David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, is known for losing his temper and calling underlings at 6 a.m., according to a recent New Yorker profile. But the chief executive has long been viewed in a favorable light by people who sat above him in the pecking order.
Former colleagues interviewed by the magazine describe Zaslav as the kind of person who cultivates friendships with senior bosses—playing tennis with partners at the law firm where he started out, bonding with “key deal decision makers,” as one source says—and uses those relationships to keep advancing in an organization. “He was very good at managing up,” a past colleague said.
Warner Bros. Discovery did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
“Managing up” is a practice that management scholars actually encourage. But unlike purer working definitions of the term, which include getting to know the way your supervisor works best and communicating effectively, the more sinister version involves stroking the egos of people above you, and creating the mirage that you’re an effective leader while treating direct reports like a brute.
This toxic approach to managing isn’t just unethical, it’s dangerous. Experts say that when middle managers cross over to the dark side of managing up, the leaders at the level just above them—the ones on the receiving end of praise from a self-serving manager—are often left unaware of problems two levels down. When trust is broken between a manager and their team members, those employees also stop sharing their ideas for innovation or change, and the whole enterprise suffers.
And if it’s a CEO who’s managing up with Machiavellian intentions, the board probably won’t have a realistic view of the company they oversee—until they’re blindsided by a crisis.
The healthy kind of managing up
To those unfamiliar with the concept of managing up, it might sound inherently manipulative.
A term that emerged in the 1980s, it means “consciously trying to create a productive and a positive working relationship with the people who are above you in the food chain, who have the power over you, so that you can succeed, they can succeed, and the organization can succeed,” says Mary Abbajay, president of leadership coaching firm Careerstone Group and author of Managing Up: How to Move Up, Win at Work, and Succeed With Any Type of Boss.
At the heart of benevolent upward management lies strong and well-aligned communication, in terms of both style and content. Effective employees match their approach to sharing information with that of their bosses’ and deliver information their managers need before they even ask for it, says Abbajay. That could mean sending a self-initiated weekly status update or setting up structures—spreadsheets or shared docs—to keep your workflow visible and organized. Your goal is to make everyone’s job easier by keeping your boss’s needs in mind, not merely your own.
Beyond keeping your manager in the loop, managing up can also involve suggesting improvements, voicing concerns, and testing creative tweaks to a team’s protocols that will help the team work better, says Michael Parke, an assistant management professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Valued employees will tell their own bosses, “Hey, I've noticed this problem. I want to bring it to your attention,” he says.
Staying mindful and even strategic about how you engage with your manager isn’t only a concern for the middle ranks. A McKinsey study involving 1,200 chief marketing officers as proxies for C-suite leaders found that actions connected to managing up and laterally were more important than managing subordinates for a company’s performance, “and well over twice as important” for success in a person’s career.
In interviews with top CMOs, McKinsey’s researchers also found that for C-suite leaders, managing up meant thinking about the same big issues that kept their CEOs up at night and seeing the company’s larger mission as part of their personal remit. “When we asked CMOs about their primary role, some responded that they ‘ran the marketing organization’ or ‘led their companies’ advertising and brand campaigns,’ the study authors wrote. “By contrast, the most effective and successful leaders in our study were more likely to describe their primary role as increasing company growth or better outreach to customers to improve performance.”
Abbajay has found that many people worry about coming off as self-important or controlling when they first learn about managing up, but most bosses appreciate the consideration and even want to be asked about how best to communicate. Parke likewise says there’s little risk or downside to managing up when it’s done in the right spirit. There’s nothing conniving about sending your boss an agenda for your one-on-one, for example, if your ultimate goal is to do a better job and be a more effective employee.
Just express your openness to scrapping your agenda if it doesn’t work for your manager, he adds, and if your boss doesn’t like that you’ve created an agenda full stop, “they can tell you that.”
If there’s one argument to be made against even well-meaning managing up, it might be that it can put the onus for creating a productive work relationship on the wrong person. For instance, employees of color or those from other underrepresented groups who are concerned that their managers may not see their value are often encouraged to actively manage up, but many workers find it exhausting.
The dark side of managing up
Even when benevolent managing up is taxing, however, the outcomes are still essentially positive. With the toxic form, there are no silver linings. What’s more, Parke has found that dark-side managing up begets self-motivated behavior, manipulation, paranoia, and nihilism down the chain.
First, a leader puts a huge amount of effort into managing their reputation outside of their team, speaking glowingly of the team’s “awesome work,” Parke says, but the subtext is “and it's because of me.” These managers are easy to spot: “They’re buddy-buddy with other leaders, but overly demanding, unfair, and overly critical to their team members,” the professor explains. “That creates a lot of fear that if you mess up, you’re going to lose your job.”
Next, a mismatch develops between how a company talks about its culture and what's actually rewarded. People see that getting ahead requires self-centeredness, maybe even some degree of deception, and prioritizing your own needs, says Parke. When a company is infected with this warped mindset, burnout sets in and turnover soars, unless the pay compensates for the miserable atmosphere. But even with “outrageous incentives,” Parke says, people will eventually leave.
Unfortunately, this is a perennial story. More than 30 years ago, a New York Times article featured an organizational psychologist’s thoughts on healthy and unhealthy narcissism. The theory was that healthy narcissists have the confidence as leaders to own their shortcomings and incorporate criticisms and advice, while their counterparts “combine an almost-grandiose sense of certainty with disdain for subordinates” and are “particularly good at ingratiating themselves with their seniors.”
One reason toxic managing up works to boost someone’s career—at least in the short term—is that people are vain, says Abbajay. Top bosses enjoy being flattered and treated with reverence. The other reason is that people don’t want to know there are problems, she adds. “It’s ‘I don't want to know what's going on because I don't know how to fix it,’” she says.
Safeguarding against the wrong leadership patterns and the downward spiral that they create demands adding checks and balances within the system. Senior leaders need to check in with middle managers’ team members to ask, “How is this manager, for real, with you all?” Parke suggests. To avoid cultural rot and the kind of widespread fear that prevents both potential whistleblowers and innovators from speaking up, top bosses should make themselves available to everyone within a firm’s hierarchy, Abbajay recommends.
Otherwise, she says, “you might be living in a dreamland.”
