Patterns for managing up

Dear new developer,

Design patterns are common ways to implement solutions that can be repurposed across different systems and domains. This post proposes patterns for handling organizational situations.

Some really good excerpts:

No matter how amazing you are at your job, you will sometimes get feedback about things you could be doing better. It can be difficult to hear, especially if you are someone who works really hard all the time. When it comes to negative feedback, it is important to reframe the conversation. Feedback isn’t a bad thing. It is a gift, and you should always adopt a growth mindset and see it as a chance to improve.

I have received negative feedback about how I managed (I was managing how I would want to be managed, not how the employee wanted to be managed). It was really good to hear because it let me improve, but I definitely had to hold down a “wait a minute, you don’t understand” thought. If I hadn’t, I would have both lost that opportunity to learn, and possibly many more. If you react negatively to feedback often enough, people will decide that it isn’t worth giving to you.

And this is a good one too, about how to handle a problem you created:

When problems occur, there is a natural instinct to hide or deny that the problem is a problem, or that it is even happening at all. We want to minimize the problems that are our responsibility because, after all, a big part of our job is to make sure problems don’t happen. When you are proactive about sharing and fixing a problem, however, it is actually an opportunity to show you are an asset to the bosses.

Going to a boss and saying “I screwed up” is terrifying, especially the first time you do it. But going to the boss and saying “I screwed up and this is how I am going to both fix it now and make sure it doesn’t happen in the future” is terrifying but empowering too. The other alternative is to just hope that you are never found out, which is a miserable way to work (who wants to hide things? what happens if the problem gets bigger?). If you screw up, take a deep breath, come up with a plan, and solve the issue.

The whole article is worth a read.

Sincerely,

Dan