This transcript was produced by robots and left as-is. Accuracy and elegance are not guaranteed.

The last few episodes were about the mechanics of leading people below you and alongside you. Influence, hard conversations, decisions. But there’s a relationship that most engineers leave almost entirely to chance. And it has more leverage over your career than all the others combined. The relationship with your boss.

Most engineers don’t consciously manage upward. Not because they think it’s unimportant, because managing up sounds like a euphemism for politics, flattery, or playing the game. So they opt out. They assume good work will speak for itself and let the relationship run on autopilot. That’s a design error.

Your boss makes decisions about you, for you, and around you. Projects, resources, visibility, advancement. The quality of those decisions depends entirely on the signal they’re receiving. Most engineers are deliberate about the signal going downward and sideways. They leave the upward signal to chance.

Here’s a reframe. Your boss is a stakeholder. You already know how to manage stakeholders. You calibrate what information a decision maker needs, in what form, at what frequency, so they can make good decisions on your behalf. You do this for your clients almost instinctively. Then you look upward and stop doing it entirely.

There are three ways this failure shows up. The first is the silent performer. Head down, doing excellent work, assuming results speak for themselves. They don’t. Not upward at least. Your boss isn’t watching your work product. They’re watching your signal. If you’re quiet, their brain fills the gap. Usually not in your favor.

The second is the fire hose. Every detail, every update, every problem. You think you’re being transparent. Your boss experiences it as noise and starts to wonder why you need to hand them every problem. You’re training them to see you as high maintenance.

The third is always fine. Everything on track, no issues until suddenly there’s a serious issue. No one wants to be surprised. Always fine doesn’t build trust. It just delays the moment of reckoning.

I’ve lived the first one and the third one, often at the same time. Early in my career, I relocated to open a branch office. New city, new clients, new industries we never worked in before. Local politics I wasn’t quite prepared for. It was genuinely hard. Difficult clients, slow traction, perceptions of an outsider, obstacles I had not anticipated. And I said almost nothing about any of it.

Now part of that was ego. I didn’t want to look like I couldn’t handle it. Part of it was optimism. I figured if I just kept moving, results would follow. And the results would be the story. What I didn’t account for was that my boss wasn’t watching the obstacles I was clearing. He was watching the signal I was sending and the signal I was sending was silence.

There were real reasons some things were slower than they should have been. Context that would have mattered to the people above me. But I never provided it. So they worked with what they had, which was not much, and made their assessments accordingly. That’s not their fault. That’s a signal design failure.

Here’s a mechanic that fixes that. Most engineers wait for their boss to set the one-on-one agenda. That’s backwards. The engineer who owns the agenda owns the signal. Three items. What’s moving, what’s stuck and why, what you need from them. That’s it. Under 10 minutes. You’re not performing, you’re not politicking, you’re giving a decision maker the calibrated input they need to see your work accurately and support it when it counts. It’s not brown-nosing, it’s signal engineering.

Managing up isn’t flattery, it’s not playing the game. It is information engineering applied to the relationship with the most leverage over your career. You design the signal or the silence designs it for you.

Here’s something simple to try this week. Write down three things your boss would say about you right now if asked. Then ask yourself two questions. Are those things accurate? And did you put them there deliberately? If the answer to the second question is mostly no, you’ve found the gap.

Next episode, we’re going to make it harder. Same influence problem, but this time the person has no obligation to listen to you, no reporting relationship, and plenty of their own priorities. Working with people who don’t report to you and getting things done anyway. That’s where we’re going next.