Do Business Well

No manager can make an employee productive. Managers are catalysts. They can speed up the reaction between the talent of the employee and the needs of the customer/company. They can help the employee find his path of least resistance toward his goals. They can help the employee plan his career. But they cannot do any of these without a major effort from the employee. In the world according to great managers, the employee is the star. The manager is the agent. And, as in the world of performing arts, the agent expects a great deal from his stars.

This is what great managers expect of every talented employee:

• Look in the mirror any chance you get. Use any feedback tools provided by the company to increase your understanding of who you are and how others perceive you.
• Muse. Sit down for twenty or thirty minutes each month and play the last few weeks back in your mind. What did you accomplish? What did you learn? What did you hate? What did you love? What does all of this say about you and your talents?
• Discover yourself. Over time become more detailed in your description of your skills, knowledge, and talents. Use this increasingly deep understanding to volunteer for the right roles, to be a better partner, to guide your training and development choices.
• Build your constituency. Over time, identify which kinds of relationships tend to work well for you. Seek them out.
• Keep track. Build your own record of your learnings and discoveries.
• Catch your peers doing something right. When you enter your place of work, you never leave it at zero. You either make it a little better or a little worse. Make it a little better.

SO YOU WORK FOR A DISCIPLE OF “CONVENTIONAL WISDOM” . . . OR WORSE

Great managers are still a minority. Few employees are lucky enough to work for “supersupervisor”: the perfect balancer of warmth and drive, support and authority, a manager who understands them, accepts them in all of their imperfection, and knows just how to energize them on even the most sluggish of mornings.

Instead most employees work for a supervisory “work in progress”: a manager who genuinely wants to treat his people well, who genuinely wants them to excel, but who is still struggling to get it right. Maybe he spends too much time telling his people what to do and not enough time listening to the unique needs of each person. Maybe he wants to perfect his people by making them learn his way of doing things. Maybe he naively treats everyone the way he would like to be treated. Maybe he is well intentioned but too busy to find the time to talk with all employees about their performance. Or maybe he is less well intentioned. Maybe he dislikes people, distrusts them, takes credit for their successes, and blames them for his failures.

If you work for any one of these managers, what can you do? What can you do to help him or her make the most of you? While we cannot offer you a surefire solution, we can give you a few pointers for managing your manager.

A. If your manager is just too busy to talk with you about your performance or your goals . . . schedule a performance planning meeting with him. Remove the planning burden from his shoulders and tell him that you will provide the structure for the meeting in advance so that you can use your time together most efficiently. You will prepare a short review of the last three months, the actions you took, the discoveries you made, the new partnerships you built. You will then want to discuss with him the next three months—specifically, your main focus, the new discoveries you want to make, and the new relationships you want to build. All he has to do is show up to the meeting and focus on you for forty-five minutes.

If he consistently cancels the scheduled meeting, or has nothing to say to you during the meeting, then your problem is not that he is too busy. Your problem is that he is a poor manager. Faced with this problem, you are limited in your options. If you love the job itself and feel you are doing well, you may simply have to put up with him. The alternative is to make a move, which we will discuss in item E.

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