Managing Up & Influence

Influencing upward and across the organization — sustained campaigns, coalition-building and diagnosing what executives actually need from an interaction.

Also known as: Issue selling, issue selling, Buy-in, buy-in, managing up, Ally / blocker / fence-sitter, Small wins, Restraining forces, Reassurance, pain points

How authors use it

Oldest first (extraction date when no publication date is known).

Documents (10)

• When Persuasion Is (and Isn't) Manipulation Eben Harrell (interviewing Colin Marshall) · 2026-09-14 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Persuasion is ethical, not inherently manipulative, when it treats the other person as a reasoning partner — engaged through honest reasons, respect, and compassion under conditions of real attention and trust — rather than as a psychological system to be managed, and this same criterion, not any particular technique or tool (including AI), is what determines whether an act of influence helps or harms.
• Welcome to AI Autumn Gretchen Gavett · 2026-09-08 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Two distinct claims coexist under one masthead: leaders can find profitable new market space not by outcompeting rivals but by removing industry-imposed pain points for excluded noncustomers (illustrated via Midea's air-conditioner redesign), and HBR's own newsletter readership currently ranks 'leading through change and uncertainty' as its top self-reported leadership challenge, ahead of workload, career advancement, influence, and organizational politics.
• TBM 433: The Border Collie Faustian Bargain John Cutler · 2026-07-29 Reader 🖥️
  In an organization performing a strategy that its experienced members already know isn't one, people sort by whether they can see the incoherence and whether they can tolerate it -- and the people who can see it but can't fully stomach it (the 'Border Collies') face a Faustian bargain: trade the right to challenge the fiction for more influence over it, a trade that starts as reasonable-sounding local accommodations and ends with the Border Collie having become responsible for producing and defending the very ambiguity it once found intolerable.
• How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026 | Annual AI sentiment survey (Noam Segal) Lenny Rachitsky (Lenny's Podcast), guest Noam Segal · 2026-07-13 Reader 🖥️
  AI's effect on how tech workers feel about their professional identity — not their role, company, seniority, or any other job characteristic — is now the single largest driver of workplace sentiment, splitting the workforce roughly in half between those who feel amplified and those who feel destabilized or diminished; burnout has surged industry-wide as a result, and effective management is the strongest available lever for countering it.
• How to ask for help from people who don't know you pradyuprasad.com · 2026-06-30 Reader 🖥️
  Asking a stranger for help is a learnable communication skill, not charisma or luck, and it succeeds by modeling the responder's mind and lowering their cost, risk, and obligation — making yourself worth helping and making it effortless (and safe) to say yes or no — rather than by centering your own need.
• DORA Community Discussion - Operationalizing DORA within a large organization DORA (speaker: Julia Jakubiec, ABN AMRO; host: Nathan Harvey) · 2026-06-26 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Operationalizing DORA at enterprise scale is fundamentally a change-management problem — solved by running Kotter's 8 steps to institutionalize a durable continuous-improvement culture — not by the metrics themselves, which serve only as a recognizable survey instrument, authority brand, and benchmarking catalyst.
• Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea HBR.org · 2026-05-20 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Selling an idea upward is not a single pitch but a sustained campaign that succeeds by mobilizing allies, reducing resistance rather than overpowering it, framing the idea around mutual benefit and strategic fit, and pursuing small wins while regulating one's own emotion and ego.
• When an Executive Asks You an Unexpected Question Melody Wilding · 2026-05-05 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  When an executive asks you an unexpected question, you should diagnose which of three underlying needs — reassurance, guidance, or action — is driving the question, and respond to that need rather than providing exhaustive factual answers.
• Managers Are Struggling to Keep Up with the AI Productivity Boom Mollie West Duffy (with Liz at Atlassian) · 2026-05 Reader 🖥️
  As AI accelerates individual execution, managers become the new bottleneck; their role must shift from editor-in-chief (policing the work) to strategic guide (clearing the path) via five behavioral changes — focus on where not what, make managing up a core skill, deploy AI as an EQ coach, use AI to filter rather than flatten, and restructure check-in cadence.
• How to Convince Your Boss They Need a Coach Marlo Lyons · 2026-03-27 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  The article argues that subordinates can influence senior executives to engage an executive coach by reframing coaching as a strategic tool rather than a remedial intervention, using the executive's own stated pain points as entry points, and carefully managing the power dynamics so the decision feels self-originated.

Propositions touching this concept (18)

By publication month, oldest first (extraction month when no publication date is known).

2026-03

• explicitdevelopedFraming coaching around the executive's self-identified business pain points is more effective than pointing out behavioral gaps.
  How to Convince Your Boss They Need a Coach · p5

2026-04

• explicitManagers need 'brag documents' just as much as individual contributors do — small wins compound into strategic insights
  SWLW #702: How I created OpenClaw, Your CEO is suffering from AI Psychosis, and more. · p8

2026-05

• explicitestablishedDecreasing restraining forces is a better change strategy than increasing pushing forces.
  Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea · p4
• explicitcorroboratedIssue selling is a campaign, not a meeting.
  Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea · p5
• explicitVerbal assent is not buy-in; nodding heads and delay are forms of passive resistance.
  Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea · p9
• explicitcorroboratedSmall wins create momentum and attract allies.
  Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea · p10
• implicitWorking prototypes are more persuasive than written proposals for securing design resources and stakeholder buy-in.
  This week on How I AI: The internal AI tool that's transforming how Stripe designs products (Protodash at Stripe) · p8
• explicitAll executive questions stem from one of exactly three underlying needs: reassurance, guidance, or action
  When an Executive Asks You an Unexpected Question · p2

2026-06

• explicitRollout requires organizational buy-in from every team whose domain the system will investigate, secured before deployment; discovering undisclosed monitoring after the fact creates a political problem no technical accuracy can resolve.
  Your AI agent just blamed the network team. Now what? · p9
• explicitThe engineering leader's job in this deployment is not to evaluate whether multi-agent diagnostics can technically solve the problem (the author asserts they already can) but to establish the trust model, secure organizational buy-in, and set the pace of autonomy expansion.
  Your AI agent just blamed the network team. Now what? · p13

2026-07

• explicitSolutions that employees themselves generated and ranked produce stronger buy-in and willingness to participate than solutions imposed by leaders.
  Frontline Workers Know How to Solve Your Organization's Biggest Problems · p6
• implicitcorroboratedLeadership's willingness to cede authorship of the solution set to employees — not just information-gathering from them — is itself causally necessary for the buy-in and trust outcomes, beyond whatever the resulting solutions technically contain.
  Frontline Workers Know How to Solve Your Organization's Biggest Problems · p12
• explicitInternal buy-in for a risky AI initiative was deliberately built through face-to-face conversation rather than email (avoiding a CC'd paper trail), and by leading with the initiative's purpose rather than announcing 'we're using AI' — an oblique framing intended to let stakeholders engage with the goal before reacting to the technology.
  How a Museum Marketing Team Used AI to Bring People Closer to Art · p6
• explicitThe standard user-scoped, interactive-auth model does not scale in larger organizations, where repeated authorization and consent prompts are one of the biggest pain points in enterprise MCP deployments.
  AI Model Context Protocol Adds Centralised Auth for Enterprise · p2

2026-08

• implicitA strategic, potentially unpopular decision (resting the starting eleven) requires the outside/sideline leader's longer time horizon, while the inside/embedded leader's role is to build understanding, safety, and buy-in for that decision within the team.
  Leder du fra sidelinjen – eller ute på banen? · p13

2026-09

• explicitPreceptorship is easier in smaller organizations (Hanselman's 400-500 person 'sweet spot') but is achievable at scale in large companies if implemented in smaller shards with explicit executive buy-in and support.
  Podcast: How Will We Train Developers If AI Does the Routine Work: A Conversation with Scott Hanselman · p8
• explicitOnboarding buddies are still necessary, but mainly for social and cultural integration (team norms, buy-in, having a friend) rather than technical ramp-up.
  How Anthropic Builds And How Engineering Will Change Soon | Thariq Shihipar · p2
• implicitThe whole design assumes an organization can secure a statistician's involvement and enough authority and organizational buy-in to randomly assign live delivery work to 'with/without AI' conditions — a nontrivial organizational capability the essay assumes rather than argues for.
  Measuring AI's Impact on Delivery Speed · p12

Open gaps (34)

• unacknowledgedThe panel's advice is entirely provider-centric. The consumer perspective — what developers and AI agent builders actually want from API products — is not represented with data or research.
  Building API Products in the AI Era — read next: Look for developer surveys or agent-builder interviews about API product preferences and pain points.
• incompleteNo engagement with organizations that lack Microsoft's scale, cash, or executive sponsorship -- a resource-constrained startup, a non-tech company's small engineering team, or a highly outsourced/offshore engineering org has no obvious path to implementing preceptorship as described (400-500 person 'shards,' formal cohorts, explicit executive buy-in).
  Podcast: How Will We Train Developers If AI Does the Routine Work: A Conversation with Scott Hanselman
• incompleteThe article identifies executive non-perception of relevance as the root cause of failed buy-in, then assigns 100% of the remedy to the seller. The corresponding institutional remedy — executives learning to receive, sponsor allocation, structured 'bring-up' channels — is mentioned (Mankins & Litre) and immediately dropped. This is the conversation's largest hidden asymmetry: it accepts a structural diagnosis but offers only individual prescriptions.
  Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea — read next: Cutler's work on institutional overload and operating-system design (TBM); Edmondson on psychological safety as a receiving infrastructure; sociotechnical literature on decision rights.
• incompletePower, incentives, budget authority, and zero-sum redistribution are absent. The stakeholder map (ally / blocker / fence-sitter) is purely affective; it does not model who controls the resources, whose headcount shrinks, or whose KPIs the idea threatens.
  Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea — read next: Pfeffer ('Power'); Bolman & Deal's political frame; March & Simon's bounded rationality and political coalitions; Christensen on incumbent self-protection.
• incompleteThe framework conflates several distinct receiver-behaviours under 'resistance': overload-induced inaction, genuine objection, competing issue-selling, and political vetoing. They demand different responses, but the article treats them as variants of 'we need to dig deeper.' Without a diagnostic, the seller can be told indefinitely to socialize and follow up on what is in fact a hard 'no.'
  Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea — read next: Argyris on undiscussables and skilled incompetence; Kahneman/Klein on diagnostic decision-making under ambiguity.
• incompleteThe article assumes the seller possesses time, network, political cover, and emotional regulation as preconditions. It does not address how to do issue selling when one or more of those is unavailable — i.e., the typical condition of overloaded mid-level managers.
  Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea — read next: Time to Think (Kline) on the conditions ideas need; Stolen Focus on attention as precondition; Fearless Change patterns for resource-poor change agents.
• incompleteAdler's mode of incompleteness: the article reduces idea transmission to tactics and scripts ('three questions,' 'map the stakeholders,' 'aim for worth exploring'). The structural conditions under which those tactics actually work — slack in the executive agenda, trust between layers, a culture that distinguishes loyalty to leaders from loyalty to ideas — are presupposed and never named. The advice is therefore most useful exactly where it is least needed (healthy organizations) and least useful where it is most needed (organizations whose pathology is what makes upward selling necessary in the first place).
  Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea — read next: Fearless Change (Manns & Rising) — patterns for getting ideas through resistant organizations; Time to Think (Nancy Kline); Cutler's 'institutionalized overload' essays; Donella Meadows on leverage points (rule-changes, paradigms) vs. parameter-changes.
• illogicalLewin's force-field model is invoked to justify reducing restraining forces, but the conversation conflates two different uses: (a) reduce the *perception* of loss through framing, and (b) reduce the *actual* loss through redesign. Only (a) is illustrated in the cases. The implication that (a) generally substitutes for (b) is not earned by the cases shown.
  Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea — read next: Original Lewin on planned change; revisionist critiques (Burnes, Cummings & Worley) on what force-field analysis can and cannot do.
• uninformedThe article never engages with the considerable literature on why good ideas reliably fail in organizations independent of framing skill — institutional isomorphism, status quo bias of senior leaders facing reputational risk, principal-agent problems, sunk-cost commitments. The implicit theory of failure here is unidimensional (the seller framed it badly).
  Getting Buy-In for Your Next Big Idea — read next: DiMaggio & Powell on isomorphism; Jensen on agency costs; Hambrick on upper-echelons theory.
• incompleteSame system-shift-framed-as-practice-tweak pattern recurring across the user's recent extractions (Cutler, Osmani, Reed, HBR Career-Growth-Overwhelmed). Duffy diagnoses a structural failure of the manager layer to keep pace, then prescribes individual behavior changes that leave organizational architecture, role boundaries, decision rights, and compensation untouched.
  Managers Are Struggling to Keep Up with the AI Productivity Boom — read next: Pair with Cutler 'AI Won't Save the Kingdoms We Built' and Osmani 'Orchestration Tax is You' for the syntopical thread. The unanswered question: when is the manager role itself the bottleneck-design, and what would an AI-era org chart actually look like?
• incompleteTreats manager decision-rights over AI-produced output as unproblematic — but if AI generates faster, broader, and (with verification) better output than the manager's review can keep up with, the manager's authority is conventional, not epistemic. The piece never asks whose judgment is actually load-bearing.
  Managers Are Struggling to Keep Up with the AI Productivity Boom — read next: Cathy O'Neil on algorithmic accountability; Bainbridge 'Ironies of Automation' for what happens to operator authority when automation outpaces oversight (Paul Reed extract).
• incompleteThe AI-as-EQ-coach example is presented as a clever augmentation, but if managers cannot find time for warm communication, that's an org-design failure being masked by a tool. The article never asks whether normalized DM-auditing by AI changes the implicit contract between manager and report.
  Managers Are Struggling to Keep Up with the AI Productivity Boom — read next: Surveillance/trust literature; HBR 'On Managing Yourself' for the older norm being replaced.
• illogical'Increase frequency to course-correct faster' (daily syncs) is offered as a remedy for manager overload, but adding meetings to an already overloaded manager is the textbook overload-amplifier. Osmani's orchestration-tax argument applies to managers too.
  Managers Are Struggling to Keep Up with the AI Productivity Boom — read next: Cutler TBM on institutionalized overload; Osmani 'Orchestration Tax is You'.
• incomplete'89% of leaders agree AI has accelerated work' — but the article assumes that acceleration is sustained throughput rather than a transient burst as teams adopt new tooling. No engagement with the possibility that the 'AI productivity boom' is a one-time S-curve, not the new steady state.
  Managers Are Struggling to Keep Up with the AI Productivity Boom — read next: DORA reports on AI's effect on engineering throughput; longitudinal AI-adoption studies.
• incompleteThe survey report gives five ranked leadership challenges with percentages that sum to 66% of respondents, with no statement of what the remaining 34% said (an 'other' category? unlisted lower-ranked challenges? was the question multi-select?), no total respondent count beyond 'more than 100', and no description of how respondents were recruited (self-selected newsletter subscribers who chose to answer a survey) — making it impossible to assess how representative the ranking is of leaders generally, versus of engaged HBR.org newsletter readers specifically.
  Welcome to AI Autumn — read next: HBR's own methodology notes for the Insider Insights survey series, if published, or a larger-sample leadership-challenges survey with disclosed methodology for comparison.
• incompleteThe measurement problem is acknowledged but left unresolved. Ricketts advises against early measurement, and the primary metric offered (net new website visitors) has obvious attribution challenges. The advice amounts to 'trust that it's working based on qualitative signals,' which is reasonable for a $10B company with founder buy-in but unhelpful for resource-constrained startups.
  How Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business | Camille Ricketts — read next: Look for frameworks that quantify community ROI without premature optimization — e.g., lagging indicators, cohort analysis of community-exposed vs unexposed users.
• incompleteNo outcome evidence or survivorship check. The essay is entirely prescriptive, illustrated with hypotheticals; there is no reported ask that succeeded or failed and no base rate, so we cannot tell whether these heuristics actually raise reply rates or merely describe a plausible-sounding etiquette derived from the author's own (presumably successful) experience.
  How to ask for help from people who don't know you — read next: Read against empirical work on cold-outreach response — cold-email reply-rate studies, referral-effect data, and any A/B-tested outreach experiments — to convert intuition into base rates.
• incompleteThe method presupposes the asker already has demonstrable proof of work and something to trade. It does not address the person at the very start with nothing to show, or asks made purely from need — arguably the case where help matters most and is hardest to earn.
  How to ask for help from people who don't know you — read next: Read alongside literature on asking from low status / genuine need, and on how newcomers bootstrap a first credible artifact before they have any standing.
• incompleteTension with the essay's own constructible-credibility thesis (p10). It dismisses institutional credibility as 'weak,' but inherited status, warm networks and pedigree heavily determine who even opens your message and grants the initial attention the whole method depends on; 'credibility is built, not assigned' understates how status-gated the starting line is.
  How to ask for help from people who don't know you — read next: Read against work on networks, homophily and privilege in who gets replies — and against extract-heis-03-christin-gorman-leder-uten-tittel#g1 ('whose work is invisible without a platform').
• incompleteSilent on scale and on the responder's side of the ledger. There is no treatment of what happens when many askers apply the same tactics to one sought-after responder (specificity and low-friction blurbs become an arms race; inbox overload dominates), nor of when or why a responder should say yes.
  How to ask for help from people who don't know you — read next: Read alongside attention-economy / inbox-overload treatments and issue-selling-at-scale critiques (e.g., the overload gap in extract-hbr-buy-in-for-big-idea).
• incompleteCulture-specificity is unexamined. The prescribed norms — directness, brevity, low-obligation asks, and especially 'make it easy to say no' — reflect a particular high-individualist, low-context professional culture; the essay presents them as universal, but reciprocity and obligation norms differ sharply across cultures.
  How to ask for help from people who don't know you — read next: Read against cross-cultural communication research (high- vs low-context cultures; differing norms of reciprocity, face and obligation) to see where the heuristics invert.
• paywallSeveral content blocks could not be imported from the original HBR document due to paywall restrictions. These appear at the beginning, middle, and end of the article and likely contain supplementary content (author bio, related articles, or promotional material).
  How to Convince Your Boss They Need a Coach — read next: Access the full article at hbr.org with a subscription to verify no substantive content was missed.
• evidenceThe article's recommendations rest almost entirely on the author's consulting experience and anecdotal client cases. No controlled studies, success/failure rates, or systematic evidence for the five-step framework are offered.
  How to Convince Your Boss They Need a Coach — read next: Look for empirical research on upward influence tactics in organizational psychology (e.g., Yukl & Falbe on influence tactics) to assess whether the recommended strategies have empirical support.
• scopeThe article assumes a relatively healthy organizational context. It does not address what to do when the boss's blind spots constitute toxic or harmful leadership, where coaching alone may be insufficient.
  How to Convince Your Boss They Need a Coach — read next: Consider literature on managing toxic leadership, whistleblowing, and organizational exit as complementary frames.
• missing_counterargumentThe article does not address the possibility that coaching may not be the right intervention -- for instance, when the problem is structural (bad incentives, poor organizational design) rather than behavioral.
  How to Convince Your Boss They Need a Coach — read next: Consider systems-thinking perspectives on leadership problems, e.g., Senge's 'The Fifth Discipline.'
• incompleteThe manager-effectiveness finding establishes a strong correlation (via self-report of both manager quality and personal wellbeing) but never disentangles causation from selection or halo effects — e.g., whether effective managers cause better outcomes, or whether already-thriving teams simply rate their managers more favorably, or whether good managers are selectively assigned to already-strong teams.
  How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026 | Annual AI sentiment survey (Noam Segal) — read next: Organizational-behavior research isolating causal manager effects (e.g., quasi-experimental studies of manager rotation/turnover on team outcomes), or Gallup's manager-engagement research, for a methodologically stronger version of this claim.
• uninformedThe core explanatory variable — the single self-report question classifying 'AI identity shift' as amplified/redefined/destabilized/diminished — is treated as cleanly isolating AI's effect, but a one-question self-classification in a period of concurrent stressors (layoffs, market volatility, general role redefinition) is vulnerable to attribution bias: people may retroactively credit/blame AI for feelings actually driven by other salient factors, simply because AI is the dominant cultural narrative right now. Notably, Noam opens the episode approvingly citing the 'AI Confidence Theater' critique of overclaimed certainty in AI discourse, but doesn't turn that same scrutiny on his own survey's central construct.
  How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026 | Annual AI sentiment survey (Noam Segal) — read next: Read the 'AI Confidence Theater' piece (already in this corpus) directly against this survey's underlying methodology/report for confound controls, and look for survey-methodology literature on self-report attribution bias in technology-sentiment research.
• incompleteThe 'cognitive rot' / skill-atrophy finding rests entirely on self-perception ('my brain is rotting,' 'my work feels worse') rather than any objective quality measure (e.g., code review defect rates, output audits, before/after task performance).
  How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026 | Annual AI sentiment survey (Noam Segal) — read next: Empirical studies attempting to measure AI-assisted output quality or skill atrophy objectively rather than via self-report — e.g., the Simon Willison conversation referenced in the episode, or controlled studies of AI-assisted vs. unassisted task quality.
• incompleteKotter's 8-step model is itself contested and weakly evidenced empirically, yet the talk adopts it as a given scaffold without engaging critiques or comparing alternatives (Lewin, ADKAR, Fearless Change patterns).
  DORA Community Discussion - Operationalizing DORA within a large organization — read next: Critical change-management literature on Kotter's model; Fearless Change (Manns & Rising) and other pattern-based or evidence-based change frameworks.
• incompleteGeneralizability is unaddressed: the approach leans on advantages that may not transfer — a well-resourced, highly visible central CoE; a bridging executive sponsor who arrived by luck; and the borrowed authority of the DORA/Google brand. It is unclear how much of the playbook works in organizations lacking these.
  DORA Community Discussion - Operationalizing DORA within a large organization — read next: Change adoption in low-resource, low-visibility, or low-authority settings; how much of the outcome is attributable to the method versus the enabling conditions.
• uninformedThe five closing options for a Border Collie -- bark (voice openly), backchannel, herd locally (a form of loyalty-with-translation), leave (exit), conserve energy (neglect) -- map almost exactly onto Albert Hirschman's classic Exit/Voice/Loyalty(/Neglect) framework, yet Hirschman is never cited or drawn on, so the piece reinvents a well-studied typology from scratch and gets none of its accompanying theory (e.g. what makes exit costly, what makes voice effective) for free.
  TBM 433: The Border Collie Faustian Bargain — read next: Albert O. Hirschman, 'Exit, Voice, and Loyalty' (1970) -- directly supplies the missing theoretical scaffolding for exactly the choice this piece poses without resolving.
• incompleteThe article does not address how to diagnose which of the three needs applies in real time. The taxonomy is presented, but the recognition heuristics are thin — you would need to read context clues, but the article gives little guidance on what those clues are or what to do when the signals are ambiguous.
  When an Executive Asks You an Unexpected Question — read next: Literature on executive communication patterns, or Chris Voss's 'Never Split the Difference' on reading implicit needs in conversation
• incompleteThe framework assumes a one-to-one mapping between questions and needs, but real executive questions often blend needs — an exec might want both reassurance and guidance simultaneously. The article does not address mixed or shifting needs.
  When an Executive Asks You an Unexpected Question — read next: Research on conversational dynamics and need-shifting in organizational communication
• uninformedNo empirical evidence or research is cited for the three-category framework. It is presented as practitioner wisdom without grounding in communication research, psychology of questioning, or organizational behavior studies.
  When an Executive Asks You an Unexpected Question — read next: Academic literature on question types and communication pragmatics, e.g., speech act theory (Searle) or the SPIN selling framework's question taxonomy for a parallel practitioner model