Help your manager to help you
Step-by-step guide on building a partnership with your manager!
Intro
Managers play a crucial role in your experience at work. Having a good working relationship with them can often be a differentiator in having a good time and it can also be the difference in your progression inside the organization.
You want to put your best foot forward in building as good working relationship as possible. Being proactive here is key.
You show your value by proactively finding out what’s the most pressing for your manager, the team and the overall organization and putting genuine effort into making things better.
That’s how you show that you are not just focusing on your own tasks, but you are actively partnering with your manager to make things better.
This is very important to keep in mind and in today’s article I’ll share my experience of how partnering with a manager and resolving their problems helped me grow from Team Lead to Engineering Manager.
And also I’ll share a step-by-step guide on how you can build a partnership with your manager.
This is an article for paid subscribers, and here is the full index:
- Partnering with your manager is one of the best ways to progress in your career
- This has helped me to grow from Team Lead to Engineering Manager
- So, what led them exactly to agree to this?
🔒 Here is a step-by-step guide on how you can build a partnership with your manager
🔒 Start building credibility
🔒 Take good care of the projects you are assigned to even if they might not be the most exciting
🔒 Focus on finding out the problems your manager is facing and do your best to resolve them
🔒 Tell your manager about your goals and aspirations
🔒 Keep nurturing the working relationship
🔒 Last words
Resources mentioned in the article:
How to build credibility in the engineering industry (paid article)
How to be a reliable engineer (paid article)
How to be a proactive engineer (paid article)
How to let your manager know about your goals and aspirations (paid article)
Let’s go straight into it.
Partnering with your manager is one of the best ways to progress in your career
And the reason is that the working relationship is reciprocal. You help your manager and your manager will help you.
Find out the problems and challenges that your manager is facing and actively look to resolve them.
Do this enough times and you will get opportunities and promotions.
And also by you doing good work, you make your manager look good as well. It’s all connected.
So what may happen is that both you and your manager “grow” together. They get promoted and you get the job they were doing or a similar one with a different team.
This can happen to extend from engineer all the way to VP level. That’s how impactful doing this can be!
This has helped me to grow from Team Lead to Engineering Manager
I grew from Senior Engineer to Team Lead and was leading a team of 5 engineers.
After 4-6 months I became an Engineering Manager and went from leading 1 to 3 teams and from 5 to 15+ direct and indirect reports.
I was able to do that because I recognized that my manager of my manager was having problems that I could resolve.
So what happened?
My current manager at the time decided to take on a new challenge and change companies. So, the role of my manager was open and it was quite a crucial time for the company as we were doing restructuring of teams and also the architecture as well.
Hiring a new person would take some time and also getting them up to speed would as well. So, my manager of my manager would need to fill that role until then.
I knew that they already had a lot on their plate, so I offered to help them take on more responsibilities. They said, they would get back to me and after 3 days, I grew to become an Engineering Manager.
It was a win-win situation for us both, as I grew in my career and my manager was able to focus on more important things.
So, what led them exactly to agree to this?
Well, I believe it was several factors: a bit of luck, but at the same time I was already doing good work as a Senior Engineer and I was also getting better as a Team Lead and learning from my mistakes.
At the end of the day, I was providing value to the organization and was able to show growth and potential. And I know that they were thinking highly of me.
I remember thinking to myself that I needed to project confidence when I offered to help with taking on more responsibilities. But at the same time internally, I was feeling like an impostor.
So, even if internally I didn’t believe it, I was still able to inspire trust in me to take that chance.
And of course, I believe that they wouldn’t agree to this if it wouldn’t resolve problems for them. I just grew to Team Lead and didn’t have a lot of managerial experience.
This opportunity has then been a big stepping stone for me to progress in my career because it gave me the confidence to keep progressing!
So, after 11+ years in the engineering industry and growing from engineer all the way to CTO, I’ve learned a lot about how to build good partnership with a manager from both perspectives: as a manager and employee.
And I’ve created this step-by-step guide on how you can do that yourself!
Here is a step-by-step guide on how you can build a partnership with your manager
