Leading Up: How to Get What Your Campus Needs from Your Assistant Superintendent and Superintendent

Every principal knows the moment: your campus needs something only someone above you can grant — a position, a budget exception, a policy adjustment, a change in the accountability calendar. And every principal knows the two wrong ways to handle it. One is to say nothing and quietly absorb the shortfall. The other is to demand loudly, frame the assistant superintendent as the obstacle, and wonder why next year's asks get harder. There is a third way, and it has a name: leading up. Done well, it is not politics and it is not flattery. It is the deliberate use of leadership influence to help your superiors lead — and, in doing so, to win what your students need.

The Book That Named the Practice

The definitive treatment is Michael Useem's Leading Up: How to Lead Your Boss So You Both Win (Useem, 2001). Useem, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, built the book from real accounts across the military, corporations, and public service, and his conclusion is striking in its simplicity: in organizations that work, subordinates have a duty to lead up — to give their superiors the unvarnished information, the well-reasoned counsel, and the honest support those superiors need to lead well. Groups win when voices are heard and help offered is help received. Silence in the face of a bad decision, Useem argues, is not loyalty. It is abandonment.

Behind the book sits a research lineage. Gabarro and Kotter's classic Harvard Business Review article, Managing Your Boss, established the foundation decades earlier: the relationship with your superior is one of mutual dependence, and effective managers study their boss's goals, pressures, and working style rather than assuming their own merit will carry the day (Gabarro & Kotter, 2005). Abbajay's Managing Up popularized the practical side for a new generation — building trust, adapting to your boss's style, and making the relationship a career asset rather than a career risk (Abbajay, 2018). And the influence-tactics research settles the mechanics: rational persuasion — evidence, logic, and a clear case — is among the most effective ways to move a decision upward, while pressure and ingratiating tactics reliably backfire (Falbe & Yukl, 1992). Cohen and Bradford extended the same logic to organizations where you hold no formal authority at all (Cohen & Bradford, 2005).

Why Leading Up Is Central — Not Peripheral — in School Districts

In the private sector, leading up is a career skill. In public education, it is a student-outcome variable. District leaders sit at the center of an information system they cannot fully observe. Superintendents and assistant superintendents make resource, staffing, and policy decisions for campuses they may visit a few times a year. The accuracy of those decisions depends almost entirely on the quality of the signal rising from the field — and principals are the signal.

The research on school leadership keeps landing on this. Leadership practice in schools is distributed — stretched over many people, formal positions and informal, in ways that make the boundaries between leading and following deliberately blurry (Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2004). The newest national synthesis, The Principal Effect, documents that principals shape student learning, teacher retention, and school climate — and that principals do their best work where district support is strong, information flows honestly, and leadership capacity is treated as an investment (Darling-Hammond, Fitz, Giani, Gordon, & Wechsler, 2026). Superintendents cannot support what they cannot see. A principal who leads up well is not asking a favor of the district; that principal is supplying the district's decision system with its most valuable input.

Seven Moves for Leading Up in a District

1. Learn your superior's scoreboard before you bring your own. Your assistant superintendent answers to a superintendent who answers to a board. Find out what your supervisor is being measured on this quarter — attendance, safety, a bond calendar, a board commitment — and frame your campus need inside their scoreboard, not just yours. A request that solves your superior's problem travels at a different speed.

2. Bring evidence, not adjectives. Rational persuasion works because it respects the decision-maker's position (Falbe & Yukl, 1992). 'We need another counselor' is an adjective. 'Our counselor caseload is 486 to 1 against the recommended 250, and here is what the attendance data shows' is a case. Bring the one page: the need, the evidence, two options, your recommendation, and the cost of doing nothing.

3. Deliver bad news early and plainly. Every superintendent has been ambushed by a problem a principal knew about for six weeks. Being the leader who surfaces problems while they are still cheap to solve is the single fastest way to build upward trust — and upward trust is the currency that funds every future ask.

4. Execute visibly on what you were given before asking for more. Nothing closes a superior's door faster than a leader whose last grant went nowhere. Nothing opens it wider than visible stewardship. When you spend what you were given exactly as you said you would, and show the results, your next request arrives pre-credentialed.

5. Help your superior look good in rooms you are not in. Useem's core insight is that leading up means helping your boss lead (Useem, 2001). Send the assistant superintendent the data points they need for their own meeting with the superintendent. Credit them when your campus wins. Help offered is help received — and it returns at the moments that matter.

6. Respect the chain — and make it work. The assistant superintendent is not an obstacle to route around; they are the first rung of leading up. Bypassing them to reach the superintendent may win a week and will cost you a year. Bring them your case first, give them the chance to champion it upward, and let them carry the win.

7. Distinguish influence from capitulation. Leading up is not saying yes to everything. When a district decision will harm students, the same trust you have built through moves 1 through 6 is what buys you the standing to say so — early, privately, with evidence, and with an alternative. Principals with no upward trust can only comply or resign. Principals with upward trust can change the decision.

What This Looks Like from the Other Side of the Desk

I have held this relationship from both directions — as a principal asking, and later as an Executive Director supervising principals and then as a Deputy Superintendent receiving the asks of an entire district. From the district side, the principals who moved resources and policy were never the loudest. They were the ones whose data I could trust, whose bad news arrived before the board meeting instead of after it, and whose campus results gave me confidence that the next ask would be stewarded as well as the last one. And I saw the same dynamic at the state level: the community partnership initiative I directed at the Texas Education Agency succeeded in no small part because champions in the legislature carried it upward — leaders who believed in the work and knew how to place it inside the goals of the people above them. Leading up is not a corporate trick. It is how public education actually moves.

Actionable Insights

Start with one relationship and one ask. Three moves this month:

Map your superior's pressures. Write down what your assistant superintendent and superintendent are accountable for this semester. If you cannot fill the page, that is your first task — the request comes second.

Rebuild your next request as a one-page evidence case. Need, data, two options, recommendation, cost of inaction. Rational persuasion, in writing, before the meeting.

Deliver one piece of useful upward signal this week. A data point they need, an early warning they deserve, or a public credit they have earned. Build the trust account before you make the withdrawal.

Pro Tip Question

If your assistant superintendent described you in one sentence to the superintendent, would it be the name of a problem — or the name of a leader who makes the whole district smarter?

References

Abbajay, M. (2018). Managing up: How to move up, win at work, and succeed with any type of boss. Wiley.

Cohen, A. R., & Bradford, D. L. (2005). Influence without authority (2nd ed.). Wiley.

Darling-Hammond, L., Fitz, J., Giani, M. V., Gordon, M. F., & Wechsler, M. (2026). The principal effect: How investing in school leaders is key to solving education's challenges. Learning Policy Institute. https://doi.org/10.54300/644.197

Falbe, C. M., & Yukl, G. (1992). Consequences for managers of using single influence tactics and combinations of tactics. Academy of Management Journal, 35(3), 638–652.

Gabarro, J. J., & Kotter, J. P. (2005). Managing your boss. Harvard Business Review, 83(1), 92–100. (Original work published 1980)

Spillane, J. P., Halverson, R., & Diamond, J. B. (2004). Towards a theory of leadership practice: A distributed perspective. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 36(1), 3–34.

Useem, M. (2001). Leading up: How to lead your boss so you both win. Crown Business.

Practicing these moves with a coach accelerates them: Explore the Mentoring Administrators program.

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