Making Your Manager's Job Easier

Some of the best advice I’ve received comes from my former manager, Josh Higgins, who I believe got this from one of his managers, who very well may have gotten it from one of their managers, and so on, ad infinitum.

“Every day, try to make your manager’s job easier.”

Your first reaction is probably, “That seems like a great way to kiss up,” and you don’t want to grovel to climb the greasy corporate ladder. Touché. On the surface, that’s a fair perception. However, I think this is insightful advice that is self-serving for multiple reasons.

It elevates your thinking

Every manager is responsible for a set of work more broad than yours, by nature of being your team’s manager. Because they support a wide team, they are responsible for holding you accountable to your work, along with your peers, so they have breadth where you have depth.

Making your manager’s job easier means you have to understand the 10,000-foot view of your team’s work in order to look at it from their perspective. It helps you connect what you’re doing to the entire hierarchy of roadmaps, strategies, and OKRs in your organization, especially those that are overlapping or parallel to your own. You’ll be better placed to identify new opportunities, shift priorities, and find fertile ground for your ideas.

It forces you to be proactive

Managers deal with a constant inbound of stress, as the challenges you run into may be completely different than the ones your peers are experiencing. The context switching and difficulty in making things actionable can weigh heavily, as adding new items to what they’re juggling may cause them to drop others.

Making your manager’s job easier means you have to be proactive in solving your problems. You’ll have to approach problems with a “yes, and…” rather than a “no, but…” Rather than coming to your manager with, “Here’s the problem I need you to solve,” you start coming to them with, “Here’s the problem I have, and here’s how I’m thinking of solving it.”

Once you get the hang of that, you start coming to them with, “Here’s the problem I have, here’s how I’m trying to solve it.”

Then, “Here’s the problem I had, here’s how I solved it. Do you have any feedback?”

Then, “Here’s a problem I foresee, here’s how I can prevent it.”

It forces you to take ownership

For all of those inbound challenges, your manager has to decide how it will get solved: they’ll delegate it, de-prioritize it, keep pushing it off, or just do it themselves. That’s often a difficult decision to make, as important issues often don’t weigh against each other. They all need to happen.

Making your manager’s job easier means you take ownership over some of the challenges demanding their attention. In the process, you’ll be learning the same valuable delegate / de-prioritize / delay / do it skills that will serve other parts of your job. It puts you outside your comfort zone to drive that initiative no one volunteered for, show up as a role model and a leader for your team, or take over that conflicting meeting so you two can divide and conquer as a team.

It builds relationships

“Divide and conquer as a team,” brings me to my last point. Rethinking your relationship in this way helps you think of your manager as a partner, rather than a boss. You’ll learn their strengths and weaknesses, and understand where to use your complementary skills to make a healthier organization.

It all comes from asking the simple question, “How can I help?”

Since taking this advice, especially as a manager myself, I’ve grown the sophistication of my thinking and ability to see emerging themes and connections across the org, I’ve said yes to more opportunities and learned more versatile skills. All the managers I’ve worked with this way have become some of my closest partners, friends, mentors, and confidants.