One of the most common questions I get from young professionals is about promotions. How do you get noticed? What gets you ahead? How do you position yourself for bigger roles? I’ve watched lots of careers develop over the years. Some people rocket up the ladder while others with similar talent stay stuck. There’s a story in those differences.
First, be excellent in your current role. I don’t care what it is. When I was a teenager, my first job was as an intern for a guy who owned a transportation company. One day I’d be painting the walls of a warehouse, the next I was getting him groceries. My mission was clear: paint those walls perfectly and make sure to get him exactly what he wanted from Kroger. Regardless of what your job is, be excellent at it. Nothing else matters if you haven’t gotten this right. This won’t guarantee a promotion, but failing at it promises you won’t get one. You can’t focus on the next thing without being great at the current one.
Next, we have an uncomfortable truth. Your employer pays you to do your job, not to prepare you for the next one. That preparation is your responsibility. Learn what skills are needed to be excellent at the role you want and develop them on your own time, not during company working hours. The market rewards skills it values, not complaints about lack of opportunity.
You want to become a better writer? Read and write every morning before work. A better speaker in front of a group? Go to improv classes on the weekend. The skills that create career value don’t always develop between the hours of 8 and 5. They’re built in the margins of life. The people who get promoted choose to do extra work and develop additional skills in their own free time.
Third, become a surplus-value employee. Companies keep and promote people who create more value than they extract. This doesn’t only apply to revenue-generating roles such as product development or sales; it’s the same whether you work in marketing, human resources, inventory management, or building maintenance. Mentor others, solve problems before they become crises, and make the company culture better. When you consistently deliver multiple times what you cost, your promotion becomes a rational business decision.
The people who get promoted fastest are busy doing excellent work, learning constantly, and making everyone around them better. The system works because excellence creates opportunity, skills create options, and value creation increases demand for you.
During one of the meetings with my Learning Leader Circle a few years ago, we were focused on how we all can better manage up. A fellow member, Stephanie Wernick Barker, said, “Good news often. Bad news early. And never any surprises.”
People hate uncertainty more than they hate bad news. Your boss can handle problems. What they can’t handle is being blindsided by something they should have known about weeks ago. The ability to manage relationships with those above you isn’t some corporate game. It’s a core skill that separates people who advance from those who stagnate, regardless of their technical abilities. When done well, it reduces friction, builds trust, and creates conditions where everyone can do their best work.
This is a useful framework for communication that deserves a deeper look.
Good news often: Sharing wins, progress, and positive developments regularly keeps your boss informed and builds confidence in your abilities. Don’t wait for formal reviews to highlight accomplishments. A quick email about meeting a milestone or receiving positive client feedback takes minimal effort but keeps your contributions visible. I liked sending these notes to my boss every Friday morning (or a few hours before our scheduled one-on-ones).
Bad news early: Problems don’t get better with age. When issues arise, addressing them immediately gives your boss time to provide guidance, reallocate resources, or adjust expectations with their stakeholders. The alternative, hiding problems until they become big issues, erodes trust and creates unnecessary pressure for everyone.
Never any surprises: Your boss hates surprises. Keep them informed about potential risks, changing timelines, or shifting priorities. Even seemingly small changes can have ripple effects throughout an organization that you might not be aware of.
In addition to proactive communication, here are some other important ways to manage up:
Learn Their Priorities and Pressures: Your boss has their own goals, constraints, and people to report to. Understanding their pain points allows you to frame your work in terms that matter to them. I once worked with a brilliant analyst who couldn’t understand why his meticulously researched reports weren’t appreciated. He was solving problems nobody asked him to solve. Once he started asking, “What decision does my boss need to make next month?” his work became better.
Make Their Job Easier: The universal currency in all organizations is making someone else’s life better. Look for opportunities to lighten your manager’s load. This might mean handling routine tasks independently, preparing background information before meetings, or filtering information so they can focus on truly important decisions.
Build Trust Through Reliability: Nothing builds credibility faster than consistently delivering on commitments. When you say something will be done by Friday, make sure it happens. If circumstances change, communicate proactively about adjustments to scope or timeline. Most trust isn’t built through grand gestures but through a hundred small promises kept.
Manage Expectations: Be realistic about what you can accomplish and distinguish clearly between committed deliverables and aspirational goals. Humans tend to be optimistic about timeframes but pessimistic about outcomes. Reverse this tendency: Be conservative about when things will happen, but confident in your ability to deliver quality.
Navigating Difficult Situations: Even the best manager-employee relationships face challenges. Here’s how to handle common difficult scenarios:
When You Need Resources: Frame requests in terms of organizational goals rather than personal preferences. “To meet the quarterly target, we need additional design support” is more compelling than “I’m feeling overwhelmed and need help.”
When You Make a Mistake: The difference between a good relationship and a poor one isn’t the absence of mistakes. It’s how they are handled. Own it completely, explain briefly what happened, present your plan to fix it, and share what you’ve learned so that it doesn’t happen again. Most bosses appreciate accountability more than perfection.
When You Disagree With a Decision: Choose your battles carefully. For minor issues, sometimes it’s best to “disagree and commit.” For more significant concerns, present alternative viewpoints respectfully, backed by data when possible. Focus on shared goals rather than personal opinions.
The Ultimate Goal: a True Partnership: The manager-employee relationship might be the most important dynamic in any organization. Your day-to-day experience at work, your opportunities, and your growth all flow through this relationship. When you get good at managing up, you stop seeing your boss as an obstacle to work around and start seeing them as a partner in getting things done. That shift changes everything about how you show up at work. And over time, you become the kind of person others actively want to work with and follow.
Excerpt from The Price of Becoming: The Compounding Practices of High Performance © 2026 by Ryan Hawk. Published by Harper Edge, an imprint of HarperCollins LLC.