How to Manage Up: Building Strong Relationships with Senior Leadership

How to Manage Up: Building Strong Relationships with Senior Leadership

Your team’s objectives and the company’s strategic goals often feel like two pages from different books, especially when “senior leadership” spans from your friendly (or not-so-friendly) director to the elusive C-suite. It’s more common than you would think to hear teams admit they have no idea what those top-level goals even are, and that uncertainty can paralyze progress.

While it's the responsibility of senior leadership to clearly communicate those goals and vision, part of your job as a manager is to bridge that gap and help your team see how their work fuels the bigger picture. "Managing up" means understanding what truly matters to decision-makers, translating your team’s wins and challenges into the language of value, and spotting potential “uh-oh” moments before they become full-blown crises.

The key is learning how to treat your senior leaders as collaborators instead of gatekeepers, and this blog post will provide some practical techniques and advice on how to do that.

The Secret to Managing Up (Without Fear or Flattery)

Here’s our playbook for building better interactions - and ultimately stronger relationships - with your senior leaders. Dive into the tips below to turn those nerve-wracking exchanges into genuinely rewarding collaborations:

1. Get Inside Their Heads (Without Being Creepy)

Before you can align your team's work with your company goals, you need to understand what these strategic goals actually are. Remember that senior leaders tend to think in terms of revenue growth, cost reduction, market expansion, return on investment and risk mitigation. You need to demonstrate that you have some understanding of what's keeping them up at night. You can do this by:

• Getting the Goals: If there's an open-door policy, ask for the strategic goals (or request via an Executive Assistant); otherwise, skim the company annual report to try and find the top objectives and financial targets.

• Using All-Hands & Socials: All-hands meetings are your chance to listen closely and ask the clarifying questions everyone’s thinking anyway. If that fills you with dread - grab your leaders at happy hour or a company social event to casually ask them questions. Tell them about your team and ask smart, focused questions.

2. Speak Their Language (Less Acronym Soup, More Impact)

When you’re focused on building strong relationships with senior leaders, assume they aren’t fluent in your team’s day-to-day or your technical jargon. Translate your work into the clear outcomes they care about by:

• Translating Your Wins into Business Impact: Help them understand exactly how your team is contributing to the success of the company. For example, if you're in an IT Ops team, you might say, "We reduced bugs on the platform by 30% in the past 8 months, which freed up 40 dev hours, which was enough to launch a key feature two weeks ahead of schedule."

• Reframing Problems as Opportunities: While senior leaders should be keen to hear constructive feedback or problems, they are more likely to be interesting in how you are contributing to solutions. For example, rather than complaining about a tedious manual task, show how your team has solved this through an automation, which has saved time, cost or resources.

3. Be Proactive (Surprise Them...in a Good Way)

Following on from above, if you want to build strong relationships with senior leadership, it's important to show that you are proactive and can take initiative. You can do this by:

• Sharing Roadmaps, Not Just Status Updates: Status updates are generally requested, but take the time to show that you are planning ahead and thinking strategically about the work your team does and how it fits into the bigger picture.

• Pre-Plan for "Uh-Oh" Moments: Your senior leadership want to know they have team members who are proactively thinking about possible risks and ways to mitigate them. They don't want everything to feel like a fire drill.

4. Keep Communication Simple (but Consistent)

   
   

Keeping senior leaders in the loop doesn't mean bombarding them with information, updates and slide decks - less is more. It's about clear, concise information shared at an appropriate cadence. You can try:

• Regular Status Updates: Choose the appropriate cadence for your updates and keep them to one-page only, zero fluff i.e. wins, in-progress items, support needed.

• Visual Dashboards: Everyone loves a visual so represent (or supplement) your one-page update with a visual dashboard with RAG (Red, Amber, Green) updates, work items in progress or completed, etc.

• 15-30 Min Monthly Syncs: If your leader is readily available to meet, organize a short and focused monthly check-in with them. Stick to the agenda and time block appropriately.

5. Bond Over Something (Coffee, Chocolate, Cycling...)

Remember, senior leaders are just people too and showing genuine interest in their hobbies or passions builds real rapport. Whether it’s a shared love of coffee, a favorite chocolate bar, or weekend cycling routes, finding common ground opens doors to trust, makes future conversations easier, and reminds them you are more than just a status report.

Wrap-Up: Big Boss Rapport in a Nutshell

Managing up isn't about flattery or fear, it's about partnership, clarity and trust. By showing you understand leadership priorities, speaking their lingo, staying proactive, communicating smartly and building genuine rapport - you'll turn that nerve-wrecking big boss dance into a smooth tango.

Remember, at Team Sparx we're here to help managers to make leadership and team development easier. Visit us at www.team-sparx.com for zero-prep team-building kits, practical tools, and no-nonsense support to make your management journey easier and more enjoyable.