Managing Up and Across: Being a Good Steward of Other People's Time and Attention
This month at AdaMarie, we're thinking about stewardship and what it means to carry responsibility well. And one of the most overlooked forms of responsibility is this: how you handle other people's time and attention.
When we talk about managing up, most people picture it as a strategy for getting ahead: how to make your boss happy, how to get noticed, how to position yourself for the next opportunity. And it can be those things. But there's a deeper way to think about it, one that will serve you far longer: managing up and across is really about stewardship.
Every time you send an email, request a meeting, ask a question, or hand off a piece of work, you are spending someone else's time and attention. Those are finite resources, maybe the most finite resources anyone at work has. How you spend them says everything about whether you're someone people want to work with, trust with more, and go to bat for.
But being a good steward of other people's time and attention is not about being deferential or making yourself small. It's about being someone who makes the people around you more effective, not less. Here's what that looks like in practice.
Come with the Thinking Already Done
The single most respectful thing you can do with someone's attention is to not outsource your thinking to them.
Before you bring a question to your manager or a colleague, do the work of getting specific. Instead of "What should I do about this?", come with "Here's the situation, here are the two options I see, here's the one I lean toward and why. Do you agree?" You've just transformed a request that would cost them real mental energy into one that costs them a quick gut check.
This doesn't mean you can never ask an open question or admit you're stuck, because sometimes you genuinely are, and that's fine. But defaulting to bringing a point of view rather than a blank slate is one of the clearest signs that you respect the other person's time. It also, not coincidentally, builds your reputation as someone who thinks, not just someone who asks.
Make Your Communication Easy to Act On
A lot of workplace friction comes down to communication that makes the reader do extra work. A long message with the actual question buried in paragraph four. A "quick call?" with no context about what it's for. A request with no deadline, so the person has to come back and ask.
Being a good steward means packaging your communication so the other person can act on it immediately. Lead with what you need. Put the ask up front. Give the context they need and no more. Include the deadline. If you're asking for a decision, make the decision easy to make by laying out the options clearly.
The goal is for the person on the other end to read your message once, understand exactly what you need, and be able to respond without a second round of clarifying questions. Every round-trip you save them is a small deposit in the account of being easy to work with.
Be Deliberate About Meetings
Meetings are where time and attention get spent in bulk, which makes them one of the biggest places to practice stewardship.
Before you schedule one, ask whether it needs to be a meeting at all. A lot of meetings are really just a message that could have been written. If it does need to be live, come with a clear purpose and, ideally, a short agenda so people know what they're walking into and can prepare. Start and end on time. And if you called the meeting, it's your job to make sure it actually accomplished what it was for, rather than drifting and requiring a follow-up.
When you consistently run meetings that are focused, purposeful, and respectful of the clock, people start to trust that time with you is time well spent. That trust is worth a great deal; it's the difference between people dreading your invites and people making room for them.
Manage Across, Not Just Up
It's easy to focus all your "managing up" energy on the people above you and treat your peers as an afterthought. That's a mistake, both ethically and strategically.
Your colleagues' time is just as valuable as your manager's, and the way you treat it is just as visible, often more so. The person who respects their peers' deadlines, communicates clearly with collaborators, gives credit generously, and doesn't create fire drills for other teams builds a kind of lateral trust that is enormously powerful over a career. These are the people who get recommended, included, and sought out.
Stewardship that only flows upward isn't really stewardship; it's self-interest with good manners. The real thing shows up in how you treat the people who can't do anything for you, as much as the ones who can.
Protect Their Attention from Your Anxiety
This one is subtle but important. Sometimes we spend other people's attention not because we need their input, but because we need reassurance. We over-update, over-check, over-ask — not because the work requires it, but because our own anxiety does.
Part of stewarding someone's attention well is learning to hold your own uncertainty rather than handing it to them. That might mean sitting with a decision a little longer before escalating it, trusting yourself to make a call you're equipped to make, or finding reassurance from a peer or a mentor rather than repeatedly pulling on your manager's focus. The more you can self-regulate, the more your communication becomes signal rather than noise, and the more weight it carries when you do reach out.
Here's what makes this a stewardship issue and not just an etiquette one: how you handle other people's time and attention compounds.
Every clear message, every well-run meeting, every question you thought through before asking builds your reputation as someone people can rely on with more. And being trusted with more is how careers grow.
You don't need a title to practice this. You can be the most junior person in the organization and still be the person whose communication is clean, whose meetings are worth attending, and whose requests are easy to say yes to. That reputation travels. And it starts with a simple reframe: the time and attention of the people around you is not yours to spend freely. It's yours to steward well.
AdaMarie is a professional network for early-career, rising, and career-changing STEM professionals. Join the community at weareadamarie.com.
