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Managing Up: How to Work With Executives and Leaders
721 students
Managing Up: How to Work With Executives and Leaders
managing up | working with executives | influence without authority | chief of staff | executive communication | trust
Last updated 9/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Understand what the person above you actually spends their week deciding
- Write a brief an executive reads in two minutes and acts on
- Get agreement from senior people without any formal authority over them
- Read the informal power structure in a company and work with it
- Present a proposal in the language decisions are made in: numbers
- Manage upward deliberately, including how much detail to send and when
- Support a leader through a crisis, and know what to filter and what to escalate
- Communicate a decision so it survives being retold by three other people
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Explore related topics
Course content
16 sections • 43 lectures • 21h 46m total length
Requirements
- A manager or executive whose decisions affect your work
- No finance background required. The financial statements start from zero
- Willingness to read your own last few updates as your manager would
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- Honesty about which conversations with senior people you have been avoiding
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Managing up is usually mistaken for getting along with your boss. It is actually four separate skills, and none of them is charm.
Why good proposals die
You bring something well thought through. It gets a polite response and no decision. What went wrong is almost never the idea. It is that the proposal arrived in the wrong week, framed around your problem rather than theirs, in a format that took eleven minutes to read, without the one number that would have made the answer obvious. I have watched better ideas than mine lose to worse ones presented properly, and it took an embarrassingly long time to stop calling that unfair and start calling it a skill I did not have.
What this course actually covers
Five blocks. First, the professional version of this work — the chief of staff role: managing an executive's focus and calendar, synthesising information into briefs they act on, working with the hidden power structure, getting agreement from senior people without authority, and supporting a leader through a crisis. Second, their agenda: ten lessons on what a chief executive actually decides across direction, team, product, growth, money, crisis, technology and operations. Third, being worth listening to — a personal audit, working with your own manager, overdelivering visibly, and communicating so you are understood the first time. Fourth, their language: market structure, competition, economics, regulation, risk and the three financial statements, so a proposal can be argued in numbers. Fifth, being heard beyond one room — audiences, channels, delivering bad news, and measuring whether the message landed.
A note on two of the blocks
The business and communication blocks were recorded inside a people-function frame, and the last lesson of the finance block is explicitly about justifying a function's initiatives financially. The material itself is not domain-specific: STEEPLE, Porter's five forces, the Boston matrix, the three financial statements and audience segmentation do not change depending on whose proposal is being defended.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, reporting into and arguing with founders through that entire period, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 41 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: the executive brief structure, prioritisation with Eisenhower and ICE, the personal audit, Porter's five forces, the three financial statements, audience personas and the channel mix
Real practice from Google, Netflix and others
Where to start
Take the last written update you sent upward and read it as your manager would, in the ninety seconds they actually had. If the decision they needed to make is not obvious in the first three lines, that is where this course starts. Enrol now and start today.
Who this course is for:
- Specialists whose proposals are good and never get approved
- Managers reporting into an executive whose priorities they cannot predict
- Chiefs of staff, business partners and anyone whose job is to support a leader
- Function heads who present to a board and lose the room in the first minute
- People who have been told to be "more strategic" without being told what that means
- Project leads who need decisions from people far above them
- Anyone who found out about a decision that affected them after it was made