Managing your manager.
For most of my decade across academia and industry, I had decent managers. Then, late in my corporate years, the person managing me changed, and I met the other kind.
The temperature dropped almost straightaway. And when I said out loud that I wanted to step up, something instructive happened. I didn't get a path. I got more work, tighter deadlines, and a quiet drought of the opportunities that had been flowing before.
I did what most professionals do. I assumed it was me, and I worked harder. The goalposts simply moved again. It took me far too long to see what was actually happening, so this issue is the one I wish someone had sent me at the time. It comes in two halves, because there are two kinds of manager, and the costliest mistake you can make is using the playbook for one on the other.
The numbers say it's not just you
Your manager is the single biggest variable in your working life. Gallup research puts managers at at least 70% of the variance in team engagement, and a Gallup study of 7,272 US adults found one in two had left a job to get away from a manager at some point in their career.
Here's the part that should lower your blood pressure: most of them were never taught the job. UK research by the Chartered Management Institute found 82% of managers are "accidental managers" with no formal training. And MIT Sloan's analysis found a toxic culture is 10.4 times more powerful than pay in predicting who walks. This is a structural problem. You just happen to be standing in it.
If your manager is decent: manage them
Managing up isn't grovelling and it isn't politics. It's running the relationship like an operator, because a decent manager responds to good inputs.
Three moves do most of the work.
- Learn their scoreboard. Ask what they're being measured on this quarter, and make sure your part of it is never the loose thread.
- Give them no surprises. Bad news early, plus a three-line Friday update (done, next, flagged) that quietly answers the question every manager carries, which is "do I need to worry about this person?"
- Talk results, not effort. "The report's automated, it saves us four hours a week" travels upstairs. "I've been really busy" travels nowhere.
Do this for a couple of months and the check-ins fade, the flexibility grows, and your evenings arrive with a clearer head. That calm is not a luxury. It's the raw material of everything you're building on the side.
But do not over-deliver
Here's where I disagree with most managing-up advice. Reliability buys autonomy. Heroics buy nothing.
The reward for over-delivering is rarely more money. It's more work. In a 2022 survey, 78% of workers reported being "quietly promoted": handed a bigger workload with no rise to match. And researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh have shown how much career time gets eaten by "non-promotable tasks", work that helps the organisation but never shows up in your review. The committees. The note-taking. Organising the team social. The timeout meetings that exist so a manager can feel a team spirit that isn't there.
Deliver a steady, dependable 100. Don't deliver a heroic 140 and donate the difference to someone else's scoreboard. The reward for being the office packhorse is a heavier pack. That spare 40 belongs to your build.
The manager you can't manage
Now the other half, the one the managing-up industry stays quiet about. Some managers cannot be managed, because your growth is not in their interest.
You'll recognise the signs:
- The goalposts move after you hit them.
- You ask about progression and receive workload instead of a path.
- Credit flows up and blame flows down.
- Your name stays off the visible work.
- Every one-to-one leaves you slightly smaller than you walked in.
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You start to feel micromanaged.
If that's your Monday to Friday, hear me clearly: no Friday update fixes it. You cannot out-perform a manager who benefits from keeping you exactly where you are. I tried. The harder I worked, the better the arrangement got for everyone but me.
You can't manage a bad manager. You can only escape.
But escape has two versions, and only one of them is any good.
The panic exit is the resignation letter written at midnight, the jump into the next job offer that comes (if you're lucky), the past burnout shows up again, this time with the next manager. That's not escape. That's re-rolling the dice.
The planned exit is different. You keep the salary, you go boringly reliable at the 100 level, you stop spending emotional energy trying to win an unwinnable game, and you pour the reclaimed hours into income that doesn't answer to them. Build first. Leave second. A bad manager controls your week. They only control your future if every pound you earn flows through them.
I'll tell you the strangest part from my own experience: the day my exit stopped being hypothetical, the pressure lost most of its power. Nothing about the job had changed. Everything about my position had.
This, more than anything else, is what Parallel Income OS is being built for: a step-by-step blueprint that gets your parallel income moving within weeks, so your exit stops being hypothetical too. It's not live yet, but it's close, and subscribers will be the first to know.
Your homework
Decide, honestly, which manager you have. If they're decent: send the three-line Friday update this week and start the compounding. If they're the other kind: stop spending energy trying to win them over, and put one reclaimed hour this week into your parallel income instead. That hour is the first brick of the escape.
Coming next Monday
A personal one. Next Monday marks exactly a year since my last day as someone else's employee. I'll tell you honestly what changed when my parallel income went full time, and which parts surprised me.
See you then.
Izhar