"I don't manage up well."
A leader I've been coaching said this to me recently. It's been constant feedback for him, review after review.
He runs a team of thirty-plus people. He's respected. His people trust him. By every measure that matters to the people who report to him, he's doing the job.
The problem wasn't the work. The work was excellent.
The problem was that nobody upstream could see it.
Most people hear "managing up" and think politics. That framing is exactly why so many talented leaders quietly refuse to do it.
Here's the reframe I offered him:
It is the job of the employee to keep their boss informed at the right level of detail.
Not the boss's job to extract it. Not the boss's job to go hunting. Yours.
And when you don't do it, you're not just costing yourself. You're costing your team. Their wins don't percolate up. Their contributions stay invisible.
That's when it landed for him. His words: "Maybe I'm doing an injustice to them by not sharing these updates."
Years ago I worked for a leader far more detail-oriented than I am. So I built a practice — a short weekly recap, three buckets:
Wins → what got done, who deserves credit
Challenges → what's stuck, where I need something from you
Opportunities → what I'm planning for the week ahead
Three things made it work. I used his language — wins, challenges, and opportunities were HIS words, not mine. I kept it skimmable: bullets, never a book. And I let items carry forward, adding "still needing this" to anything unanswered.
The effect on him wasn't just that he was informed. He was confident. He stopped wondering. That bought me an enormous amount of room to operate.
That practice served me for years. It would not survive contact with 2026.
I could not have written that recap in ninety seconds in 2015. Today anyone can.
And that is exactly the problem.
Researchers at BetterUp Labs and Stanford's Social Media Lab have a name for what happens next: workslop. Their shorthand is for output that arrives looking finished and turns out to carry nothing — the recipient ends up doing the thinking the sender skipped. Most of it moves between peers. But close to a fifth of it travels upward, from direct reports to their managers.
The consequences are not neutral. People who received it came away rating the sender as less capable, less reliable, and less trustworthy than they had before.
Read that again. A polished weekly summary with no judgment behind it now costs you the exact trust it was supposed to build.
Which points at something the tools make newly obvious. The update was never really about the information. Your manager could always have found most of it by asking around. What they could not get anywhere else was your read on it.
That is what is still scarce. Which of these thirty things actually matters. What you're uneasy about that no dashboard will show. What you are asking for. What you're choosing to do next, and why.
Use AI for the gathering. Let it pull your notes, your threads, your transcripts. Let it draft in the format your particular leader prefers — that part is real leverage, and the leader I was coaching was right to reach for it.
Then do the part it cannot do. Cut it in half. Add the thing you're worried about. Say what you actually need.
The same researchers separate pilots, who use AI purposefully to reach their own goals, from passengers, who use it to avoid the work. Your boss probably can't name which one you are. They form an impression anyway.
One practical note, since it's now a live issue: AI notetakers have quietly become common in meetings, and surveys this summer suggest most workers are not consistently asked before one joins. If a bot is helping you build your recap, ask the room. Trust built on a weekly update is not worth trust lost over a recording.
None of this changes the underlying point.
You're probably already doing the work. You're just not letting anyone see it.
The tools got faster. The judgment is still yours — and it's the only part that was ever the point.
What's one relationship where a weekly recap would change things? Start there. Run the experiment. Then ask how it landed.
#Leadership #ExecutiveCoaching #ManagingUp #AIatWork #Workslop