How do you manage upwards?
By making your manager's job easier and by taking responsibility for the information flow between you — which is not politics or flattery, but recognition that they cannot read your mind and are managing several people with partial information about each.
What it actually involves:
Understand their pressures. What are they measured on, what are they worried about, and what does their manager want from them? Work framed in terms of their priorities gets supported; work framed only in terms of yours does not.
Learn how they take information. Detail or summary, written or verbal, early or when finished, morning or afternoon. Ask directly — most managers have never been asked and will tell you.
Bring problems early and with options. "This will slip; here are three ways forward and what I recommend" is a completely different conversation from "it slipped".
Never surprise them. A manager blindsided in front of their own boss will manage you more closely afterwards, and reasonably so. Bad news travels upward badly by default, and correcting that is the single highest-value habit.
Make your work visible without performing. Brief written updates, a running document, results framed as outcomes rather than activity.
Ask for what you want explicitly — a project, a pay review, a development opportunity. Managers are not tracking your ambitions, and the assumption that good work speaks for itself is the most expensive belief in most careers.
Tell them what you need from them, in specifics: a decision, an introduction, cover, or simply to be left alone.
Disagree properly. In private, with reasoning, once — then either commit or escalate deliberately. Quiet non-compliance is the worst option.
What it is not. Agreeing with everything, taking on everything, or managing their emotions at the cost of your own work.
When the relationship is not working: name the mismatch directly rather than enduring it; document what was agreed; and recognise that some managers cannot be managed upwards, at which point the question becomes whether to move rather than how to adapt.