A large part of excelling at work means knowing how to deal with your superiors and reminding them of your achievements. If you can successfully manage your managers, odds are that you’ll live a more peaceful life at the office, on the sales floor, at the construction site, and elsewhere. However, some managers are bent on making your life miserable, they won’t recognize your hard work, your dedication, your willingness to give them a second, third, even fourth chance to change their ways.
And some people… they’ve lost the spark of goodwill that made them go the extra mile and be nice to everyone. That’s exactly what Dr. Kate Lister, a lecturer in the School of Arts and Communication at Leeds Trinity University, spoke about in her viral thread on Twitter.
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Kate asked her followers how old they were when they realized that their plan of being nice, working really hard, and taking on more than their share of tasks wouldn’t automatically be rewarded, was nonsense and wouldn’t actually work out. Scroll down to have a read what people tweeted back to Kate, as well as for Bored Panda’s interview with financial expert Sam Dogen, the founder of the Financial Samurai project, about how to deal with managers and how it’s vital to let them know about your achievements on a periodic basis.
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Kate’s thread was a massive success on Twitter. Her questions got a whopping 351.6k likes (that’s over a third of a million!) and was retweeted over 54k times. People opened up the difficulties they faced at work and exactly when they realized that being a dedicated worker who goes out of their way to do more than everyone simply isn’t enough. Not everyone is recognized for working hard. Though I personally still believe that discipline and working hard are the core reasons for success. Is that naive of me? Realistic? That’s for you to decide, dear Pandas.
Financial expert Sam, who runs the Financial Samurai blog, told Bored Panda more about what ‘managing managers’ actually means. In essence, it’s about constant communication and reminding our superiors of what we’re doing, what we’ve achieved, what our contribution to the company is.
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“Managing your manager entails keeping him or her abreast of what you are up to,” Sam explained that we should do our best to keep our superiors in the loop about our work as much as we can, without going into too much unnecessary detail.
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“It means highlighting your key wins and reminding them at the end of the year about what you did in the first half of the year,” the expert pointed out that we have to periodically remind our bosses of what we’ve achieved so far. It’s something to keep in mind and you should probably take this into consideration, what with the end of the year approaching and all.
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I was interested to get Sam’s take on whether we should be worried about leaving a paper trail about what we’ve done and what we’ve spoken about with our colleagues, managers, and bosses.
“It is very important to keep everything in writing. Over time, we tend to forget our interactions,” Sam warned that we have to take the time to make copies of the most important interactions we’ve had at work. These can save our bacon if things go wrong. They can also remind our managers about any promises they made in the past.
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Financial expert Sam noted that we tend to misremember things, so we shouldn’t rely just on our memories. Having documents, screenshots helps refresh your memory and get closer to the truth.
“By keeping things in writing, we can better remember situations and better argue for ourselves when it comes to asking for a raise and a promotion,” Sam said that when we have clear evidence of our work, our achievements, our input, it’s then easier to angle for a raise. The expert added that he’s got some great tips on how to deal with micromanagers which you can find on his blog, Financial Samurai, right here.
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Jeff Shannon, an executive coach, has a similar point of view that we need to get our superiors to notice our work. He told BBC Worklife that hard work is a good start early in your career, but it’s not enough if you’re aiming for the top or want to avoid stagnating in your career.
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“At a certain point, you look around and realize, wow, everyone works hard at this level. Expertise and hard work just become the expectation, and will not help you up the ladder,” he told the BBC. In short, a certain amount of office politics is inevitable if you want to rise in the ranks, get a proper raise, and see your hard work pay off.
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That means getting noticed: advertising what you do and promoting yourself, so you don’t fly under the radar when it’s time for a promotion. Tell your manager that you want to keep them in the loop so it doesn’t look like boasting. Or, as Carol Frohlinger, the president of Negotiating Women, Inc., told the BBC, “If you don’t take care of your career, nobody else is going to do it.”
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Source: boredpanda.com