What should you expect from your manager?

“I rarely got feedbacks from my manager.” My mentee said, “when I asked them ‘how I was doing”, they usually just said something like ‘you are doing great.’ , then moved on to talk about s-team goals and project work … but I want to be mentored and coached too! What should I expect from my manager about my own career growth?”

“Ha, on paper I would say your manager should give you all the support you need: opportunities, coaching, room to fail, time to learn and meaningful feedbacks…”‘I sighed, “but that is not the reality we live in sadly. We are not perfect. Why would we expect our managers to be perfect? Sure you can change teams, or change jobs but you might be in a circumstance you can’t just leave yet. So you have to accept what you have now and get the best out of it.”

“So I should not have any expectations for my manager?” My mentee asked.

“Well, when there is no expectation there is no frustration. But then it is also extremely rare your manager is completely incompetent or evil. They got that position for a reason. They are humans just like we are, good at something but flawed on other things.

As long as your manager still gives you opportunity and space to do your job and grow your career, I would say they are reasonably good manager already.

But you can be more deliberate to create productive feedback loops both ways:

1. Ask concrete feedbacks, not general ones like ‘how am I doing?’. For example, write a document and ask your manager to review and offer feedbacks on your ideas and writing

2. Calibrate yourself against your corporate role guidelines regularly, write down your accomplishments and misses according to the guideline: do you miss something to meet your role requirements or have you exceeded them? Do you need more opportunities to apply your skills, more training to acquire certain skills or just more time to gain experience and hone your skills to mastery? Share your writing with your manager and ask their perspective.

3. Do you need something from your manager to grow your career? Attend a training, go to a conference? Opportunity to speak in ReInvent? Ask your manager explicitly, if you don’t ask they won’t know, because they are busy growing their career.

The best situation you can create is a win-win scenario that your manager can directly benefit from your career growth, not to be threatened or annoyed by you. So they are willing to invest on you because they are growing their career by doing so.

As Adam Smith said: ‘It is not from the benevolence (kindness) of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’

But when the system we live in is still healthy, it is still structured the right ways that reward good work and punish bad, at least more often than not, collectively we will do things that benefit ourselves, others and the community as a whole.

We call the system capitalism!”