Progress in your career by managing

Managing is an important skill, and I didn’t realize I could do it until I was a senior engineer at Facebook. If I had worked better with my manager I could have received much more career support and investment.

Here are three main ideas that made a meaningful impact on my approach to manager relationships:

First, understand your manager’s motivations. Many early career engineers are not fully aware of how their managers are evaluated. Ultimately, your manager is evaluated on his or her team’s overall impact. Your manager will often spend time responding to reports and ensuring engineers are cleared of disruptions. But they may also need to remove people from the team or cancel projects. You need to determine what your manager cares about and how your work fits into their priorities.

Second, understand your boss’s preferred communication style. Many software projects come with a README file that explains how to use them. Imagine you had to write a README file for your manager: information to know to have the best conversation with them. This document will include their preferences and dislikes regarding communication, their preferred work environment, and their strengths and weaknesses. Once you have a README file, either something you wrote on behalf of your manager or something you put together collaboratively with your manager’s input, apply it to your interactions.

Finally, figure out how to work productively with your manager when planning your tasks. Bring value instead of asking how you can get involved in something new. Provide data, insights or proposals that drive the conversation forward rather than waiting for an assignment. Plus, no manager wants to deal with surprises. Make sure you communicate in advance of any surprises, and that you’ve thought about next steps when things inevitably go wrong.

You can, at least partially, control your manager’s investment in you. It’s not about drinking after work or political maneuvering – management is a vital skill for career advancement, whether we do it consciously or not.

-A male name

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