Managing Up and Across (HBR Guide): The Unspoken Skill That Shapes Success

Book Review: We look at this standard-issue primer and evaluate its use for innovators. "Leadership isn’t only top-down."

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May 31, 2025

In our 📚 Reviews & Marginalia series, we review books, essays, and other media that shape how we think about leadership, innovation, and navigating complexity. These aren’t endorsements — they’re conversation starters. Our goal isn’t to summarize, but to highlight the enduring, the useful, or the provocative — and to test how these ideas hold up in today’s world of projects, pivots, and pressure. We conclude with a pre-release preview of our Innovator’s Lens, our in-development framework for assessing and evaluating relevance across innovation roles and experience, as well as applicability to navigating the complex space of building the future.

One of the most under-appreciated capacities (and often in that realm of “esoteric yet critical, unfortunately), for innovation and organizational success isn’t technical excellence or a brilliant idea. It’s the ability to manage relationships upward and sideways.

Originally published in 2012, the Harvard Business Review Guide to Managing Up and Across offers a practical framework for something many professionals encounter, but few are formally taught: navigating the dynamics of influence within organizations. While some examples and framing may feel a bit dated in today’s context of distributed teams and evolving management culture, many of its underlying lessons hold contemporary value.

At its core, it serves as an introduction and primer on working smarter inside the structure you’re in, and strategically expanding your influence without needing to change your title.

Let’s talk about that.

You Are Not Just Managing Tasks

When we think about leadership, we often default to managing people who report to us. But in practice, success is determined just as much by your ability to:

Align with your manager’s priorities,
Anticipate what they need before they ask,
Communicate in the mode they best receive,
And build trust, not dependency.

This is what "managing up" actually means. It’s not sycophancy. It’s strategic sense-making: understanding how your manager functions, what pressures they’re under, and how to make things work better for both of you.

Read the Room, and the Role

Your boss might be a visionary who thinks in broad strokes, or a tactical executor who loves the details. Are they flooded with information, or always asking for more?

This is your first job: figure out how they process, prioritize, and perform. Then adjust your own communications accordingly. A weekly bullet-point update might be gold for one manager and a nuisance to another. Know what lands, and adapt to it.

Introduction to the “Managing Across” section.

Influence is Horizontal, Too

Managing across means collaborating laterally with peers, stakeholders, and those outside your chain of command. These relationships aren’t governed by hierarchy — they’re built on credibility and goodwill.

When you help others solve problems, share useful information, or make their job easier, it’s not just kindness. It’s strategy. You are building a reputation that precedes you.

Cross-functional influence is especially vital in innovation settings. If you’re launching something new, odds are you’ll need people from teams you don’t directly manage. Political savvy here doesn’t mean playing games. It means playing fair and playing smart.

An interesting take with a noteworthy amount of systemic buy-in.

Solving Isn’t Always the Point

One surprising insight: Don’t always be the fixer. Instead, learn to frame problems well. When you present context, stakes, and options clearly, you help decision-makers make better calls. (I alluded to this in a recent post on iteration & momentum, where a key challenge is demarcating decision spaces and identifying when and where decisions actually need to be made.)

That’s real leverage. And it's a form of leadership that builds trust and avoids the micromanaging trap.

"Leading from the Middle" Is Real

You don’t need to be the VP or founder to lead. The best teams thrive on distributed leadership. That means people across levels who:

Know how to communicate up and across,
Create shared wins,
And model what effective collaboration looks like.

This isn’t just about getting ahead in your career. It’s about making good work possible at all.

Now, whether or not the administration or C-Suite recognizes what you are doing and works with your effort and increased awareness of these dynamics, that is a topic for another day.

Innovator’s Lens: Assessing Applicability

What does this text mean for those of us doing the work of building the future? Our familiar lenses of senior vs early career, and, relevance for innovators conclude this review.

For Leaders and Early-Career Professionals

For senior leadership, managers, and team leads:

Don’t underestimate the impact of psychological safety and context clarity. When people feel safe to speak and are clear on how their work connects to larger goals, they’ll manage up more effectively.
Proactively model the kind of communication you want to see. Make your priorities known and your working style transparent.

For early-career researchers and professionals:

Get curious about your manager’s pressures and perspective — not to pander, but to align.
Learn to frame your updates and requests based on shared goals.
And remember: credibility is built laterally, too. Be reliable, generous, and solutions-oriented with your peers.

Relevance to Builders and Innovators

Does this book offer breakthrough guidance for those building the future? Not quite. It’s more of a primer than a blueprint.

But the lessons here do reinforce something essential in fast-moving innovation spaces: that execution depends on alignment. Influence, clarity, and communication — especially when stakes are high and titles are informal — matter more than many realize.

In that sense, managing up and across isn’t just about career survival. It’s about organizational coherence. And if you’re trying to build something novel or complex, that’s non-negotiable.

Role in Curriculums

This would benefit someone who is seeking a very initial contextualizing of workplace dynamics or “ working smarter inside the structure you’re in, and strategically expanding your influence without needing to change your title”, as noted earlier.

Starter material that offers broad categories to be refined later with experience,
Not recommended for particularly experienced folks, as there seems to be an ease of dismissing some of the rudimentary frameworks at hand.

“How do we get there?” Score

This is an experimental lens that we are developing at FHTT. In short, we are looking to evaluate the ways and means a material or resource is aligned with or demarcates our Does it help with navigating to the future we want?

3.5 Fundamentals
1.5 Expert Writing
1.5 Old-Track Alignment
0 AI & Technology Savvy
2 Whole-Person
2 Systemic Buy-In
0 Addressing Macro Problems
1 Future Fit
1 FHTT Alignment

1.3/5 How Do We Get There Score
Aggregate, rounded up

Reviewer’s Take

1 General
0 Bookshelf
0 Dessert Island

Reviewer’s Comment:

It’s just too basic and too old to have any particular relationship to the modern realm of higher EQ and better interpersonal skills (ideally), and the absolute interfacing with technology and AI that dominates our time. If this is the only interpersonally-focused tomb on your boss’s bookshelf, be wary. Serves as a fair overview of the general landscape, but generally avoidable in favor of modern alternatives.

From Here to There: Strategy and Mentorship for Innovators

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