Leverage Your Leaders
Stop proving you can do it alone — make it cheap for your manager to unblock you.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
Bosworth's most-repeated career advice: people systematically under-use the leaders, mentors and advisors built around them because asking for help feels like admitting defeat. The fix is a low-cost, high-frequency upward communication habit — short heartbeat updates that require no response, and pre-packaged asks (drafted emails, yes/no questions) when you are genuinely blocked. Your job is not to do it yourself; your job is to get it done, and the tools to get it done often sit with your manager.
Origin
Developed by Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth across 18 years at Facebook/Meta as an engineer, VP of Ads and now CTO, and published in his post on leveraging your leaders. The 'HPM' (Highlights / People / Me) update format was a Facebook-wide manager convention from roughly 2008 to 2014. Bosworth reinforces the point with a Patrick Stewart observation about auditions: the person on the other side of the table wants you to be great.
Core principles
- 01Your job is not to do it yourself — your job is to get it done, done well, done right.
- 02Nobody wants you to be more awesome than your manager does; when you're amazing, their life gets easier.
- 03A leader's job is mostly small touches keeping many plates spinning, not big set-piece interventions — so small touches are cheap to request.
- 04Silence costs more than the ask: a six-month misunderstanding is a communication failure, not an intelligence failure.
- 05Leaders also owe you a refusal — sometimes the most powerful thing a manager does is decline to rule and say 'you've got this'.
- 06Managers differ; ask each one directly how they like to receive information rather than applying one template to all.
How to run it
- 1
Kill the 'I must do it alone' frame
Notice the internal goal that is actually operating — 'prove I can do this myself' — and replace it with the real goal: the thing is done, done well, on time. Asking for help is not conceding the goal; it is pursuing it.
Pro tip Bosworth's reframe: the people above you are rooting for you the way a casting director roots for the actor auditioning — your success ends their problem.
Watch out The castles you build in your own mind are what keep you from engaging the structures that exist to help you succeed.
- 2
Ask your manager for their operating manual
At the start of any new reporting relationship, ask explicitly: what cadence do you want, how do you like to stay informed, what do you want pushed to you versus pulled? No manager is offended by this question.
Pro tip Re-ask when the org grows — as spans widen, one-on-ones thin out and written updates have to carry more of the load.
- 3
Send the no-response-required heartbeat
On a regular cadence, send a five-to-ten sentence email: progress, what you're blocked on, current plan, and an explicit 'if this all looks good, no response required'. It costs your manager almost nothing to read and gives them a live mental model of you.
Pro tip Use the HPM structure: Highlights (and lowlights), People (who's at risk, who deserves a shout-out), Me (how you're personally doing).
Watch out This is not a status report for the archive — if it takes you an hour to write, it's too long and you'll stop doing it.
- 4
When blocked, package the ask so it is nearly free to grant
Don't surface a problem — surface a problem plus the exact intervention. Draft the email you want your leader to send to the other team. Frame questions as 'I think X is what you want, yes or no?' so the answer is one word.
Pro tip Expect them to rewrite your draft — a large part of its value is that it carries the tone, the history and the framing they need to land the message without it reading as heavy-handed.
Watch out Don't let the drafted email read as if you expect a copy-paste; the point is context transfer, not delegation of your writing.
- 5
As the leader, run the mirror-image discipline
Reward the ask by clearing paths fast, and be willing to refuse to rule: tell people when the challenge they face is the right challenge and they should own it. Both behaviours train the team to escalate at the right threshold.
Pro tip Treat the absence of an escalation as a data point — if a plate stopped spinning and nobody told you, the reporting habit is broken, not the person.
Watch out If you weigh in on everything, you teach people that escalation is expensive and they will stop doing it.
In the wild
Bosworth briefs an engineer on a piece of work. They say 'I got it', disappear, and come back six months later having built the wrong thing — because the brief was miscommunicated and they never checked in. In other cases the work lands correctly but takes a year instead of six months, because the person quietly absorbed obstacles their manager could have bulldozed in an afternoon.
→ Bosworth takes the L on the miscommunication, but the cost is real and symmetrical: months of wasted effort and a frustrated engineer, all avoidable with one light-touch email.
From roughly 2008 to 2014, every Facebook manager sent an 'HPM' up the chain — Highlights, People, Me. When Bosworth ran Communication Apps he sent his to Zuckerberg and the whole leadership group: the big things they needed to know, who was at risk or doing standout work, and how he personally was doing.
→ A standing, low-cost information channel that kept leadership's mental models current across an org without extra meetings.
Common mistakes
Treating an ask for help as an admission of incompetence
The assumption that your manager is testing you is almost always wrong — they are rooting for you, because your competence directly reduces their workload. The silence you keep to protect your image is what actually damages it.
Escalating a raw problem instead of a packaged one
'I'm blocked' forces your leader to do all the diagnosis and drafting. A blocker plus a draft email plus a yes/no question converts a 30-minute favour into a 30-second one, and gets acted on.
Using the same update style for every manager
Leaders vary enormously in the cadence and channel they want. Applying one format everywhere means half your updates are ignored — ask each one how they want to be informed.
Is it for you?
Best for
Individual contributors and mid-level managers who default to heads-down independence and only surface problems when they've already become expensive
Not ideal for
Environments where the leader is genuinely absent, punitive about bad news, or so overloaded that escalation reliably goes nowhere — there the fix is a different manager, not a better email
From the transcript
“more often than not your job is not to do it yourself your job is to get it done”
“nobody wants you to be more awesome than your manager does because when you're amazing your manager his life gets easier”
“you can say like hey I'm making progress on this this is what I'm blocked on this is the current program and I'll even say…”
“I love like a a tight you know like a five 10 sentence email no response required here's where things are”
“we actually used to have a format for that we called um hpms high like people me”
“one of my things I always tell my managers one of the most powerful things we do is refuse to rule”
From the episode
Making Meta
Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO)