self-protective ways of being when the ego feels under threat — but they are also signs that you have slipped into Adapted Child mode.
The antidote is to stay in Adult mode, and actively seek autonomy-oriented help by responding calmly and with curiosity:
When you get feedback on deficiencies, ask questions rather than accepting the list as evidence of what you need to fix: “Can you help me understand the standard you’re measuring me against?”
Stating what you need from the relationship: “I work best when I have clarity on your expectations upfront.”
Naming a dynamic that isn’t working: “This isn’t working for me, can we talk about how we communicate on this?”
Making decisions based on what the situation requires rather than what you think will keep them happy: “I think this is the best course of action, based on x, y, z.”
Alongside this, protect your sense of professional identity. A Critical Parent manager will erode your confidence over time if their assessment is the only data point you're working from. Build an external evidence base: talk to peers, engage with your network, calibrate yourself against people at a similar level in other organisations. If the external evidence consistently tells you that you're well equipped for your role, then the problem is the relationship dynamic, not you.
And this leads us to an uncomfortable conclusion. If your manager cannot or will not shift out of Critical Parent mode, you staying in Adult mode will create friction. You may get a crossed transaction: you respond calmly and factually, and they escalate because you’re not playing the expected role. No amount of tactics, whether it’s social contracting, a ‘manual of me’, or better-structured 1:1s, is going to fix a dynamic where one person refuses to meet the other as an equal.
On the surface, this realisation can feel disempowering. But recognising that the dynamic won’t change is actually where your agency begins. You have three options: stay and manage the friction consciously, knowing the cost and choosing to absorb it for now; escalate by finding a sponsor or senior leader who can intervene; or leave, on your terms, before the relationship does lasting damage to your confidence and career. All three are valid. The one option that isn’t valid is staying in Adapted Child mode, filtering yourself, working harder, and hoping it gets better — because as Lenny’s research shows, that is the path to burnout.
If you found this useful, here’s how I can help you more:
Develop your career as a leader with me through leadership coaching.
Inspire your team to change their beliefs through company keynotes and workshops.
Join the waitlist for my new book, Beliefocracy: How our beliefs govern us.
I highly recommend reading Berne’s popular book, ‘Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships’ for more.
Nadler, A. (2002). "Inter-group helping relations as power relations: Maintaining or challenging social dominance between groups through helping." Journal of Social Issues, 58(3), pp.487-502.