Pulling the cursor back from the edge of the ‘Send’ button, I realize I’ve spent exactly 43 minutes calibrating the tone of a three-sentence email. The email is a reminder to my supervisor, Marcus, about a budget approval that was due 13 days ago. If I am too blunt, I am ‘difficult.’ If I am too vague, the task will continue to float in the purgatory of his inbox until the project dies of neglect. This is the performance of ‘managing up,’ a phrase that has been sanitized by corporate HR departments to sound like a leadership skill, when in reality, it is a survival tactic for those stranded under the weight of an incompetent superior.

I just finished matching all my socks-every single one of the 53 pairs I own-and there is a terrifying clarity that comes with that kind of order. You start to see the threads that don’t belong. In the professional world, managing your manager is the loose thread that eventually unravels the whole garment. We are told it is about ’empowering’ our leaders or ‘filling the gaps,’ but that is a polite way of saying we are doing two jobs for the price of one. We are the architects of our own work and the babysitters of the people who are supposed to be directing it.

The Unseen Structure: Astrid’s Glass

Astrid D.R. understands this better than most, though her office is a studio filled with the smell of flux and the sharp tang of old lead. Astrid is a stained glass conservator, a woman who spends 73 hours a week meticulously taking apart windows that were built 103 years ago. She isn’t just cleaning the glass; she is correcting the structural failures of the original lead-work.

‘Sometimes the original glazier was lazy. They didn’t solder the joints correctly, or they used lead that was too thin for the weight of the pane. Now, a century later, the window is bowing. It’s my job to make it look like it never needed me in the first place.’

That is the soul-crushing paradox of managing an incompetent manager. If you do it well, no one notices there was a problem. The project succeeds, the deadlines are met, and the manager receives the accolades for a ‘well-oiled machine’ that they actually tried their hardest to jam. You become the hidden lead-work holding the glass in place, invisible and strained. You are performing a 23-step dance every day just to ensure the basic functions of your department don’t collapse into a pile of shards.

The Quick Fix vs. Structural Integrity

I remember Astrid telling me about a specific restoration she did for a chapel in upstate New York. The 3 main windows were sagging so badly they were literally falling out of the stone frames. The church board didn’t want to pay for a full restoration; they wanted a ‘quick fix.’ They asked her to just push the glass back into place and add a few support bars.

She refused. She knew that a quick fix was just a delayed catastrophe. Managing up is the ‘quick fix’ of the corporate world. It keeps the window in frame for another year, but it doesn’t solve the fact that the lead is crying.

The Tax of Competence

There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being the only person in a relationship-professional or otherwise-who cares about the details. It is the same exhaustion one feels when navigating the labyrinth of a legal claim after an accident. You are hurting, you are overwhelmed, yet the burden of proof and the necessity of constant follow-up with an unresponsive insurance entity often falls squarely on your shoulders.

In those moments, when the system seems designed to make you fail by sheer attrition, having someone like

siben & siben personal injury attorneys step in is a recognition that you shouldn’t have to manage the failure of the people responsible for your recovery. But in the office, there is rarely an advocate to step in. You are the victim and the investigator all at once.

The Cost of Enabling Success

I once spent $233 on a set of organizational planners, thinking that if I could just show Marcus how to use them, our department would stop hemorrhaging time. I spent 3 weeks color-coding his calendar. I thought I was being a ‘team player.’ I wasn’t. I was being an enabler. By managing his disorganization, I was preventing the natural consequences of his incompetence from reaching the people who actually had the power to replace him. I was the reason he looked successful. My 43-minute emails were the only thing standing between him and a performance review that he desperately deserved.

Astrid showed me her favorite scar-a jagged white line across her thumb from a piece of 1923 glass that shattered while she was trying to force it into a lead channel that was too small. ‘The glass always tells you when it’s under too much pressure,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t scream. It just lets go.’

The Terrifying Honesty of Stopping

I have a confession to make: I once intentionally missed a deadline. Not a big one, not one that would sink the company, but a 3-day internal milestone that Marcus was supposed to approve. I didn’t send the 13 reminders. I didn’t ‘check in’ to see if he needed anything. I just sat at my desk and watched the clock. The deadline passed. Then another day passed. Then a week. Marcus didn’t notice. But the client did. And when the client called, I didn’t cover for him. I said, ‘I’m waiting for Marcus’s approval. He’s had the draft for 13 days.’

It felt like dropping a 3-pound weight. It was the most honest thing I had done in my career. It was also terrifying because the system hates honesty. The system wants the window to stay in the frame, no matter how much the lead is crying. Astrid’s studio is full of those ‘honesty’ moments-pieces of glass that simply couldn’t take the pressure anymore. She keeps them in a jar. They are beautiful in their brokenness because they are finally free of the job they weren’t meant to do.

The Breaking Point

We need to stop praising ‘managing up’ as a virtue. We need to start calling it what it is: a failure of the hierarchy. If a manager cannot manage themselves, they have no business managing others, and the people beneath them shouldn’t be expected to act as their unpaid executive assistants. It’s a 33-year-old cycle of corporate dysfunction that continues because we are too afraid to let the glass break.

The Illusion We Maintain

What happens if we just stop? What happens if we allow the 3rd reminder to remain unwritten and let the weight of the silence do the work we’ve been doing for free? The glass might break. The window might fall. But at least then, someone might finally notice that the lead was never strong enough to begin to hold it in the first place.