Promoting Your Boss to Advance Your Career?
6 September 2006There’s an interesting article in Yahoo Finance by Jim Citrin on how you can advance your own career by trying to boost your boss. He’s not talking about going around constantly talking up how great your boss is, but more about trying to make sure that you don’t step on their toes and that you do the work in a way that lets them get credit as a good manager, even if you’re the one behind it.
It’s an approach that I think could work with some bosses - but I don’t really like it as a generic way to get a promotion. First, I’m not sure that this is very good advice:
To make this tactic work most effectively, you may need to “let go,” allowing your boss to get the credit for what you do and claiming some of your work as his or her own. This might entail swallowing your pride of authorship and putting up with your boss acting as if he or she actually is a creative person, even if that’s the case only when you’ve supplied the ideas.
The kind of boss who would take credit for your work like this isn’t the kind of boss that you want to be trying to promote to help yourself. Letting them take credit for your work isn’t going to advance your own career - any boss who doesn’t at least throw off a few crumbs of praise about how he couldn’t have done it without your diligent work isn’t one you should be supporting like this. You’ll just end up seeing them promoted and you left behind. If your boss appreciates your contributions, on the other hand, then great - if they get promoted, they may want to bring you with them.
Keep in mind that I’m not advocating that you stand up and start explaining to everyone how your boss really didn’t do the work and doesn’t know everything. Anyone who has even a little training in being a corporate weasel should know that there are more subtle ways to let people know who was doing the actual work.
I do think it’s good advice to try to support the needs of your boss whenever you can, especially if you’ve got a good one. That often affects their impression of you - and you want it to be a good one. It might go a little too far, however, to do this:
One of the best ways you can do this is to compensate for his or her weaknesses. If your boss is a creative visionary who can’t run a meeting, stick to a schedule, or produce consistent performance information, take it upon yourself to help bring managerial discipline and operational excellence to the group.
This sounds awfully close to something that would anger many managers: ursurping their authority. You don’t want your boss thinking you are trying to take over their job. If your boss can’t run a meeting, don’t suddenly start trying to dictate things. Tell them you had an idea to improve the meetings, and offer to do something that won’t impede on their authority - for example, a set schedule of discussion times. If you’re just jumping into the meeting all the time asking people to move on, it doesn’t look good. And sometimes you won’t be able to do anything about it. You genuinely might not be able to do anything to get your boss to run a meeting well - and in that case, it’s better just to hold your tongue.
While I’ve got reservations about it, I’d suggest reading this article and following some of the advice if you’ve got a boss you think will be loyal to you. Some bosses have cronies, and some recognize the best workers they supervise. If you’ve got a good boss, you can go a lot further by helping someone who respects you advance in your company. What goes around often comes around.
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