Managing Up Is Not a Career Move. It Is a Leadership Responsibility.

Nurturing relationships with the people above you in an organisation is one of the most consequential things a commercial leader can do for their team. It is also, in my experience, one of the things that commercial leaders most consistently underinvest in.

The hesitation is understandable. Managing up carries an association with self-promotion, with the careful management of impressions, with positioning yourself in the right conversations for the sake of your own career. That version exists and is recognisable to anyone who has spent time in a larger organisation. But it is not the only version, and conflating the two tends to leave teams less well served than they should be.

In commercial life science organisations, where resource allocation decisions, headcount approvals, and strategic prioritisation can determine whether a team succeeds or stalls, the leader’s ability to operate effectively above their own level is not a peripheral skill. It is central to delivering for the people in their team.

Headcount approvals, territory investments, budget allocations, the internal prioritisation that determines whether a team’s work gets the organisational backing it needs: all of these are shaped by relationships and credibility that sit above the manager’s own reporting line.

When a resource request comes from a manager that senior leadership knows well and trusts, it lands in a context of established confidence. When it comes from someone they rarely hear from outside of formal review cycles, it starts from a much weaker position, regardless of how well the case is made. That is not a meritocracy failure. It is how organisations allocate resources under uncertainty, making judgements about where investment will be well used based on the information and relationships available to them.

Ensuring that the people above you have an accurate and current picture of what the team is doing, what it is achieving, and what it needs is not political activity. It is the practical work of creating the conditions in which the team can grow. In a pre-commercial or early commercial life science company, where resources are finite and prioritisation decisions carry significant commercial consequence, this matters more, not less.

Budget meetings, talent reviews, strategic planning sessions, the informal exchanges between senior leaders that often shape more of the organisational direction than any formal process: these are conversations where the team’s interests either get represented or they do not. There is no neutral outcome.

A manager who is well connected upward can surface their team’s contributions in these contexts, correct misconceptions before they solidify, and create space for opportunities that the team would never know to ask for. The growth opportunities available to individuals within a team are partly a function of how visible they are to people above the manager’s level. That visibility does not happen by accident. It requires someone to speak about their work in rooms they are not in, to connect their names to the right conversations at the right moments, and to ensure that when a development opportunity arises, the people who deserve consideration are already known.

Creating that visibility is a deliberate act of leadership. It is also one that only becomes possible if the leader has invested in the relationships that give them standing to do it. A manager who appears at the senior level only when they need something will find that the relationships are not there when they are needed most.

A leader who has genuine relationships above them tends to receive signals earlier when the organisation is about to change direction. That early awareness allows for thoughtful preparation rather than reactive firefighting, for honest conversations with the team about what is shifting and why, rather than managing the anxiety that fills the space when information arrives late and without context.

The flow in the other direction matters equally. A leader who has built enough trust with senior leadership to surface what is actually happening in the field, where the commercial strategy is encountering friction, where assumptions in the plan are not matching the reality the team is navigating, is providing something genuinely valuable to the organisation. That honest upward intelligence is only available from people who have earned the relationship that makes it possible to deliver it without it being filtered, softened, or ignored.

In a commercial life science context, where the gap between the plan and the market reality can be significant and where course corrections made early cost a fraction of those made late, this quality of upward communication can be the difference between a commercial launch that adapts and one that persists with assumptions that no longer hold.

Managing up in service of a team and managing up in service of oneself can look similar from the outside, at least in the short term. Both involve maintaining visibility with senior leadership, communicating proactively, and ensuring the team’s work is known at the right levels.

The difference becomes apparent over time in what those behaviours are oriented toward. A leader who is primarily managing their own position tends to advocate for their team when it reflects well on them and to go quiet when it does not. A leader who is genuinely doing it for the team does it consistently, including in the moments when the team needs support rather than recognition, when a difficult conversation needs to be had on their behalf, when a mistake needs to be owned rather than distanced from.

That consistency is what builds the kind of trust within a team that makes the rest of the leadership relationship function well. People can usually tell the difference between a manager who is genuinely in their corner and one who is using the team’s performance as material for their own advancement. The former creates loyalty and the kind of discretionary effort that does not show up in a job description. The latter produces a transactional relationship that delivers exactly what is required and nothing more.

Commercial leadership in life sciences is most often discussed in terms of what happens inside the team: how direction is set, how performance is managed, how culture is built. Those things are central to the role. But the leader’s responsibility extends into the organisational environment the team operates in, and managing that environment well is not a peripheral activity.

The resources a commercial team needs, the visibility the individuals within it deserve, the early intelligence that allows for thoughtful preparation rather than reactive response: all of these depend on relationships above the manager’s level that have been built with genuine investment over time. This is true in large organisations with mature commercial infrastructure and equally true in the early stage life science companies where the stakes of each resource decision are proportionally higher.

The leaders who deliver most consistently for their teams over time are almost always the ones who understood this. They were deeply invested in the people who worked for them, and they understood that some of the most important work they could do for those people happened in conversations that had nothing directly to do with them. That orientation, more than almost any other quality, is what separates leaders who build enduring commercial teams from those who simply manage them.