Managing Up 2.0: The New Rules of Modern Marketing Leadership

You know that feeling when Hollywood announces yet another reboot of a movie that didn’t need even one? Now that we’ve survived Freakier Friday, should we brace ourselves for Freakiest Friday next year?

One of the most interesting challenges younger marketers face feels like a sequel: figuring out how to work with leadership. Welcome to Managing Up: Into the Feedback-Verse. 

Same premise. New cast. Now with AI-generated dialogue and a bigger budget for buzzwords.

“Managing up” was once seen as the noble art of helping your boss (and, by extension, you) succeed. Opinions on the corporate version of being a good scene partner unspooled regularly. The Wall Street Journal said it’s all about “making your supervisor’s job easier.” Harvard Business Review (subscription required) said managing up “begins and ends with doing your job, and doing it well.”

Cute. And, honestly, a bit obvious. Anyone who's ever had a boss knows that managing up isn't that easy. And it's only gotten trickier.

Does it still make sense to make your boss’s life easier? Should you challenge them to be better? The answer to both questions is yes (just as in the original movie). 

But beyond the platitudes (e.g., “just do your job better”), what does that look like?

Today, the context has changed. Marketing leaders are rising faster than ever, often with fewer roles under their belts and enduring more scrutiny over every post, pitch, and pixel. 

Related:Prediction: Valuable Friction Will Be the 'Secret Sauce' for Standout Marketing in 2026

The creative risk-taking is lower, the AI tools are louder, and everyone’s one wrong sentence away from becoming an embarrassing clip on TikTok.

Managing up today is all about navigation, helping leaders steer through speed, noise, and ego without capsizing the whole brand along the way.

The express lane to leadership (and why it bites you)

You're living through the era of the fast-tracked leader — the marketer who rockets from junior manager to VP in record time, often before they’ve led a team, weathered a downturn, or faced a hard “no.”

But it’s also the era of the reduced leadership half-life. That same fast-tracked CMO is unlikely to last more than a few years in the role (and possibly less).

According to Spencer Stuart’s latest CMO Tenure Study, the average CMO tenure now hovers around four years — down from nearly six a decade ago. Among the top 100 advertisers, it’s closer to three. 

That’s not a career arc. That’s a sprint. Sure, the CMO’s tenure is on par with that of other leadership positions. But knowing that doesn’t help practitioners settle into a comfort zone with the continuity of their leaders.

Interestingly, the Spencer Stuart study calls the shrinking tenure a “positive sign,” noting that most CMOs are leaving for better roles. But that doesn’t change the fast-track problem: Leaders are still racing upward, they’re just moving to different companies to do it.

Meanwhile, practitioners — the people who have to manage up — are slowing down, and their career environment is getting more concerning, not less. 

Korn Ferry recently reported that a majority of employees plan to stay in their current positions for at least the next six months, with Gen Z showing the strongest intent to stay put. They called the trend job-hugging (the opposite of job-hopping).

Put those two trends together, and you get an interesting collision. Leaders are moving faster than ever, while the people reporting to them are trying to have some level of permanence.

Here’s the plot twist: Many of these new leaders are smart, ambitious, and deeply curious people. But they’ve been promoted in a system that confuses momentum for maturity. They don’t yet have the scar tissue to know when to take a punch or how to throw one.

Which makes managing up a strange mix: half mentorship, half damage control. You’re not just managing your boss’s expectations; you’re managing their education.

The AI approval machine: Output becomes infinite

Where the bottleneck once was production, it’s now approval. Marketing teams have traded the pain of waiting for creators to finish content for the pain of watching leaders endlessly “tweak” an AI-generated draft that’s still not great after 27 versions.

And, because redoing something now takes seconds, there’s no cost to indecision or revision. The review process has become an infinite loop of “What if we just …”

Welcome to the era of infinite sequels. Marketing content ideas feel familiar because they are familiar. It’s the same plot, new cast. A whitepaper about innovation that sounds like last quarter’s “thought leadership.” A social media campaign about authenticity written by a bot. A CEO post on LinkedIn that could have been (and probably was) written by any other CEO.

Now, to be clear, people are scared, not lazy. AI has made the creative process too efficient, which means the only friction left in the process is human. And friction (that messy, ego-laden, tension-filled process where great ideas emerge) has become the enemy of speed.

Layer on top of that a new generation of leaders who lack deep experience (sometimes even in the subject matter they’re leading), and you get the perfect breeding ground for safe, average, and utterly yawn-worthy marketing.

So instead of managing up, many marketing teams manage around. They pitch the safest ideas instead of proposing new ones. They don’t teach their leaders; they mimic them. 

And somewhere along the way, the approval process becomes less about trusting the work and more about protecting the boss from any kind of uncertainty.

In other words, marketing teams have automated creativity and institutionalized fear.

And the real kicker? Many of these leaders practice the modern trend of acting as “influencers,” making public pronouncements on topics they only half understand, including those their teams specialize in. 

The result is a weird, unspoken tension: Practitioners quietly roll their eyes while ensuring the boss still looks brilliant online.

It’s a new kind of double bind. Say nothing, and you’re complicit in mediocrity. Speak up, and you’re “not aligned with the brand.”

I’m already seeing teams default to the safest path, giving leaders content that “feels smart,” “sounds visionary,” and “won’t get us canceled.” The marketing of ideas becomes less about truth and more about tone management.

We’ve entered the era when managing up means managing reputation. And that’s a job nobody applied for.

Managing up 2.0: The new rules of engagement for marketing teams

You don’t have to stay trapped in a work universe of endless reboots (like Marketing 2: The Algorithm Strikes Back).

It’s time to start writing a new script.

Managing up today should be about creating productive asymmetry. By that, I mean helping your leaders navigate uncertainty instead of hiding from it.

Follow these rules to do it:

1. Move the approval upstream

If you need a leader’s fingerprints on the work, get them to approve the concept, not the deliverable. Invite them to the brainstorm, not the layout review. Influence their thinking, not their markup notes. You’ll save yourself 37 unnecessary revisions and at least one existential crisis.

2. Replace “alignment” with “agreement on tension”

Stop chasing the now clichéd idea of “alignment” (aka consensus) like it’s a KPI. Great creative work isn’t born from agreement but from creative tension. Your goal isn’t to make your boss comfortable; it’s to make them confident that the tension is in service of something valuable.

3. Don’t manage the person, manage the process of trust

What your boss needs more than another yes-person is someone who helps them navigate uncertainty. That’s what trust really is — a confident relationship with the unknown. Build that, and you’ll never need to “manage around” your leaders again.

4. Help your leaders build asymmetry

Modern leadership lives in networks of relationships (internal and external). Managing up means helping your boss build those relationships strategically with peers, critics, audiences, and even competitors. Influence comes not from control, but from connectedness.

5. Keep a little friction in the system

Smooth is seductive, but friction keeps things interesting. If there’s no resistance, there’s probably no originality. Create space for pushback, dissent, and the occasional “Wait, are we sure?” moment. That’s where good marketing lives.

The final cut

Managing up at its best is an act of courage rather than compliance. It’s what happens when you stop designing processes to get through the system and start planning ways to change it. 

So, yes, you can still make your boss’s life easier. Just make sure it’s not because you’ve made your own smaller.

No one needs another reboot of the same tired dynamic: the cautious marketer, the anxious boss, the endless loop of politics and approvals. 

Marketing needs a new story, one where trust, curiosity, and a little bit of friction make the sequel better than the original.

So roll the credits, cue the music, and start writing Managing Up: The Director’s Cut.

It’s your story. Tell it well.