Managing up is the practice of building productive relationships with your manager and senior leaders by understanding their priorities, adapting to their working styles, and proactively supporting their success—which in turn accelerates your career growth and organizational effectiveness. Rooted in mutual benefit rather than manipulation, managing up requires balancing assertiveness with empathy, visibility with humility, and strategic communication with genuine relationship-building. The key mental model: your manager is not just your supervisor but a critical stakeholder in your career whose success is interlinked with yours—when you help them look good and achieve their goals, you simultaneously create opportunities for your own advancement and influence within the organization.