Department of Labor Unveils “Upward Performance Optimization” to Formalize the Work of Making Managers Look Good

Washington, D.C. — The Department of Labor has released a new advisory encouraging employees to adopt a structured approach to ensuring their direct supervisors and management consistently appear effective, decisive, and high-performing — a framework the Department describes as long overdue recognition of an already prevalent workplace practice it says should no longer be left to improvisation.

The framework, titled Upward Performance Optimization (UPO), was published without a press conference under the routine nomenclature reserved for technical guidance documents. Labor officials have emphasized that the framework is advisory, non-binding, and intended only to clarify best practices for what one deputy administrator described as “a category of labor that every employed adult in this country already performs without compensation, recognition, or any meaningful taxonomy.”

The document runs 284 pages. Roughly half of that length is devoted to hypothetical workplace scenarios rendered in the dispassionate register typical of federal case studies, in which anonymized employees named Employee A, Employee B, and Employee C navigate situations such as being asked whether a manager’s proposed restructuring plan is a good idea.

The framework’s stated objective is “alignment of employee output with hierarchical perception structures.” Labor economists consulted for this piece described the phrase as “the longest way anyone has ever written ‘make your boss look good.’”

The Premise

According to the guidance, the framework rests on three observations that the Department characterizes as non-controversial, empirically grounded, and, by the Department’s own admission, “previously understood but insufficiently formalized.”

• organizational success is often evaluated through management
• management perception influences outcomes
• employee output must be… properly attributed

The third observation appears in the document’s executive summary with the ellipsis intact. The Department was asked, during a subsequent briefing, whether the ellipsis indicated hesitation, revision, or the presence of a redacted clause. A spokesperson responded that the ellipsis was “deliberate and fully within the range of federal typographic convention.”

Asked to clarify what “properly attributed” meant, the same spokesperson declined, citing ongoing interagency review of the definition.

One policy note attached as Appendix B states:

“Your performance is most effective when it enhances your manager’s visibility.”

The note is presented without elaboration. In the preceding paragraph, the document defines “effective” as“producing outcomes consistent with the continuity of the employment relationship.”

Labor analysts reviewing the document observed that the definition functions recursively: effective performance sustains the employment relationship, which is itself the condition under which performance is observed, which is itself mediated by the manager whose visibility the performance is intended to enhance. One analyst described the framework as“a closed loop rendered in the language of an open one.”

A Formalization of the Informal

Department officials have been careful to frame the guidance as a formalization rather than an innovation. Deputy Administrator for Workforce Standards Patricia Hollings stated that the practices described in UPO are“observable in every functioning workplace in the federal economy” and that the Department’s role was limited to “providing vocabulary for phenomena that have historically escaped linguistic capture.”

The document contains a section titled “Historical Context,” which acknowledges that upward performance management has existed for as long as hierarchical labor organization itself. The section cites the Code of Hammurabi, the Roman patronage system, the medieval guild structure, and the 1983 Harvard Business Review article “Managing Your Boss” as antecedents. It does not dwell on the moral implications of any of them.

In a footnote, the document observes that the practice of managing upward has been continuously reinvented by management consultants, self-help authors, and corporate training divisions for at least four decades, each iteration marketed as novel insight. The Department describes its contribution as “terminological stabilization.”

Hollings clarified that the framework imposes no requirements on either employers or employees. “We are not mandating anything,” she said. “We are describing. If employees find the description useful, they may use it. If they do not, they may not.”

Asked what the consequences might be for employees who did not use it, Hollings paused, then said: “That is a question for their supervisors.”

Core Practices

The framework outlines several key behaviors, presented in the document as a sequential competency ladder that employees are encouraged to internalize in order of increasing subtlety. Each practice is accompanied by suggested language, behavioral markers, and measurable indicators of successful execution.

1. Credit Routing

Credit Routing, described in Section 4.1, addresses what the document calls “the attribution flow of workplace success.” Employees are encouraged to ensure successful outcomes are visibly linked to management direction, and to frame achievements as:

“aligned with leadership vision”

The framework provides a sample taxonomy of attribution phrases, ranked by what it terms “hierarchical resonance.” Low-resonance phrases include “I did this.” High-resonance phrases include “under the director’s guidance, I was able to do this,” “executing on the vision articulated in our last one-on-one,” and “thanks to the strategic framing established by leadership.”

The document notes that Credit Routing is considered “foundational” and advises that employees who struggle with it may wish to consult the 47-page supplement titled “Narrative Hygiene in the Shared Credit Environment.”

A subsection addresses the question of what to do when a successful outcome was achieved despite, rather than because of, managerial direction. The document advises:

“Where the causal relationship is ambiguous, employees are encouraged to resolve ambiguity in the direction most consistent with organizational coherence.”

The phrase “organizational coherence” appears 94 times in the document. It is not defined.

2. Preemptive Alignment

Preemptive Alignment, addressed in Section 4.2, asks employees to adjust work before review to match managerial preferences, thereby reducing the need for correction. The document frames this as efficiency optimization.

In practice, the Department explains, Preemptive Alignment requires the employee to develop what it calls “predictive fluency in managerial aesthetic preferences” — an ability to anticipate not what the manager has said they want, but what they will want once they see what was produced. The document acknowledges that these two categories frequently diverge.

The framework provides a worked example. An employee is asked to prepare a presentation. The manager specifies they prefer clean, minimal design. The employee produces a clean, minimal presentation. The manager, upon review, indicates that the presentation feels unfinished and asks why there are no charts.

In this scenario, the document notes, a Preemptively Aligned employee would have produced a presentation with minimal design and charts, having correctly inferred that the manager’s stated preference for minimalism did not extend to the absence of the specific visual elements the manager associates with thoroughness.

“The goal,” the document explains, “is not to execute instructions. The goal is to execute the instructions the manager would have given, had they fully articulated them at the time of assignment.”

A sidebar notes that this competency is developed over time and cannot be rushed. The Department recommends observation of managerial reactions to prior work, attention to facial expressions during meetings, and cultivation of what it describes as “the practiced ear.”

3. Narrative Support

Narrative Support, outlined in Section 4.3, addresses the employee’s role in group settings. The core practices are to reinforce management decisions in group settings and to provide verbal and documented affirmation.

The document is specific. Employees are encouraged to speak in support of managerial positions during meetings, to repeat managerial talking points in subsequent meetings, to follow up in writing with summaries that credit the manager’s framing, and to “proactively generate social proof for decisions the manager has already made.”

A suggested script is provided:

“I think what Director Chen was getting at is really important, and I want to expand on it because I don’t think we’ve fully appreciated the implications of her framing.”

The document notes that this script performs multiple functions simultaneously: it amplifies the manager’s position, positions the employee as a supportive collaborator, and, through the phrase “I don’t think we’ve fully appreciated,” subtly implies that other employees in the meeting have failed to demonstrate adequate appreciation. The Department describes this last function as “incidental but not counterproductive.”

Section 4.3 also addresses what the document calls “the silence problem” — situations in which a manager has expressed a position that the employee believes to be incorrect. The Department’s guidance is as follows:

“Silence may be interpreted as disagreement. Disagreement may be interpreted as disloyalty. Loyalty may be demonstrated through affirmative engagement with the managerial position, even when the employee’s professional judgment differs. Employees are reminded that professional judgment is not an enumerated workplace right.”

The passage is followed by a footnote indicating that nothing in the framework is intended to discourage employees from raising concerns through appropriate channels. “Appropriate channels” is not defined.

4. Risk Absorption

Risk Absorption, addressed in Section 4.4, is described by the document as the most advanced of the core practices. It asks employees to contain errors at the operational level and to prevent escalation that may reflect negatively upward.

The Department is careful in its framing. The framework does not instruct employees to conceal errors. Rather, it instructs employees to “localize the consequences of errors at the level of origin.” The distinction, the document notes, is meaningful.

Practical applications of Risk Absorption include:

• resolving problems before managers become aware of them
• resolving problems before they require resources the employee does not have
• resolving problems that were caused by managerial decisions the employee was required to execute
• not specifying, in after-action reports, the originating cause of the problem
• not specifying, in general, anything that would compel the manager to generate a response

The final bullet is expanded in a subsection titled “Upward Informational Restraint.” The document observes that managers, on average, have limited capacity to process information about operational problems, and that the generation of such information creates burdens that reflect poorly on the employee who generated it.

“The employee who brings a problem to the manager’s attention has created the problem for the manager. The employee who resolves the problem silently has prevented the problem from occurring, from the manager’s perspective. These outcomes differ only in visibility. Only one of them is compatible with the manager’s continued perception of organizational stability.”

The passage is among the document’s most frequently cited in preliminary analysis. Labor scholars have described it as “unusually honest for a federal document,” and one academic remarked that she could not recall a previous federal publication that so explicitly reframed problem concealment as problem prevention.

Supplementary Competencies

Beyond the four core practices, the framework introduces several additional competencies, described as “advanced applications suitable for employees seeking promotion or long-term retention.” These are not mandatory but are considered “strongly associated with career success.”

Emotional Regulation on Behalf of Leadership

The document describes situations in which managers may experience stress, frustration, or uncertainty, and asks employees to absorb these states without returning them to the manager or transmitting them laterally. Employees are encouraged to “serve as a stabilizing presence during moments of hierarchical turbulence.”

The document notes that this competency frequently takes the form of listening to managerial complaints about other employees, other departments, other executives, and, occasionally, the manager’s family. The Department advises employees to respond with “calibrated affirmation” — verbal acknowledgment that the manager’s feelings are valid without endorsement of any specific accusation that could, in subsequent recollection, be attributed to the employee.

Calendar Defense

Employees are encouraged to “maintain awareness of the manager’s schedule in a manner that enables strategic protection of their time.” This includes declining meetings on the manager’s behalf when the manager’s attendance would be unproductive, and accepting meetings on the manager’s behalf when the manager’s absence would be politically costly.

The Department notes that this competency requires delicate judgment, and that the employee who accepts a meeting the manager would have preferred to decline, or declines a meeting the manager would have preferred to accept, may find themselves in a position described by the document as “difficult to recover from.”

Informational Gardening

Employees are encouraged to curate the information the manager encounters, ensuring that news favorable to the manager reaches them promptly and news unfavorable to the manager reaches them in a form that has been “contextually stabilized.”

The document acknowledges that Informational Gardening sits in a complicated relationship with Risk Absorption, and advises employees that the two competencies must be coordinated carefully to avoid “narrative collision.”

Reputational Proxy Work

This competency involves representing the manager to external stakeholders in a manner that enhances the manager’s reputation without requiring the manager to be present. The document describes it as “speaking well of the manager in rooms the manager is not in, with sufficient specificity that the praise appears independent rather than performed.”

The Department notes that Reputational Proxy Work is among the most economically valuable of the supplementary competencies, with effective practitioners often generating significant returns on behalf of managers who are, in the Department’s words, “not themselves aware of what they are receiving.”

The Justification

Officials argue that the approach stabilizes organizational hierarchies, reduces friction, and improves perceived coherence. These three goals are presented in the document as self-evidently desirable. The framework does not consider the possibility that any of them might be in tension with one another, or with any other organizational goal.

One advisor stated:

“Strong leadership perception creates strong organizations.”

The statement was delivered during a stakeholder briefing at the Department’s headquarters and subsequently included as a pull quote in the framework’s foreword. It was not attributed. Asked who the advisor was, a Department spokesperson said only that the advisor was “internal to the review process.”

The framework elaborates on the claim across a 38-page section titled “Perception as Outcome.” The section argues that the perception of strong leadership and the fact of strong leadership are, for most operational purposes, interchangeable; that stakeholders, employees, and markets respond to the perception; and that the perception, once established, generates real effects that in turn validate the perception.

The document notes that this dynamic is well-documented in management literature, though the specific citations it provides are to other Department of Labor publications.

A footnote acknowledges that the dynamic may, in certain rare cases, produce organizations in which the perception of leadership strength is sustained indefinitely in the absence of any substantive leadership capability. The footnote describes this as “an edge case.”

The Efficiency Argument

The Department offers a secondary justification grounded in efficiency. According to the framework, organizations in which employees engage in Upward Performance Optimization experience less internal conflict, fewer escalations, reduced turnover at the executive level, and “smoother meeting dynamics.”

The document does not claim that these organizations are more effective at their stated missions. It claims only that they are more stable, more legible to observers, and more pleasant for senior leadership to operate within.

An accompanying impact assessment estimates that widespread adoption of UPO could reduce federal workplace friction by approximately 23 percent, though the Department acknowledges in a footnote that the baseline against which this reduction is measured “has not been established with certainty.”

Employee Reaction

Workers have responded with measured interpretation. Interviews conducted across eleven federal agencies and sixteen private-sector firms yielded a consistent pattern: employees reported that the framework described practices they already engaged in, had been engaging in for years, and had not previously considered to constitute a recognized category of professional competency.

One employee commented:

“So the job is… to manage the manager’s image?”

The employee, a mid-level program analyst at a federal agency, asked that her name be withheld on the grounds that her manager would likely read this article and that “it would reflect poorly on the department.” When asked to clarify which department, the employee paused and said: “Either one.”

Other employees offered more expansive responses. One senior associate at a consulting firm described reading the framework as “like someone finally writing down the family recipe.” Another described it as “the first federal document I’ve ever read that accurately described my job, which is not my stated job.”

A survey conducted by the Department in the two weeks following the framework’s release found that 81 percent of respondents recognized at least three of the four core practices in their current workplace behavior, and that 67 percent reported engaging in all four. A further 14 percent declined to answer, citing concerns about “how the survey data would be used.”

Among respondents who recognized the practices, 72 percent reported that they had never previously considered these behaviors to constitute a form of labor. When asked what they had considered them, the most common response, according to Department researchers, was “just how work works.”

Workshops and Training Materials

In the week following publication, several management consulting firms announced workshops designed to help employees develop UPO competencies. Advertised titles include “Strategic Visibility Management,” “Navigating Upward in the Modern Hierarchy,” and “The Art of Looking Like You’re Supporting Something.” Pricing begins at $2,847 per attendee.

One firm, citing anticipated demand, announced a certification program. Graduates of the four-week course will receive credentials as “Certified Upward Alignment Specialists,” a designation the firm describes as “industry-recognized,” though the industry that recognizes it has not yet been identified.

A separate firm announced a software product that analyzes employee communications and flags language that may reduce managerial visibility. The product is described as “anti-understatement technology.”

Resistance and Its Limits

A small number of employees have publicly objected to the framework. A coalition of workers identifying themselves as “professionally horizontal” issued a statement describing UPO as the codification of sycophancy and the transformation of labor into perpetual flattery.

The statement received limited attention. The coalition’s spokesperson was, according to reports, terminated from his position shortly after issuing it. The stated reason was unrelated. The coalition’s website has since gone offline.

A separate group of employees organized a brief online campaign titled “Downward Performance Recognition,” which proposed that managers be evaluated on how well they make their subordinates look good. The campaign lost momentum within 48 hours. Organizers cited “lack of institutional interest.”

Analyst Perspective

Experts describe the framework as perception-focused, hierarchy-reinforcing, and strategically aligned. Academic responses have been mixed, though the distribution of mixed reactions has itself been organized along predictable hierarchical lines: tenured professors have been more willing to criticize the framework openly than untenured faculty, who have been more willing to criticize it than graduate students, who have been more willing to criticize it than adjuncts, who have mostly declined to comment.

One analyst summarized:

“It formalizes what was previously informal.”

The phrase has been widely repeated in subsequent coverage. The analyst, who spoke on background, elaborated that formalization itself is not necessarily normative: practices can be formalized for the purpose of critique as easily as for the purpose of endorsement.

The Department’s framework, she noted, does not obviously distinguish between these possibilities. It describes the practices neutrally. It explains how to perform them well. It does not, at any point, ask whether they should be performed at all.

“That’s the tell,” she said. “A genuinely neutral analysis would include a paragraph acknowledging the downsides. The absence of that paragraph is the paragraph.”

The International Response

Comparative labor policy analysts have observed that similar frameworks exist, in unofficial form, in nearly every national workplace culture studied. A researcher at the Port-au-Prince Institute for Market Dysfunction, Dr. Henry Gutenberg, offered a broader framing.

“In every hierarchical organization ever studied, subordinates have engaged in upward image management. This is not a feature of American corporate life. It is a feature of hierarchy itself. What is distinctive about the American version is the decision to document it. Most cultures have the decency to leave it undocumented, in the same way that most cultures have the decency to leave certain other forms of mutual understanding undocumented. Documentation, in such cases, is not clarification. It is commitment.”

Gutenberg’s remarks have circulated widely in labor policy circles. He was asked whether the American decision to document the practice would, in his view, lead to its eventual reform or its entrenchment.

“A practice written down is a practice defended. A practice defended is a practice that has already won. The framework will not be reformed. It will be refined, credentialed, and eventually required. Within a generation, employees who fail to perform upward optimization will be described as lacking professionalism. Within two generations, the question of whether to perform it will not be asked, because there will be no vocabulary for not performing it.”

The observation was delivered without visible affect.

Quantitative Approaches

Several labor economists have attempted to quantify the economic value of Upward Performance Optimization. Preliminary estimates suggest that, across the U.S. economy, employees devote between 18 and 34 percent of their working hours to activities classifiable under the framework. One estimate placed the aggregate annual value of this labor at $847 billion, a figure the Department has declined to confirm or dispute.

The estimate, if accurate, would make upward performance optimization the third-largest unpaid labor category in the American economy, trailing only domestic caregiving and emotional regulation of spouses. It is the only one of the three that has received federal guidance.

A researcher involved in the estimate noted that the figure reflects only the labor performed by employees. It does not attempt to quantify the economic value of the managers whose visibility is being enhanced, on the grounds that “we have been unable to isolate a baseline scenario in which their visibility would be separable from the labor producing it.”

The Question of Voluntariness

The Department has been consistent in describing the framework as optional. The word “optional” appears 41 times in the document’s 284 pages, typically in proximity to phrases such as “though employees may wish to consider” and “while not mandated, strongly associated with favorable outcomes.”

Labor scholars have noted that the word’s frequency may itself be revealing. One professor of employment law observed that documents describing genuinely optional practices typically do not need to repeat the word “optional” dozens of times.

“The repetition performs reassurance,” she said. “Reassurance is needed when people have reason to doubt the claim. The document is responding to an anticipated objection that it has not otherwise articulated.”

The framework includes a section titled “On Voluntariness,” which addresses the concern directly. It notes that no employee is required to engage in Upward Performance Optimization. It further notes that performance reviews, promotions, retention decisions, and assignment to desirable projects will continue to be made by managers, and that managers are “free to use whatever criteria they find professionally relevant.”

The juxtaposition, scholars have noted, is not accidental.

The Employee Who Does Not Comply

The framework contains a brief appendix addressing employees who decline to engage in UPO. The appendix is titled “Alternative Career Paths” and is six pages long. It notes that such employees may find fulfilling work in “roles with minimal hierarchical exposure,” including sole proprietorship, independent contracting, and certain categories of creative work.

The appendix does not recommend continued employment in traditional hierarchical organizations.

A footnote observes that self-employment is “associated with elevated levels of autonomy, reduced exposure to managerial perception structures, and a 47 percent higher rate of income volatility, unpaid illness, and existential uncertainty.”

The footnote is presented without further commentary.

The Manager’s Role

One section of the framework addresses the manager’s responsibilities in the UPO environment. The section is comparatively brief, occupying 14 pages of the document’s 284.

The section notes that managers are expected to be “receptive” to upward optimization without being “demanding” of it; to accept enhanced visibility without appearing to seek it; and to cultivate what the document describes as “gracious centrality” — a posture in which the manager’s prominence is sustained through the efforts of others without requiring any visible effort on the manager’s own part.

The section does not identify any practice the manager is required to undertake. It identifies four practices the manager is encouraged to “cultivate a willingness to accept.”

A labor economist consulted for this piece observed that the section’s brevity, relative to the 244 pages devoted to employee practices, may be the document’s most honest feature.

“The ratio of obligations is the framework’s actual content. Everything else is the presentation of that content.”

Implementation and Metrics

The framework includes a 52-page implementation guide, which proposes measurable indicators that organizations may use to evaluate the adoption of UPO practices. The indicators are offered as recommendations rather than requirements, though the guide notes that “organizations that have adopted the indicators report improved perceived coherence.”

Suggested indicators include:

• frequency of employee references to the manager’s vision in written communications
• ratio of employee-initiated meeting follow-ups that credit the manager’s framing
• percentage of project outcomes described as “aligned with leadership direction” in post-mortem documentation
• rate of problem escalation relative to rate of problem resolution (the document recommends a ratio of 1 to 4)
• employee 360-degree feedback scores on “team-oriented mindset”
• manager satisfaction, measured quarterly

The guide notes that these indicators should be interpreted in aggregate rather than individually, as any single indicator may reflect “temporary operational conditions unrelated to the underlying competency.” It further notes that aggregate scores should be reviewed by the manager being managed.

Asked whether this arrangement might produce circular feedback — in which managers evaluate the employees who are evaluated on how well they make the managers look good — a Department spokesperson said: “All performance evaluation is, in some sense, circular. The framework is consistent with prevailing practice.”

Case Studies

The document includes nine case studies from organizations that have informally adopted UPO-consistent practices. The case studies are anonymized and presented in the third person.

In Case Study 3, an employee at a federal agency is described as having prevented 17 separate operational problems from reaching her supervisor over a three-year period. The document notes that the employee was eventually promoted, that the supervisor received a leadership award, and that the operational problems, “while resolved, contributed to a working environment characterized by episodic emotional volatility among the subordinate team, the precise cause of which was never identified by leadership.”

The case study does not explore the connection.

In Case Study 7, a junior associate at a consulting firm is described as having successfully credited a managing partner for a strategic insight that the associate had, in fact, developed independently. The partner subsequently repeated the insight at a client meeting, where it was well received. The associate received a bonus at year-end. The partner was promoted. The client, the document notes, is no longer a client, though the reasons for the relationship ending are “not documented in available records.”

In Case Study 9, an employee at a technology firm is described as having resigned after attempting to raise concerns about a product decision through appropriate channels. The case study presents the employee’s departure as “an example of insufficient Preemptive Alignment.” The product, the document notes, subsequently failed. The document does not discuss whether the employee’s concerns had been correct.

Rhetorical Architecture

Independent analyses of the document’s language have noted a consistent set of rhetorical patterns across its 284 pages. These patterns have been documented by several linguists, one of whom described the framework as “the most internally coherent federal document I have ever read, in the sense that every sentence is produced by the same engine.”

Among the identified patterns:

• the framework defines core terms through reference to other core terms that are themselves undefined, producing what one linguist called “a terminological closed system” in which meaning is established through mutual deferral
• the document consistently uses passive voice at points where the active voice would require naming an agent; the phrase “decisions are made” appears 78 times, while the phrase“the manager decides” appears twice, both times in reference to hypothetical case studies
• the framework frequently acknowledges alternative views only to immediately re-describe them in language that makes them harder to hold; critics are described as “professionally horizontal” rather than “opposed to hierarchy”
• the document’s most forceful claims are made in footnotes, subsections, or sentences beginning with the phrase “it should be noted that,” which appears 112 times
• the phrase “employees may wish to consider” appears in 91 different contexts, each time introducing an expectation that is formally non-binding but whose non-observance the document describes as “associated with unfavorable outcomes”

One linguist observed that the cumulative effect of these patterns is to produce a document that reads as descriptive while functioning as prescriptive, and that imposes obligations without ever specifying who imposes them. The effect, she noted, is characteristic of a category of administrative writing that has been studied in other contexts but rarely named.

“The document does not instruct. It describes a state of affairs in which the instruction has already been followed. The reader is invited to locate themselves within that state of affairs. Resistance is possible only by stepping outside the document’s frame, and the document offers no apparatus for doing so.”

The Footnote as Operational Unit

Close readers of the framework have noted that a disproportionate share of its operational content appears in footnotes. The body of the document describes the practices in neutral terms; the footnotes describe the consequences of not engaging in them.

Footnote 47, for example, appears on a page discussing the voluntary nature of Narrative Support. The footnote reads: “Employees who decline to reinforce managerial positions in group settings have been observed, in some organizational contexts, to experience reduced inclusion in subsequent decision-making forums. The Department does not recommend any specific remedial action.”

The body text on the same page describes Narrative Support as “an optional professional behavior.”The footnote describes the cost of treating it as such. Readers who read only the body text, the linguist noted, would come away with a different impression of the framework than readers who read the footnotes.

The framework contains 284 footnotes. The average reader, according to Department-commissioned usability research, reads 11 of them.

HR and Legal Response

Human resources professionals have responded to the framework with what one trade publication described as “a mixture of recognition and relief.” The Society for Human Resource Management issued a statement welcoming the Department’s guidance, describing it as “a valuable articulation of competencies that have historically been evaluated informally.”

In interviews, HR directors described the framework as providing legal cover for evaluative practices that had previously operated without documented criteria. One director noted that performance reviews had long included assessments of “team orientation,” “organizational citizenship,” and “leadership alignment” without any shared understanding of what those terms meant. The framework, she said, gave her a vocabulary.

“I’ve been writing performance reviews for twenty-three years. I’ve been writing the same sentences about the same categories of behavior the whole time, without ever being quite sure what the behaviors were. Now I have a taxonomy. The work hasn’t changed. Only the documentation has.”

Employment lawyers have offered more guarded responses. Several noted that the framework, while formally optional, creates legal exposure for employers whose performance evaluation practices diverge from its recommendations. An employer who terminates an employee for failure to engage in upward performance optimization is, under the framework, engaging in an action that has been implicitly normalized by federal guidance; an employer who terminates an employee for over-engaging in it has no comparable federal reference to cite.

One employment attorney, speaking on background, characterized the framework as “a shield, not a sword. It doesn’t allow employers to do anything they couldn’t already do. It makes what they were already doing harder to challenge.”

Plaintiffs’ attorneys have reported an uptick in inquiries from employees who were terminated in ways the framework would classify as consistent with deficient UPO performance. Most of the inquiries, the attorneys reported, do not result in litigation. The employees in question typically lack documentation sufficient to establish that their termination was discriminatory rather than performance-based, a distinction the framework has made more difficult to draw.

The Union Position

Organized labor has responded with a statement that has itself been the subject of analysis. The AFL-CIO described the framework as “consistent with the Department’s ongoing commitment to workplace clarity”and declined to take a substantive position on its content. Internal union communications, subsequently reported, indicated that the organization had been unable to reach consensus on whether to oppose the framework, support it, or issue the bland statement that was ultimately issued.

A senior union official, speaking anonymously, noted that upward performance optimization is practiced by union members as well as non-union members, and that opposing the framework would have required the union to take a position on behavior its own members engaged in. “We would have been opposing ourselves,” the official said. “We declined.”

A smaller coalition of independent unions issued a stronger statement, describing the framework as “the formalization of workplace coercion” and calling for its withdrawal. The statement was covered briefly in labor press and then was not covered again.

A Longer Conversation with Dr. Gutenberg

Dr. Henry Gutenberg of the Port-au-Prince Institute for Market Dysfunction was asked to expand on his earlier remarks. The conversation, conducted over an encrypted channel at his request, touched on the framework’s historical significance, its probable trajectory, and what Gutenberg described as the document’s “one genuinely interesting absence.”

On the question of historical significance:

“Every era produces the document it needs to excuse its arrangements. The feudal era had manorial custom. The industrial era had time-and-motion studies. The managerial era had the Harvard MBA curriculum. This framework is the document that the current era requires, which is an era in which hierarchy has been retained but its justification has been gradually withdrawn. The framework fills the gap. It explains what we are doing, now that we no longer remember why we are doing it.”

On the question of trajectory:

“The framework will not remain optional. It will not be made mandatory through legislation; that would require a political debate the framework has been carefully designed to avoid. It will be made mandatory through professional norm. Within five years, it will be referenced in job descriptions. Within ten, it will be a standard component of onboarding. Within fifteen, the practices it describes will be understood as prerequisites of professional existence, and their absence will be diagnosed as a personal failing. At no point will anyone have passed a law. The framework achieves mandatoriness without requiring mandate. This is its most elegant feature.”

On the “genuinely interesting absence”:

“The framework says nothing about competence. Nowhere in its 284 pages does it ask whether the manager being made to look good is, in fact, good. It takes the manager’s worthiness of enhancement as a given. This is not an oversight. It is the entire content of the framework, compressed into a single omission. The document cannot consider managerial worthiness because the framework is premised on it. To ask the question would be to reveal that the answer does not always resolve in the direction the framework requires. The omission is structural. The framework without it would collapse.”

Gutenberg was asked whether the framework could be reformed to include such a consideration. He paused for several seconds before answering.

“A framework that asked employees to make incompetent managers look good would be refused. A framework that asked employees to make competent managers look good would be unnecessary. The framework that exists is the only one that can exist, because it refuses to distinguish between the two cases. Its silence on competence is not a bug. It is the thing the framework is for.”

Asked whether he had found the framework difficult to read, Gutenberg laughed briefly and said: “On the contrary. I have read it many times. I read it any time I need to remember what a profession looks like when it has decided not to examine itself.”

Questions of Scope

The Department has been asked whether the framework’s principles apply beyond the workplace. The question has arisen in several contexts: whether the practices apply to academic advisors and their graduate students, to clients and their attorneys, to patients and their physicians, to voters and their elected representatives, and, in one briefing, to children and their parents.

The Department has declined to rule on any of these applications. A spokesperson noted that the framework is “specifically scoped to employer-employee relationships in formal workplace settings” and that “extrapolation to other hierarchical contexts is beyond the scope of this guidance.”

The spokesperson added, when pressed, that “the principles may be generally applicable to any relationship characterized by asymmetric power, differential information access, and conditional security of tenure, but the Department offers no opinion on whether any specific additional relationship meets those criteria.”

The clarification has been interpreted variously.

The Failure of the Counter-Movement

The short-lived “Downward Performance Recognition” campaign has since been the subject of organizational analysis, most of it unfavorable. The campaign’s organizers proposed a simple inversion of the framework: managers, rather than employees, would be evaluated on how effectively they enhanced the visibility and reputation of their subordinates. The campaign lasted 48 hours before momentum collapsed.

Post-mortem analyses identified several contributing factors. The organizers had difficulty identifying a constituency for the proposal. Employees, while nominally favorable to the idea of being made to look good by their managers, did not appear to believe the proposal was serious. Managers, while theoretically capable of benefiting from the reduced burden of upward management, did not appear to believe the proposal was serious either. The proposal was treated as a kind of performance — a gesture in the direction of a counter-framework that no one expected would be implemented.

One organizer, interviewed after the campaign’s dissolution, observed that the proposal had failed because it had no mechanism for enforcement. Upward performance optimization, she noted, is enforced by the structural incentives that govern employment itself; downward performance recognition would have required an entirely separate set of incentives that no one had proposed to create.

“We asked managers to do something that managers had no reason to do. The framework asks employees to do something that employees have every reason to do. That is the difference. We didn’t have a movement. We had a thought experiment.”

A second organizer offered a blunter assessment. “Managers can refuse to be evaluated,” he said. “Employees cannot. That’s the whole thing. The framework describes the labor of people who cannot refuse. Any proposal that applies to people who can refuse is not a proposal. It is a wish.”

The Department has not formally responded to the counter-movement. A spokesperson, asked during a briefing whether the Department had considered guidance on downward recognition, indicated that the Department was “not aware of any widespread demand for such guidance” and that the Department’s mandate did not extend to “speculative reorganizations of existing hierarchical relationships.”

The counter-movement’s brief existence has been preserved in several academic archives but has not otherwise entered the historical record. A proposal to include it in the framework’s appendix as a documented example of “alternative perspectives considered and declined” was internally floated at the Department and then withdrawn. No explanation for the withdrawal was provided.

International Parallels

Similar frameworks have emerged in other national contexts, though none have reached the level of formalization achieved by the American document. Labor ministries in Germany, France, Japan, Singapore, and the United Kingdom have issued guidance documents that touch on related competencies, though each framing reflects the particular managerial culture of its country of origin.

The German framework, issued in 2024, describes upward management as “cooperative coordination with leadership initiative” and emphasizes procedural documentation. German labor scholars have noted that the country’s strong codetermination laws and works councils create institutional friction that the American framework does not contend with. The German version is 89 pages long and, according to one researcher, “does most of its work by what it declines to specify.”

The Japanese framework, in contrast, was issued as a single paragraph appended to existing workplace guidance. It contains no numbered practices, no case studies, and no measurable indicators. One labor historian, asked why the Japanese version was so much shorter, observed that “Japan does not require written guidance for practices that are already the total structure of working life. The Americans required 284 pages because the practices had not yet achieved full invisibility. The Japanese required one paragraph because they had.”

The French framework has been withdrawn twice following public objection. Labor unions in France organized successful protests against the initial version, which was described as “incompatible with the dignity of the worker.”A revised version, which softened the language and removed several of the more explicit passages, was also withdrawn after sustained criticism. A third version is reportedly under development. The French framework is currently zero pages long and has been praised by domestic commentators for its “careful respect for ongoing deliberation.”

The Singaporean framework, issued in 2023, is considered by comparative labor analysts to be the most mature international example. It describes the practices without euphemism, acknowledges their coercive aspects, and then endorses them on explicitly efficiency-based grounds. The framework has been cited as a model by several authoritarian governments and has not been cited by any democratic government, though Department officials, asked whether the Singaporean version had influenced the American draft, declined to comment.

The Non-Framework Outliers

A small number of national labor ministries have explicitly declined to issue guidance on upward performance optimization. The most notable is the Icelandic Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour, which issued a one-page memo in late 2024 stating that the practices “are not considered by this ministry to constitute a category of professional competency appropriate for federal recognition.” The memo has been cited internationally as a model of administrative restraint. It has not been adopted elsewhere.

The Icelandic labor minister, interviewed about the decision, was asked why her country had declined to formalize practices that were clearly observable in Icelandic workplaces. She responded: “We observe many things in Icelandic workplaces. We do not feel that observation alone requires federal endorsement. There are things a government can decline to notice. This is one of them.”

The remark has been circulated in dissident labor circles. It has not otherwise influenced policy.

Closing Statement

The Department emphasized that the guidance is optional. A final paragraph in the document’s conclusion reiterates the point, using the word “optional” four times in three sentences.

“We are providing tools.”

The statement, delivered by a deputy administrator during the document’s unveiling, has been reprinted in every subsequent piece of Department communication on the subject. It appears on the framework’s cover page, above the title, in a smaller font. It is not accompanied by a subject, a verb object, or an identified recipient.

Tools for what has not been specified. Tools for whom has not been specified. The Department’s position is that the framework is available to anyone who wishes to use it, and that its use, or non-use, is a matter for individual discretion, to be exercised freely within the constraints of continued employment.

At press time, employees continued working.

And… positioning.

Editor’s note: Following publication of the framework, several federal agencies announced internal training sessions to help employees develop UPO competencies. A deputy administrator at one agency clarified during the rollout that attendance was optional. The rollout concluded with a reminder that performance reviews were approaching. As of press time, attendance had been high.