Manage up — without making it a performance

Managing up is real, useful, and usually taught as light-touch social manipulation. With an autistic manager, the social-manipulation version backfires. The substance version works.

Most managing-up advice in business writing is about reading your boss's emotional state, mirroring their preferred style, and quietly shaping their priorities through informal influence. That advice is not wrong for the manager it imagines: a neurotypical boss who experiences workplace interaction as a social game. It maps poorly onto an autistic manager, who is often experiencing the same interactions as substantive coordination problems and finds the social-game layer effortful at best and corrosive at worst.

What managing up actually means, stripped of the performance:

• Tell your manager what you need from them, plainly. 'I need a yes/no on the contract by Friday or the vendor walks' is managing up. Don't dress it as 'I just wanted to flag…'
• Surface tradeoffs early. 'I can do A by Tuesday or B by Tuesday, not both. Which do you want?' is a gift. It forces a real prioritization conversation instead of an end-of-week miss.
• Disagree in writing, in advance. If you think a decision is wrong, write it down, send it before the meeting, and be specific about what you'd do instead. Backchanneling disagreement to peers is what bad teams do.
• Bring options, not laments. 'This isn't working' is a complaint. 'This isn't working, here are two changes I'd like to try, I want to do option 1 unless you object' is managing up.
• Confirm receipt of decisions. 'Got it — I'll proceed with X, will revisit in two weeks' lets your manager close a loop. Silence reads, at best, as unread.

The Management Center's expectations work applies here with the direction reversed. You are managing the expectations your manager has of you. That requires the same discipline: written, specific, current.

One thing not to do: avoid trying to 'soften' your manager's communication style for the rest of the team. You are not their translator. If a peer reads your manager as rude, the peer needs to do their own adaptation work; not have you act as a buffer. Acting as a buffer makes the autistic manager invisible and makes you the relationship's unpaid translator. Both are bad.