The Manager's New Brief

16.1

Ch. 16 — Managing Up, Across, and Through Change

Part V — The long game

💡 Core idea

A great team can still fail if the manager cannot create clarity with their own manager, peers, and partners — especially when change is continuous rather than a single “transformation program.”

You are a translator: strategy down, reality up. Influence is often the work you do without enough formal authority. Andi Roberts argues that you can lead without a title through credibility and relationships, and that formal authority is only one decision tool. That is the opening move of this chapter. It does not cancel hierarchy (Chapter 1). It tells you how to work when hierarchy is incomplete, which it usually is.

Managing up: no surprises, options, uncomfortable facts

Ben Balter’s rule applies upward: “on track” is not the same as keeping your manager in the loop. Bring risks early, with options, not only bare problems. Bring the uncomfortable fact yourself. A weekly upward memo — progress, risks, asks, and what you are not worried about — keeps noise low and surprises rarer. The same mechanism works downward: Edmondson (1999) found that leader coaching and a non-defensive response to questions and challenges were associated with team psychological safety, which in turn was associated with learning behavior — including speaking up. If you want uncomfortable facts, how you respond when you get one is the system.

A clear ask (Rands; also Chapter 7) is the basic unit of this work. Vague escalation is how issues sit in a pile. A specific ask is how they move.

Stay SaaSy: managing up does not mean abandoning your team in the room. You can be aligned with leadership and still be on your people’s side. If those two conflict, that is a fact to handle in the open, not a reason to throw the team overboard for a clean slide.

Across: maps, incentives, pre-alignment

Draw a stakeholder map: who is affected, who decides, who can block, what each person cares about. Pre-alignment conversations — used ethically, not as ambush — prevent theatrical meetings in which everyone performs surprise.

Kore Nordmann is precise about a common complaint: when “we can’t deliver because of the other team” becomes background noise, incentives and metrics are speaking. Do not only coach people to “collaborate better.” Look at what the system rewards. Fix the interface and the measure, or the story will repeat.

Written agreements between teams — owner, date, definition of done — are dull and effective.

Through change, without a grand program

Change is now continuous. You still need a story people can test: why this, why now, what we will do, what we will stop, what we need, how we will know. First steps should be small enough to run. Resistance should be heard in person, not only in a survey.

Aleix Morgadas warns that “AI strategy” easily becomes strategy theater. Experiment in a decentralized way, then capitalize on what works. A slide that names a transformation is not a change.

Jurriaan Kamer again: change communication should name the cost of the upgrade, not only the promise (Chapter 12). If automation will change roles, say so, and say what you will do about learning paths (Chapter 13). Hidden costs come back as distrust.

That conversation is part of the job, not an extra. Gallup (Makridis, 2026) found that frequent AI users were more than twice as likely to fear job elimination within five years, and that respect and a sense that the organization cares about wellbeing were associated with less of that fear, especially among frequent users (Chapter 11). Familiarity with the tool was not enough.

Molly Graham is useful for the change conversation itself: people can “believe in the opportunity and still hate the change,” and, as she quotes Chip Conley, “sometimes you need to throw the funeral” for work that has ended. Holding on does not stop the change; neither does skipping the loss. See Chapter 13.

A related, weaker claim is circulating as commentary: that AI will hollow out the middle manager who only forwards information (see Chapter 1). Do not treat that as a forecast. Do treat it as a test of your own role: if your value is a relay, change communication will expose it. If your value is judgment, trade-offs, and care for the people doing the work, make that visible in the change story.

Crisis is a sharper form of the same communication job. Kevin Goldsmith is blunt: “Crisis response and crisis leadership are two different jobs.” Lead the people: “Communicate on a schedule, including when there’s nothing new.” “We don’t know the cause yet. I’ll update you at four o’clock” is a complete update. “Save the why for later.” Blame-seeking mid-event teaches the wrong lesson: “Asking during the crisis teaches people to hide the next one.”

Tools

🤖 AI-era tip: Let a tool sharpen the memo — then put the risk back in

Use an approved assistant to draft a tight status note and to anticipate questions. Then add the facts a model tends to smooth over: the risk, the disagreement, the thing that is late. Your job is not a more polished narrative; it is a truer one. The same applies to change communication: a tool can help you draft, but you must not hide the human consequences of automation behind vague language.

Takeaways

Evidence