How does your boss know you’re doing a great job?
In my last post, I talked about how your boss might have no choice but to judge your performance simply by the number of hours you work. Now I’m going to talk about some ways to change that.
If you’re boss is gauging your performance based on the amount of time your butt is in your chair, you have a BIG problem. He obviously doesn’t have a good understanding of what it is that you do. Obviously the short term solution is to figure out how to keep your butt in the chair longer for appearances. For example, come in earlier and catch up on the latest tech news. You may have been doing this at home, but why not get credit for it? The extra time you put in is also great for “playing” with the tools you use. It’s a good time to find out the most efficient ways to use them, so that you don’t have to get out of the zone when you’re working on something important.
Of course the long term solution is to change your bosses perception. Here are a few ways to do this:
- Let your boss share your pain. When you are running into hard problems, make sure he is aware of it. It might seem a little cruel, but if you don’t do it, he might not understand why you spent a week on something and have nothing to show for it.
- If you’re excited about something, tell your boss about it. He might just get excited about it too.
- In small talk situations with your boss, that’s a good time to give an update, but keep it short.
- In software development, there are changes that the average person would think are very easy. Your boss needs to be aware of when situations like that arise.
- Email weekly status reports to the tem. If you’re busy, this can be a good place to put some of the above suggestions instead of talking face to face. Your boss will appreciate your enthusiasm, especially if this is something that is not normally expected of you. It also serves as a good project history for him, yourself, and the rest of the team.
Also understand that your boss may need to report your progress to his boss. Be mindful of that, and try to boil down some of the information so that it can simply be repeated instead of being interpreted. Remember that anyone in the chain of command up to the President are interested in what you’re working on. The higher up you go, the more summarized the information needs to be. If you have opportunities to speak with them, you always want to be seen as passionate and motivated. It could very well affect a decision that they’ll have to make one day.
Joe said,
Wrote on April 7, 2008 @ 8:14 am
Excellent observations Jason! You are so right about the fact that stuff get’s summarized more and more the higher it goes in the chain so providing a high level perspective is a great idea.
Perhaps I’ve mentioned this to you before – I always told my various bosses: “I’m here to make you look good.” This has generally worked well for me in a software environment where you and I both used to be (“generally” meaning the only exception for me was a guy on with the initials J.B.). This was usually true because the software boss understood software – most of them used to be programmers at one point so they could appreciate what it took to accomplish a difficult task and probably even more importantly, they could appreciate creativity.
I’m not in software anymore either and I’m in a similar situation to what you describe: I have a supervisor who has no clue what I do or who I am or how well I’m doing it. He just doesn’t have the background in my specialty. Unfortunatly many of my peers and his own peers see him, well, in a rather unflattering light; hmmmm… previous boss at same company was viewed the same way… is there a pattern here???
Anyway, I’ve been considering a new strategy as well. I think it’s important for him to know that I’m his advocate and I want to make him look good – that hasn’t changed and I beleive that strategy honestly and fully played out can have an impact. In this light, I’ve been very careful to NOT jump on the bandwagon and dis him – I’ll even stick up for him at times to my peers. I learned that lesson. “Piling on” just makes me look like a whiner and it always gets back to him. It also drags others down with you; there is simply nothing productive about it – it was a big mistake and I wish I could Ctrl-Z that…
Sorry, back to the point. In light of the fact that he doesn’t understand what I do nor is he readily able to recognize my creativity, I’ve tried to make sure that those that do see it and appreciate it (especially my internal customers), pass that along to my boss – not necessarily by asking but by doing such a good job for them that they ask me who I work for so they can send an email. I work for a very large and dispersed company out of my home so my boss doesn’t interact with me on a daily basis. Your idea of weekly status reports is excellent. I’ve also use this tactic: I will pass praise emails on to my boss with a question like “do you think we could take advantage of this on the East coast (or in Europe or at this customer… etc)?”. That way, now he knows about it and the ball is in his court – he can take my creative solution and apply it to another similar situation and make himself look good and drag me along with him. Doing this in email provides a bit of “insurance” since there is an electronic trail in case your boss is unscropulous – he can’t just claim it as his idea.
Thanks again for the article – I like the new tech specific blog!