Managing Your Manager

the relationship that controls your freedom to act

Learning Objectives

Before

At every team meeting, Jess's supervisor added items to the simulator's roadmap. By the end of the third meeting, the roadmap had seventeen items that Jess and Tahia had not agreed to and could not realistically deliver. The supervisor did not think of himself as creating a problem. He was excited about the project, but he assumed that because he was the PI, his ideas were the plan. Jess could say yes to everything and deliver nothing on time while quietly resenting the situation, Or she could learn to manage the relationship.

Working With the People Above You

Managing your manager does not mean undermining them or working around them. It means making the relationship productive in both directions. Your manager has authority over resources and priorities; you have information about what is technically feasible and how long it actually takes. Neither of you can do the other's job. A manager who adds seventeen items to a roadmap without cost information is not being unreasonable—they genuinely don't know the costs. Your job is to provide that information clearly and early.

Three practices make the relationship work:

Translate effort into impact.
"That feature would take three weeks" rarely lands. "If we build that feature, we won't be able to fix the reproducibility problem before the ESIP conference, which means our three submitted talks will all demo a version that doesn't run on Windows" lands. Managers make priority decisions by comparing impacts, not by estimating hours.
Say no by offering alternatives.
"I can't do that" puts your manager in the position of having to disagree with you or back down. "I can do that if we defer item 12, which would push the March release by two weeks" gives them a choice. Most managers will make the trade-off sensibly when it is presented as a trade-off.
Give written updates before they ask.
A brief weekly email summarizing what's done, what's in progress, and what's blocking takes five minutes to write and prevents thirty minutes of ad hoc check-ins. It also creates a record that protects you when someone asks why the March release slipped: you told them in February.

Most supervisors who overload their teams are not doing it deliberately. They have more ideas than capacity and they have never seen their team's capacity written down. Making capacity visible is not complaining; it is giving your manager the information they need to make good decisions. If you don't give them that information, they'll make decisions without it.

After

Jess started keeping a one-page "capacity document" that listed the team's current commitments with rough time estimates. Before each meeting with her PI, she emailed it to him with one sentence for each proposed new item: "Adding this would require moving [existing item] to Q3." Her supervisor stopped adding items without asking about capacity first. The conversation shifted from "here are more things to do" to "here is the trade-off I'm asking you to make".

Exercises

Translate a Technical Decision (10 min)

Think of a technical decision your project has made or needs to make, such as refactoring a module or switching a dependency. Prompt an LLM with something like this:

I need to explain a technical decision to a non-technical supervisor. The decision is [describe it]. The technical justification is [one or two sentences]. Write a two-paragraph explanation that describes the decision in terms of risk, reliability, and impact rather than technical detail.

  1. Run the prompt and read the output. Does it describe the trade-off clearly? Does it use any technical terms your supervisor wouldn't know?

  2. Rewrite the explanation for your actual supervisor, based on what they actually care about. What would make them say yes? What would make them say "let's wait until next quarter"? reader.

The Alternative Offer (10 min)

  1. Work in pairs. One person plays a manager who has just asked for something unreasonable (use a real example from your own work, or use Jess's situation). The other person practices saying no by offering an alternative. You cannot say "that's not possible" or "we don't have time"; you must frame your response as, "I can do [X] if we [trade-off]."

  2. Repeat the exercise using an LLM as your manager. What prompt did you give it? Was its output useful for helping you practice for a real conversation?