How to manage your manager when your career feels stuck (and what nobody trained you to do)
You're not here because you're struggling at your job. You're here because you're good at it, and it still isn't translating into the visibility or the progression you should have by now. This is the long version of a masterclass I ran on managing up, including the four questions most people can't answer about their own manager, how to make a one to one worth having, and the point at which managing up stops being the answer.
CONFIDENCECAREER DEVELOPMENTSELF-RECOGNITION,SHINE FILE
You're not here because you're struggling at your job. You're here because you're good at it, and somehow that still isn't translating into the visibility, the progression, or the sanity you should have by now.
I ran a masterclass on managing up with TechTalk, and the questions that came in told me everything. Half the room wasn't there to learn how to work harder. They were there because they'd been doing all the right things and were starting to realise that how to manage your manager is the actual skill nobody taught them.
This is the longer version of what we covered, with some of the Q&As.
Why hard work alone won't get you promoted
In 1996, a career consultant called Harvey Coleman wrote a book called Empowering Yourself, and he proposed something that still makes people uncomfortable. Performance only accounts for around 10% of career advancement. Image, how others perceive your capability and potential, accounts for 30%. Exposure, who knows about you and what you do, accounts for 60%.
If you've been delivering brilliant work and wondering why you're being passed over, this is usually why. You've been investing all your energy in the 10%. Meanwhile, the colleague who's getting promoted ahead of you is putting deliberate effort into the other 90%.
I see this pattern with clients constantly. They come to me feeling stuck, and the first thing I check isn't their performance. It's whether the people who matter could articulate their value in a meeting they're not in. Most of the time, they can't.
The gap is measurable. In McKinsey and LeanIn's 2025 Women in the Workplace report, 93 women were promoted to manager for every 100 men. For women of colour it was 74. The report doesn't reduce that to a single cause and neither will I. What I see in my own client work, over and over, is that being unseen is a large part of it.
Managing up is not politics and it's not flattery. It's not the thing people mean when they say brown-nosing. It's about building a working relationship that actually fits both of you, and that starts with understanding the person you're trying to influence.
How to manage your manager without losing yourself in the process
I spent the first decade of my career thinking my progression was my manager's job. I'd go into 1:1s asking "what next, where do I go next," waiting for the answer. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realise nobody was coming.
You are the architect of your career. Your manager is one important person in the picture, but they are not the picture.
The foundational thinking on how to actually do this comes from John Gabarro and John Kotter, two Harvard researchers who wrote Managing Your Boss in 1980. It's still the cleanest framework I've found for this.
Their argument is simple. To manage up well, you need to know four things about your manager:
→ What are they under pressure to deliver right now?
→ How do they prefer to receive information?
→ Where are their gaps, and are you filling them or complaining about them?
→ What do you actually need from them that you haven't asked for?
Most people can't answer those four questions. Try it now. Write down your manager's name and see how far you get.
When I work on this with 1:1 clients, this is usually the moment things shift. Not because the questions are complicated, but because most people have been guessing. And once you stop guessing, you stop reacting emotionally and start engaging strategically.
How to use your one-to-ones to build influence at work
If you've ever walked out of a 1:1 thinking "what was the point of that," you're not alone. Most one-to-ones get reduced to status updates, task lists, and whoever's annoying you this week.
A good 1:1 is a strategic meeting. The agenda should cover four things. The support you need from your manager. The challenges you're sitting with. The achievements worth flagging, especially the ones they won't see otherwise. And the direction you want to go next, which is the part most women skip.
If you don't tell your manager what you want next, they will assume you're happy where you are.
This is also where your SHINE File comes in. The SHINE FileTM is a methodology I developed to help leaders build an evidence base for their own confidence. It's your playlist of growth: the place you capture your achievements, your brave moments, the failures, and the learnings. You build it over time, and then you bring it into your 1:1s and make it visible. Not as showing off. As showing your manager the version of you they don't otherwise see, because they're not in the meetings where most of your work actually happens.
One of my favourite bosses had a habit of arriving at our 1:1s like a freight train, full of his own agenda. I had to say to him directly, "the things I want to talk about aren't getting the time they need." So we built a system. I'd send him my points before the meeting. He'd tell me his at the start and we always covered both. So simple and yet so effective!
If you want to try the SHINE File in a room with other women doing the same work, that's exactly what my monthly Confidence Workout is for. It's free, it runs every month, and it's the place where we build that habit together as a community. The link is in my bio.
How to influence your manager without authority at work
The Q&A at the end of the masterclass got very honest very quickly. What do you do when your manager changes their mind every week? When they think you're wrong about everything? When you ended up under someone who didn't choose you?
Here's what I kept coming back to:
The first thing is to choose curiosity over defensiveness. When your manager pushes back, double down on curiosity, not your own position. "Tell me more about that." "What else?" "How are you thinking about this?" In coaching, "what else" is one of the most powerful questions you can ask, because the real issue is rarely the first thing anyone says. Roxanne shared a brilliant example in the Q&A, of a senior leader saying "this isn't working" in a meeting, which felt like a direct attack. When she spoke to them afterwards, it turned out they weren't criticising the system at all. They were frustrated that the team wasn't adopting it. Same words but a completely different problem. Curiosity got her there and defensiveness would have kept her stuck.
The second thing is filling gaps quietly. Every manager has gaps. The people who progress fastest around them are the ones who spot the gap and close it, without making the manager feel small in the process. I always hired people who were better than me at the things I was bad at. Give me endless spreadsheets and I'm miserable. So my direct reports were exceptional at that. That's not weakness, it's how good teams work.
The third thing is asking. Most of the women I coach massively under-ask. For visibility on a project, for an introduction to someone two levels up, for feedback on something they're being stretched on. The answer to an unasked question is always no.
If asking still feels uncomfortable, start with small things, tiny requests and build the muscle. Confidence is exactly like the gym: you don't walk in and lift 20 kilos on day one. You start at five, then ten and then more. The same logic applies here. You don't have to ask for the big thing first. You just have to start asking.
And one more thing, because this came up and it is REALLY important. There is a point at which managing up stops working, and that's when the environment itself is wrong. If your values don't fit, if you're a circle being hammered into a square, no amount of strategic communication will fix that. Managing up is a skill for the right environment and is not a substitute for being in the wrong one.
How to start managing up this week
You don't need a six-month plan.
Pick one of the four Gabarro and Kotter questions, answer it honestly about your current manager and notice where you've been guessing. Then bring one thing into your next 1:1 that you wouldn't normally bring.
If you've been quietly wondering whether the relationship with your manager is the thing holding your career back, I'd love to know which of the four questions you find the most challenging.
And if this is the work you want to do properly, with someone in your corner asking the harder questions, that's what I do with my 1:1 clients. The first step is a conversation and my details are in my bio.
And let me remind you: You are a limited edition of one, and that is your superpower. Make sure the right people see it!
Natalia Cerezo Martin is an executive and leadership coach and the founder of Empower & Lead. She works with ambitious women in corporate leadership on confidence, visibility, and career strategy. The monthly Confidence Workout is free and open to all. The SHINE File methodology is used across her 1:1 coaching programmes and group work.
©Natalia Cerezo Martin 2026
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