🐕 Teacher’s Pet | Career Development

How To Be Your Manager’s Favorite Because People Have Favorites Even If They Say They Don’t

If you’re like me, you’ve never seen a brick wall you couldn’t run right into. My weeks (if not my days) are filled with brick walls. Some of them are barriers to my objectives and some are barriers to the objectives of others. Each and every one of them is an opportunity.

Now don’t get me wrong, continuing to brute force my way through brick walls is no way to learn. I am talking figurative bricks here, but stay with me ( if you’re a brick layer by trade, you’re free to leave). A sign of brute force methods in technology are inefficient looping (e.g. breaking into an iPhone by trying every possible combination of 4 numbers). Since the machines haven’t won (yet), it’s worth knowing what it looks like in the human realm — Brute force problem solving is diving in and never slowing down to question your approach. It’s spinning your wheels on a problem where you just may not have the expertise required to solve it. Sure, if you keep trying you may come across incremental solutions and inch yourself forward, but you’re likely to burn yourself out in the process. (Brick walls in business come early and often).

You might guess the alternative I’m suggesting to be “Okay, I’ve hit a brick wall, now let me work with someone who may know the answer,” or if you’re newer to an organization you may run to your manager, throw your hands up in the air and collapse.

Pick yourself up.

…Now collect yourself.

The answer is not to go ask for help.

Imagine a manager.

This manager is responsible for all the projects for a particular segment of the business. This manager has always been patient and kind, but it’s hard to get on his schedule sometimes. Now, if I’m fresh-faced and bushy-tailed I may have a lot of questions. In parallel universe 37-C (this universe is 64-G) I imagine a version of my self asking so many questions that my manager comes to resent me, and a future version of that version of myself is left sitting at the brick wall where his luck ran out with his manager sitting on the other side unwilling to answer any more questions. Back in this reality (64-G), I diffuse that scenario by dividing my questions between my peers.

What I don’t realize is that in this scenario I’m stunting my own development in a couple ways…

• Because I’m asking different people a limited number of questions, and they’re helping me, I’m not challenged to come up with solutions. Whenever a problem arises and I run to my peers, they help me with the current brick wall (because they’re nice) and I proceed merrily until the next wall appears, no better capable at handling it.
• My manager does not have an appreciation for how I’m progressing in my development. Every time I do this I add an additional layer to the invisible barrier between he and me, the more we both become 2-D caricatures of ourselves to the other. He views me and assesses me based on hearsay from the rest of the team and we don’t have a relationship for tackling challenges when I really need help.

The best path available is not to ask my manager all my questions and it’s not to ask my manager zero of my questions. When I go to my manager I should at least have attempted to solve a problem first. The best practical measure of this is going to my manager with 1–3 possible solutions to the problem. Perhaps I don’t have the expertise and my solutions will be foolish or infeasible, but this demonstrates to my manager my developmental level, my commitment to getting better, my drive and my creative thinking. It may even tear away a layer of that invisible onion wall between us (ala the Mere Exposure Effect).

And although today I am the least competent I will ever be with this type of work at this company, I am actually at this point the most capable of creative thinking in my position. Duncan Wardle (a former Disney exec) called our developed skills “Rivers of Expertise.” Once our skills swell from a trickle to a flood of domain expertise, our ability to think creatively reduces drastically. We know what will work because we’ve done it before. That’s an excellent way to get work done, but it saps creative solutions (see also the refrain “standards kill innovation.”).

By being the person who brings the overloaded manager more problems, I am just another problem. By being the person who brings the manager solutions, I am a Godsend. All the rest is just gravy.

This is true for all managers, even the ones in 37-C.

Thanks for reading.

Michael

Looking up at The Manager. Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash