career advice

How to Manage Your Manager (And Why It Matters More Than Your Performance)

How to Manage Your Manager (And Why It Matters More Than Your Performance)

There is a version of your career where you do good work, keep your head down, and wait to be rewarded for it. A lot of people are living that version right now. Most of them are frustrated, overlooked, and quietly wondering why people who seem less capable than them keep getting ahead.

The uncomfortable truth is that doing good work is the entry requirement, not the differentiator. Everybody in your team is doing good work. That is the baseline. What actually determines how your career progresses is something most people never think about seriously, and that is the relationship you have with your manager.

Not in a brown-nosing, say what they want to hear, pretend to laugh at their jokes kind of way. That is not what this is about. Managing your manager is a legitimate professional skill, and frankly one of the most important ones you can develop. It is about understanding how to work with the person who has the most direct influence over your career, your workload, your development, and whether you get that pay rise.

I have spent over 20 years inside recruitment and talent acquisition, and I have watched a lot of careers either accelerate or stall. The difference is rarely about talent. It is almost always about how well someone understands the environment they are operating in, and that starts with their manager.

Your manager is not a mind reader

One of the most common mistakes people make in their careers is assuming their manager has a clear picture of what they are doing, how hard they are working, and what they have achieved. They do not. Your manager has their own targets, their own pressure from above, their own projects and their own problems. You are one part of a much larger picture they are trying to manage.

This means if you want your manager to know about your contributions, your wins, and your progress, you have to tell them. Not in an arrogant way, but in a simple, professional way that keeps them informed. Think of it as making their life easier. If your manager has to advocate for you at a senior level, they need ammunition. They need to be able to say “here is what this person has delivered and here is why they deserve X.” If you are not giving them that information, they are going in to bat for you with nothing in their hands.

Get into the habit of keeping a record of what you have achieved. Not just tasks you have completed, but actual outcomes. What improved because of what you did? What did you save, build, fix or grow? When your one-to-one comes around, lead with that. Do not wait for the annual review to remind your manager you exist.

Understand what your manager actually cares about

Every manager has things that matter to them. Some of those things are professional, like hitting targets, keeping the team stable, looking good to their own manager. Some of them are more personal, like wanting to be kept informed before surprises happen, or preferring to communicate by email rather than being called in for impromptu conversations.

Learning what your manager cares about is not complicated, but it does require paying attention. Watch how they react to things. If they seem particularly bothered when they are caught off guard by bad news, that tells you something. If they respond well when you show commercial awareness, that tells you something too. Over time you build a picture of what makes this person tick, and you can start shaping how you communicate and operate to align with that.

This is not about changing who you are. It is about understanding your audience. You naturally speak differently to different people in your life. You would not explain something to your mate in the pub the same way you would explain it to your grandmother. The same principle applies at work. Adjusting your communication style to suit the person you are communicating with is a skill, not a compromise.

No surprises

If there is one rule that will make you significantly easier to manage, it is this: do not let your manager get blindsided. Nobody likes surprises at work, especially managers, and especially bad ones. If something has gone wrong, if a project is falling behind, if a client has kicked off, if you have made a mistake, tell your manager before they find out another way.

The instinct most people have is to try and fix the problem first and then tell their manager once it is resolved. That works sometimes. But if the problem is serious enough that it could land on your manager’s desk from a direction they were not expecting, you are better off giving them the heads up now. Even if you do not have the solution yet. Saying “I wanted to flag something early so we can get ahead of it” is never a bad look. Getting pulled into your manager’s office because they heard about something from their manager first very much is.

There is a wider point here too. Managers have a much easier relationship with people they feel they can trust. Trust in a professional context is largely built on predictability and transparency. If your manager always feels like they know what is going on with you and your work, they will spend less time managing you, worry about you less, and give you more autonomy. That is a much better place to be.

Have the career conversation, not just the performance conversation

One of the biggest mistakes people make with their manager is only ever talking about the work. The deadlines, the projects, the tasks. That is fine and necessary, but if you never talk about where you want to go, do not be surprised if nobody ever helps you get there.

Most managers are not sitting around thinking about how to develop their team members. They are too busy thinking about everything else on their plate. Which means if you want to progress, you have to drive that conversation. You have to be direct about your ambitions, what you want to develop, where you see yourself going, and what support you would find helpful.

A lot of people find this uncomfortable. It can feel like you are asking for something you have not earned yet, or putting yourself out there in a way that feels exposed. But the alternative is staying quiet and hoping your manager figures it out, and that is a strategy that very rarely works.

You do not have to go in with a grand speech about where you want to be in five years. It can be as simple as “I would like to take on more responsibility in X area” or “I am keen to develop my skills in Y, are there any opportunities to do that?” That kind of conversation gives your manager something to work with. It puts you on their radar in a way that just doing your job does not.

When you disagree with your manager

There will be times when you think your manager is wrong. Maybe they have made a decision you disagree with, given direction that does not make sense to you, or overlooked something you think matters. This is a normal part of working with other people, including people above you. What matters is how you handle it.

The worst approach is to either say nothing and silently resent it, or to go in combatively and make it adversarial. Neither gets you anywhere. The better approach is to ask questions before you challenge. Try to understand why the decision was made or why they see it that way. There is often context you are not aware of. Your manager may be working with information or constraints that have not been shared with you.

If after understanding the reasoning you still disagree, you can push back. But do it professionally and come with something more than just “I do not think this is right.” Come with a specific concern, a data point, an alternative suggestion. That is a very different conversation to just objecting. It shows you have thought about it, that you are engaging seriously, and that you are trying to find the best outcome rather than just winning an argument.

And sometimes, even after all of that, the decision will stand and you will have to get behind it. That is just how organisations work. The key is that you raised your concern properly, through the right channel, at the right time, and then moved forward. That is what professionalism looks like.

What if your manager is genuinely difficult?

Not every manager is reasonable, well-organised, or good at their job. Some of them are chaotic, some are poor communicators, and some are just not very good people managers. If you are dealing with that, I want to be honest with you: the strategies above still apply, but they will get you less mileage and it will require more patience.

The first thing to do is separate the situation from the story you are telling yourself about it. Not because you have to excuse bad management, but because the more clearly you can see what is actually happening, the better equipped you are to navigate it. Is your manager disorganised, or are they deliberately undermining you? Is their communication style just very different from yours, or are they genuinely not giving you what you need? These distinctions matter, because they require different responses.

If your manager is difficult but not malicious, the answer is usually to over-communicate, create your own structure, and build relationships with other senior stakeholders in the business so you are not entirely dependent on one person for your visibility and progression. If the situation is genuinely harmful, that is a different matter and one that may require going to HR or having a harder conversation. But most difficult managers fall somewhere short of that, and most of the time there are practical things you can do to make it more manageable.

The bottom line

Managing your manager is not about being political, two-faced or trying to game the system. It is about being an active participant in one of the most important professional relationships you have. It is about communicating well, being visible for the right reasons, understanding how the person above you operates, and being deliberate about your own progression rather than leaving it to chance.

The people who progress fastest in their careers are rarely the hardest workers in the room. They are usually the people who are good at their job and also good at navigating the environment around them. That includes knowing how to work with, not just for, the person managing them.

Most people are never taught this. They figure it out through trial and error over the course of a decade. You do not have to do it that way.

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