The Right Altitude Field Guide to Managing Up

You do excellent work. The people who decide your future have no idea. Your boss knows, mostly, but the room where the promotion gets decided is full of people who have never seen what you do, and when your name comes up, your boss can't make the case because you never gave them the words. Three years of great work, invisible to the people who mattered most. The gap was never your performance. It was that nobody translated it upward. This is a field guide for making your value visible without playing politics. Five practices for the most consequential relationship you have at work: Reading Your Boss so you know what actually lands, the Strategic Narrative so your work has a story people can repeat, the Friday Update so the record speaks for you when you're not in the room, the Sponsor Map so your career doesn't hang on a single relationship, and Pushing Back Without Pushing Away so your agreement means something when it counts. Start with the diagnostic to find your weakest link, then go straight to the practice that fixes it. Managing up isn't politics. It's translation.