Managing Your Boss Can Boost Your Career

by Carol Kleiman
Chicago Tribune

Everyone knows that supervisors manage employees, but Michael S. Dobson of Palatine, IL says it should be a two-way street: You also have to manage your manager.

If you don't manage your boss, your career advancement is highly limited," said Dobson, a consultant in project management, communications and personal success.

"Confidence and ability help," he said, "but the right relationship with your boss will move you up further and faster."

I like the idea of managing your boss because it changes the power equation: Employees often feel helpless in the face of the overwhelming authority of the people they report to. To me, what Dobson really is talking about is a way to achieve mutual respect.

"The idea is to make sure your boss is on your side or no worse than neutral," said Dobson, the author, with his wife, Deborah Singer Dobson, of "Managing Up: 59 Ways To Build a Career-advancing Relationship With Your Boss" (Amacom, $16.95). Deborah Dobson is vice president of human resources at GTAX Terminals Corp.

The consultant isn't advising you to challenge your boss to hand-to-hand combat. You can't win that one. He's not talking about being manipulative, either. Instead, managing your boss means "providing the kind of support that helps your boss be effective," Dobson said. "That helps you to be more successful as well."

The consultant makes these suggestions:
(1) Be respectful to your manager but not scared. Remember, you're both important to the organization.
(2) Do your job. That gives you an underlying credential and is the source of your power.
(3) Do your homework, every day: Pay attention to the dynamics of the organization and how your boss operates in it.
(4) Make your boss look good.

By establishing yourself as a smart and dedicated worker, Dobson promises you'll get the leverage you need to have an effective, two-way relationship with your boss, but it takes constant attention to details.

The current popularity of the idea of managing your boss "acknowledges the change in the managerial role, which today is a more collaborative relationship with employees," said David Opton, executive director of Exec-U-Net, a career-management information service and network of senior executives based in Norwalk, CT.

If you manage your boss effectively, you have not only a boss but an advocate, a mentor and a coach," said Opton, who says he was lucky early in his career because he had a boss "who taught me how to manage him."

That sounds like really good management to me.

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