Welcome to Work Tip Wednesday, where every Wednesday I get ready and share one lesson I've learned about career, leadership, and success from working at some of the world's biggest brands.
One of the fastest ways to get promoted has almost nothing to do with working harder. As a chief commercial officer who has spent years inside companies like Nike and Bugaboo, I can tell you that part of your job was never in your job description: managing your manager's awareness and confidence. Your manager has more influence over your career progression than anyone, which makes managing that relationship a core skill rather than a nice-to-have, and it holds true even with the hard-to-read managers.
The Real Challenge
Most people treat their manager relationship as reactive. They do the work, and they answer questions when questions come. The problem is that this leaves your manager to fill in the gaps on their own, and the story they assemble from silence is rarely as good as the one you would have told. When an update only arrives after they ask for it, they have already spent energy wondering, and a manager who has to wonder about your work is a manager whose confidence in you slowly erodes.
Senior leaders operate on a different principle. Whether a project is going well, running behind, or has hit a wall, they communicate early and often, and they never wait to be asked. This is not about volume, which just adds noise. Every one of those updates exists to do one thing: eliminate surprises. A manager who is never surprised by your work is a manager who trusts you with more of it. Here is how to run the relationship that way.
1. Own the Cadence of Your Updates
Do not wait for your manager to ask how a project is going. Send a short update before they need to, or better still, put a recurring check-in on the calendar yourself so the communication has a home and never depends on either of you remembering. You are not asking permission to update them. You are taking the cadence off their plate.
When you own the communication, you get to shape the story. You decide what to highlight, how to frame a delay, and which wins deserve attention, rather than leaving your manager to reconstruct events from fragments or from someone else's version. The specific move that changes the relationship is making it recurring. A one-off update is a nice gesture. A standing rhythm, where your manager comes to expect a clear read from you on a predictable schedule, is what builds the kind of trust that gets talked about in a promotion conversation. Keep each one short. Consistency matters far more than length.
2. Share Risks as Early as You Share Wins
This is the habit that separates people who merely keep their manager informed from people their manager genuinely trusts. Most professionals wait until they have a solution in hand before they raise a problem. They sit on the risk, work it privately, and hope to present it already solved. Senior leaders do the opposite. They surface a risk early, explain what they are already doing to address it, and ask for feedback or support if they need it.
It feels counterintuitive, because bringing a problem forward before you have fixed it can feel like admitting you are not on top of it. In practice it does the reverse. Raising a risk early, with a plan attached, tells your manager that nothing is going to blow up on them without warning, and that is the single most reassuring thing an employee can signal. The person who hides risks until they become fires teaches their manager to watch them closely. The person who flags risks early, plan in hand, teaches their manager to relax. One of those people gets handed bigger, riskier, more visible work. It is not the one who looked flawless for longer.
3. Calibrate to the Manager You Actually Have
The last piece is adjusting your approach to the specific manager in front of you, including the hard-to-read ones. Managing up is not a single template. Some managers want a two-line message on Slack; others want a short weekly document they can read before your one-on-one. Some want the headline first; others want the reasoning that got you there. Your job is to figure out which one you have and meet them there.
If you cannot read your manager, ask them directly. "How do you prefer to get updates from me, and how often?" is a question almost no one asks, and it instantly marks you as someone who thinks about the relationship deliberately. With a genuinely opaque manager, watch what they forward, what they reply to quickly, and what they ignore, and let that pattern tell you what to send. The goal is the same regardless of their style: they always know where things stand, so they never have to wonder. Calibrating to how they actually process information is how you make sure the signal you are sending is one they can receive.
The Bottom Line
Managing your manager is a deliberate practice: keeping the person with the most influence over your career from ever being surprised. Own the cadence of your updates so the story comes from you, share risks as early as you share wins so trust compounds instead of erodes, and calibrate to the manager you actually have so your signal lands. This is the opposite of politics, and it is real work with a real payoff. Do it consistently, and you become the person leadership reaches for when the stakes go up.
