Most PR and communications leaders have been taught to manage up. Keep your boss informed. Avoid surprises. Deliver what is asked, on time, without drama. Fewer have been taught about leading up. And the difference between the two is bigger than it sounds.

Managing up keeps your boss informed. Leading up helps them succeed. One is about staying out of trouble. The other is about genuinely strengthening the person above you, and in doing so, strengthening yourself, your team, and your organization.

Two Generals, One President

In the spring of 1862, General George B. McClellan led a Union army of more than 120,000 troops toward the Confederate capital of Richmond. He had the numbers. He had the equipment. What he did not have was a working relationship with his commander in chief.

McClellan treated Abraham Lincoln with open disdain, considering him uncouth and untutored in military affairs. He resisted policy direction, inflated enemy troop counts, and withheld battlefield reports. Lincoln was left trying to support a general who would not let him.

Two years later, Lincoln found a different kind of general.

Ulysses S. Grant kept Lincoln informed. He explained his reasoning. He earned the president’s trust gradually, through consistency rather than charm. By the final year of the war, their relationship had grown into one of deep mutual respect, the kind of partnership that, by most historical accounts, helped save the Union.

Same boss. Same war. Two entirely different outcomes.

The lesson is not really about generals. It is about what happens when someone responsible for executing a mission also takes responsibility for the relationship with the person they answer to. McClellan saw Lincoln as an obstacle. Grant saw him as a partner. Only one of those generals is remembered as having led up effectively.

Every Leader Has a Leader

Here is something worth sitting with: even a CCO answers to a CEO. Even corporate CEOs report to their boards. Even an agency president or agency CEO answers to a holding company, a parent network, or a group of partners.

There is no leadership role without someone above it. Which means leading up is not a skill for people who have not yet arrived. It is a permanent leadership skill, one that matters just as much at the top as it does three rungs below it.

Wharton management professor Michael Useem, author of “Leading Up: How to Lead Your Boss So You Both Win”, who has spent decades studying this dynamic, draws a sharp line between the two ideas. Managing up, he explains, is keeping your boss informed about what you are hearing in the field. Leading up is something more: offering your superior a strategic insight or plan that could open a new market, or helping a boss who is struggling to convey their vision find a better way to communicate it.

Useem calls leading up an “affirmative calling” to help a boss accomplish what the organization actually needs. Not flattery. Not ingratiating yourself. Not undermining their authority by going around them. Genuinely helping them lead better, because when they lead better, everyone underneath them benefits, including you.

Many Comms Leaders Are Already Doing This, They Just Don’t Know It.

If you lead a communications function, there is a good chance you are already leading up more than you realize.

Research from Edelman’s Future of Corporate Communications study, based on more than 200 senior communications executives at Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 1000 companies, found that CCOs now spend nearly one-fifth of their time, almost a full day every week, counseling their CEO on matters that go well beyond communications. That is not managing up. That is leading up.

And yet the same research found a real gap: nearly half of communications leaders, 44 percent, do not feel their CEO fully understands the resources needed to do that job well.

That gap is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of translation, the difference between leading up reactively, when asked, and leading up deliberately, as a consistent practice. The CCO role itself reflects this shift. According to research from the Observatory on Corporate Reputation, the expanded CCO+ role, communications leaders with broadened scope across ESG, public affairs, and policy, has grown roughly 88 percent since 2019, now outnumbering traditional CCO roles for the first time.

The same dynamic plays out on the agency side, just with a different reporting line. Agency presidents and CEOs answer to holding companies, parent networks, or the partners who own them.

Consider the CEOs of the largest Omnicom PR agencies: J.J. Carter of FleishmanHillard, Matt Neale of Golin Ketchum, Susan Howe of Weber Shandwick, and Olga Fleming of MMC. Each leads a major, globally recognized agency. Each is a highly respected, accomplished leader.

Each of them reports to Chris Foster, CEO of Omnicom Public Relations Group. And  Foster reports to John Wren, Chairman and CEO of Omnicom Group.

Wherever you sit, the skill is the same. The only thing that changes is who is above you.

What Leading Up Actually Looks Like

Leading up is not about being more talkative in meetings, and it is not about agreeing with everything your boss says. Here is what tends to separate leaders who do it well from leaders who only manage up.

They translate, not just report. Managing up means telling your boss what happened. Leading up means telling them what it means, and what you recommend doing about it. Information without interpretation puts the thinking burden entirely on the person above you. Translation lightens that burden and builds trust at the same time.

They understand what their boss is actually accountable for. Useem’s research repeatedly shows that the most effective upward leaders frame their ideas in terms of what their superior needs to deliver, not just what they themselves think is right. A communications leader who understands their CEO’s board pressure, investor concerns, or quarterly priorities can frame counsel in language that actually lands.

They build trust before they need it. Grant did not earn Lincoln’s confidence in a single conversation. It accumulated, report by report, decision by decision, over more than a year. Leading up is not a tactic you deploy in a crisis. It is a relationship you build steadily, so that when a crisis does arrive, the trust is already there.

They are willing to say the uncomfortable thing. McClellan’s failure was not a lack of skill. It was a refusal to be honest with Lincoln about what was actually happening on the ground. Leading up sometimes means delivering counsel your boss does not want to hear, on a timeline that makes it actionable rather than merely accurate after the fact.

The Question Worth Asking

If you lead a communications function, agency or corporate, here is a useful gut check: when was the last time you offered your boss a strategic insight they had not asked for?

Not a status update. Not a deliverable. An actual idea, unprompted, aimed at helping them lead better.

If the answer is recent, you are likely already leading up, even if you have never called it that. If the answer takes a while to come to mind, that is not a character flaw. It is simply a skill that, like any other, can be developed deliberately.

Every leader has a leader. The question is whether you are managing that relationship, or leading it.

If you recognized a gap between how you manage up and how you could be leading up, you are not alone, and it is entirely learnable. Executive coaching helps PR and communications leaders build the confidence and judgment to lead up effectively, whatever sits above them in the org chart. If you are working toward your own seat at the table, my recent piece on closing the leadership gap to the C-suite is a useful companion read. Schedule a complimentary consultation to start the conversation.