Managing Up: Selling a Recommendation to a Skeptical Executive

Right about the market, wrong about the boss

A marketing manager with a superior performance record is hired as vice president “to straighten out the marketing and sales problems” at a company in financial difficulty that has just been acquired by a larger corporation ¹. He diagnoses, correctly, that the company needs market share. He makes pricing decisions aimed at winning high-volume business.

Margins fall. The president leans on him. He holds his ground, sure that share will come back. By the second quarter the president has taken direct control of pricing. By the fourth quarter, both men are fired ¹.

What the vice president never learned was that the president’s most immediate goal was profitability, quickly, and that the president had championed the acquisition inside the parent company. His personal credibility was riding on it ¹. John Gabarro and John Kotter, who reported the case, named three errors: he took information at face value, made assumptions where he had no information, and, most damaging, never actively tried to clarify his boss’s objectives ¹.

He was right about the market and wrong about his boss.

Managing up, in Gabarro and Kotter’s words, is “the process of consciously working with your superior to obtain the best possible results for you, your boss, and the company” ¹. For a strategist, it is mostly the work of getting a sound recommendation decided: learning what the executive is solving for, pre-wiring the decision, framing it as a choice and treating pushback as information.

The thesis of this page: good recommendations usually die because they answer a question the executive is not asking. The analysis can be flawless. If it solves for share while the boss is solving for this year’s margin, it loses, and it deserves to.

Mutual dependence, not apple polishing

Gabarro and Kotter were explicit that they did not mean political maneuvering or apple polishing ¹. Their premise is mutual dependence between two fallible people. The boss needs cooperation, dependability and honesty from you. You need the boss for links to the rest of the organization, for priorities that fit what the organization needs, and for resources ¹.

Their opening story shows what happens when one side forgets. Frank Gibbons, a manufacturing vice president known to be a poor manager of people, got a new subordinate, Philip Bonnevie, who had only ever worked for good bosses and had never thought managing his boss was part of his job ¹. The two misunderstood each other on a major product launch; a new plant was built that could not make the new product in the volume sales wanted at the agreed cost. Fourteen months in, Bonnevie was fired. The company lost $2 million to $5 million ¹.

Everyone already knew Gibbons was bad with people, the authors note. That knowledge was no consolation to the person who paid for it ¹. The lesson for a strategist is uncomfortable and useful: your boss’s weaknesses are part of the operating environment, like a regulator or a competitor. You plan around them.

Find the question before you bring the answer

Gabarro and Kotter set the minimum plainly: understand your boss’s goals and pressures, strengths and weaknesses, and preferred work style, including the pressure coming from the boss’s own boss and peers. Without that, a manager is “flying blind” ¹. They add a point new strategists miss: do this on an ongoing basis, not just when the boss is new, because priorities change ¹.

The third row is where strategists get hurt most. A recommendation that implies the executive’s last decision was wrong asks them to pay a personal price for your analysis. Find a way to make the reversal about new facts, not old judgment.

Pre-wire the decision

Pre-wiring means nobody important hears your recommendation for the first time in the meeting where it is decided. A skeptical executive surprised in front of peers will defend the status quo, because that is the safe move in public. The same executive, seen one-on-one a week earlier, can raise objections without losing face, and you can fix the proposal while it is still cheap to fix.

Match the format to the person. Gabarro and Kotter cite Peter Drucker’s split between “listeners” and “readers”: brief a listener in person and follow up with a memo; send a reader the memo first, then discuss it ¹.

1. Map who decides and who can blockList the decision maker, the people whose agreement they will want, and anyone who loses budget or scope. Stakeholder mapping shows how to score them.
2. Agree the numbers with finance firstIf the finance partner disputes the baseline in the room, the debate becomes about your arithmetic. Reconcile it beforehand.
3. Hold short one-on-onesShow each stakeholder the recommendation and ask one question: what would stop you supporting this? Write the answers down in their words.
4. Change the proposal where the objection is rightFold real concerns into the design, such as a phased start, a review date or a cap on spend, and tell the person you did.
5. Tell the executive where everyone standsBefore the meeting, brief the decision maker on who supports, who has concerns and what is still open. No surprises in either direction.

Frame it as a decision, ask first

Senior teams often treat strategy sessions as review and approve. Michael Mankins and Richard Steele argue that productive strategy reviews shift to debate and decide, and are structured to produce real decisions ². Your document should make that easy.

1. The ask, in one sentence. What you want decided, by whom, and by when.
2. Why now. The change in the business that forces the choice.
3. The options, including doing nothing, with the main trade-off of each.
4. What you would have to believe for the recommendation to be right, and how confident you are in each belief.
5. The economics, reconciled with finance, as a range rather than one point estimate.
6. Risks and the exit. What would make you stop, stated in advance as kill criteria.
7. The first step and its cost. Often smaller and more reversible than the full program.

Put the ask first. A skeptical executive who has to wait until slide twelve to learn what you want will spend slides one to eleven building the case against it. If your executive is a reader, the narrative memo is the better vehicle; the one-page decision memo follows the same order in less space.

Pushback is information

Treat objections as data about what the executive is solving for. Most fall into a few types, and each calls for a different response.

Two habits help. Ask what would change their mind, and write it down; a vague no becomes a testable condition. And offer a smaller, reversible version of the decision. A pilot with a review date lets a skeptic say yes without betting their credibility on your forecast.

Spend the boss’s capital like it is scarce

Your boss has a limited store of time, energy and influence, and every request you make draws on it ¹. Gabarro and Kotter tell of a vice president who went to great lengths to get his boss to fire a meddlesome secretary in another department. The boss had to spend considerable influence to do it. Later, when the vice president needed help on more important problems, he ran into trouble: he had used up blue chips on a trivial issue ¹.

Every favor you ask of your boss is paid for out of the same account as your next big recommendation.

Dependability is the deposit side of that account. An optimistic delivery date pleases in the short term and costs credibility when it slips ¹. One president, describing a subordinate, told the authors: “I’d rather he be more consistent even if he delivered fewer peak successes—at least I could rely on him” ¹. For a strategist, that means forecasting your own work as carefully as you forecast the business.

Then there is your own reflex. Gabarro and Kotter describe a manager whose boss hardened and overstated his position whenever they disagreed; the manager raised the ante, the boss dug in further, and the manager ended up avoiding any topic of potential conflict ¹. His fix was to notice the cycle in himself and suggest a break at each impasse; when they came back, they could usually work it through ¹. Some people resist every constraint from above; others swallow disagreement and comply. The authors call both unrealistic views of what a boss is ¹. Know which way you lean before a high-stakes meeting, not during it.

When do you break the rules? When the issue is one your boss should not decide alone: a material risk the boss is suppressing, or an ethical line. Then going around them may be right. Do it in the open, tell them first that you will, and accept that you are spending the relationship on it.

The honest objection: isn’t this just politics?

A strategist trained on evidence can find all this distasteful. Shouldn’t the best analysis win on its merits? Isn’t tailoring a recommendation to the boss’s pressures a polite name for telling them what they want to hear?

No, and the difference is precise. Managing up changes the framing, the sequence and the first step. It never changes the facts. The vice president in the opening case did not need a different diagnosis; he needed to know the constraint his diagnosis had to work within. A phased exit that protects two key accounts is a better recommendation, not a watered-down one, because it accounts for something real the first version ignored.

Bosses also signal, often without meaning to, that they want only good news, and some even rate more favorably the people who bring no problems. The authors’ advice is to send the bad news up anyway ¹. That is the line between managing up and flattery: one fits the truth to the executive’s problem, the other fits it to their mood.

Learn the question first

This week, before you finish the analysis: write down the three results your executive is measured on this year. Check whether your recommendation helps or hurts each one. If you cannot fill in the three, that is your first meeting, and it comes before any slide.

The vice president had the right answer. He never asked his boss what the question was. Most strategists who lose a good recommendation lose it the same way, and many of them could have found out in a thirty-minute conversation they never booked.

Questions

What does managing up mean?

Managing up means deliberately working with your boss to get the best results for you, your boss and the company. Gabarro and Kotter, who framed the idea in 1980, stressed that it is not flattery or politics. It rests on mutual dependence: understanding the boss’s goals, pressures and style, agreeing expectations, keeping the boss informed, and being dependable and honest.

How do you get a skeptical executive to accept a recommendation?

Learn what the executive is measured on and under pressure from, then pre-wire: show them and key stakeholders the recommendation one-on-one before the decision meeting. Lead with the decision you want, show the options and what you would have to believe, reconcile numbers with finance, and offer a smaller reversible first step with a review date.

What is pre-wiring a meeting?

Pre-wiring is briefing the decision maker and key stakeholders individually before a decision meeting, so nobody hears the recommendation for the first time in the room. It lets people raise objections privately, lets you fix real problems in the proposal, and tells the decision maker in advance where everyone stands.

Is managing up just office politics?

Not when it is done well. Managing up changes how a recommendation is framed, sequenced and staged so it addresses the executive’s real constraints; it does not change the facts. Gabarro and Kotter explicitly excluded political maneuvering and apple polishing, and named dishonesty as perhaps the most troubling trait a subordinate can have.

What are the most common managing-up mistakes?

Surprising the boss in front of senior people, shading bad news, committing to optimistic dates that later slip, and using the boss’s time and influence on minor issues. The most basic mistake is the one in Gabarro and Kotter’s marketing case: never actively clarifying what the boss’s objectives are.

Where to go next

• Stakeholder Mapping for Strategy Work
• The Narrative Memo: Template and Method
• The One-Page Decision Memo
• Kill Criteria
• Decision Journal and Log