Give Your Manager Reasons to Advocate for You

Your manager is also juggling their responsibilities. Keep expectations realistic and provide them with reasons to support you. Here's how to do it...

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I used to lean too much on my manager when I was a junior, meaning I had very high expectations of them. This led to too much frustration because my expectations weren’t realistic. I also have a job to do to help my managers help me.

I wish I had learned how to deal with my manager earlier in my career; I could have skipped so much unnecessary frustration. In this article, I aim to clarify key points that helped me (and hopefully will help you) deal more efficiently with my manager.

Your manager is like you; they have their own career goals and objectives that they are trying to fulfill as well.

Some of their career objectives intersect with your own objectives. This is why it’s crucial to understand what your manager’s objectives are and how you can make the best use of them.

Below are a few key points you need to work on to work effectively with your manager.

Help Them Help You

You need to assist your manager in supporting you effectively. You should provide them with the means to do so. You are the person who possesses all the knowledge around you, even if you don’t know it or can’t identify it yet.

This is why it’s important that you:

• Identify your goals.

• Recognize your strengths.

• Acknowledge your weaknesses.

• Specify the parts of the job that interest you.

• Identify your knowledge gaps and how to address them.

• Outline your achievements and improvements over time.

• Evaluate your downgrades in performance in certain areas.

• Reflect on whether you are effectively managing your time, and if not, how you can improve or learn to do so.

If you:

1. Identify all of the above points,

2. Organize your thoughts,

3. Write them down somewhere,

4. Identify OKRs (Objective Key Results)

you’ll give your manager the best chance to help you, and you will set yourself up for success.

Prepare an agenda for every one-to-one

I used to come unprepared for the one-to-ones when I was a junior, relying heavily on my manager for clear direction, feedback, and guidance on what to do next. This, I believe, put a lot of pressure on my manager.

Sometimes, those meetings turned into unfruitful chit-chats where we found nothing valuable to discuss. I could have utilized my time with them more efficiently, benefiting much more.

Only when I changed my perspective on the one-to-ones, did I find true value in them. Here are the key points explaining why you need to consider having an agenda for every one-to-one:

1. Efficient Use of Time: An agenda helps structure the meeting, ensuring that time is used efficiently. It allows both you and your manager to cover important topics without unnecessary diversions.

2. Clear Communication: Allowing time to think about meeting objectives beforehand enables clear communication of any concerns, doubts, interests, goals, or new ideas you want to share with your manager.

3. Goal Alignment: Revisiting your key results (i.e., goals) discussed in the previous section during one-to-ones helps maintain alignment and allows refinement as needed.

4. Accountability: Keeping track of your progress with your manager during every one-to-one holds them accountable for any areas of weakness or strength that are aligned or not aligned. If anything wasn't mentioned in those one-to-ones and is later brought up in your performance review, they are accountable for not addressing it earlier. It's advisable to keep your manager on the same page with your progression.

When you assist them with heavy lifting, they'll appreciate you more

In my experience, I've observed that managers are usually occupied with meetings involving stakeholders, other managers, and superiors, often overseeing multiple team members besides you.

This implies that they highly value proactive individuals who can alleviate some of their burdens by taking on tasks such as planning and identifying gaps and strengths in their career paths. One of the responsibilities of an engineering manager (or any manager, for that matter) is to maintain, organize, and support their team members. If you can ease that responsibility for them, they will express gratitude.

However, supporting managers in this way isn't their sole responsibility; they have other tasks as well, where your assistance can be equally valuable:

Making sure deadlines are met

Every manager I've worked with is usually very stressed by meeting deadlines and expectations set by upper-level management. This is understandable, as managers also have individuals who approve their promotions and pay raises.

This stress often leads managers to expedite their employees to meet deadlines.

A wise senior engineer once told me that it's comparable to a junior mechanic learning the profession from a senior mechanic, where the senior assigns a task, and specifies a timeframe for completion, and the primary concern is that the job is finished on time and meets a certain quality standard.

Here's how you can assist your manager in handling this:

Scope things efficiently:

• Identify dependencies on other teams, services, clients, etc.

• Consider compliances and regulators.

• Clearly define what's in scope and, equally important, what's out of scope.

• Outline milestones.

• Address deployment, experiments, testing, and validation.

• Timelines for every milestone:

  • It's crucial to incorporate buffers for any unforeseen events (which always happen).

Be prepared when things go wrong

Things can go wrong in any plan. Therefore, you need to prepare yourself to assist with the heavy lifting of difficult conversations that may occur with stakeholders. Your manager will need your help to:

1. Flex your investigation muscles to be prepared for unforeseen events.

2. Be ready to conduct postmortems and address issues.

3. Prepare solid evidence when things go wrong (e.g., incidents, missed deadlines, etc.).

4. Create a well-organized presentation for debriefs, covering:

   1. What happened

   2. Why it happened

   3. How it was fixed

The Importance of Manager’s Appreciation

I don’t want to state the obvious, but I’ll do it anyway. Like any human being, if your manager appreciates you and you earn your credibility with them, it’s like you’ll be one of their favorite children. This translates to:

• They’ll advocate for your promotion/raise with upper management.

• They’ll trust your judgment. This means:

  • Giving you more interesting projects.

  • Providing you with more credibility when presenting reasonable ideas or even radical changes in your team or organization.

  • Allowing you to say no to tasks you don’t like or don’t want to work on.

The more credibility you earn with your manager, the higher the chances you will elevate through the career ladder at the pace you’d like and in whichever path you choose (whether that’s IC, leadership, or anything else).

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