Most of us who work in the IT industry work under a boss. Working under someone has its benefits – someone to manage our workload and provide direction for our long-term projects and tasks.
However, to get ahead in your career you need to be able to impress your boss and prove to your boss that you’re good at what you do. In this article, I’ve listed a few tips to help you do that – impress your boss.
1. Impress Your Boss By Doing Great Work
This seems pretty straight forward, but it’s worth mentioning.
The single best way to impress your boss is to do great work.
I don’t just mean the general, average, day-to-day work that everyone does. I mean, great work.
Work that makes you stand out from your team and other people in the company. Other people will notice this great work, and importantly, your boss will notice it.
Great work can be implementing a great idea, delivering a high quality solution for a problem, or just going above and beyond your duties.
Any of these things would get the attention of your boss and most likely impress them.
2. Discover Your Boss’ Goals
Another way to impress your boss is to actually find out what their goals are.
I don’t mean their personal or career goals – I mean the goals they have for the team or the organization. The goals that have been set by their managers and higher up the organization.
It could be areas such as reduce network downtime, increase user adoption, increase sales, reduce support requests, anything like that.
Why should you care about this?
You should be aware of this because it can help you do your job better.
If you know what your boss’ goals are, you can impress them by helping them to achieve them. This will be reflected in the work you do and the choices you make when doing your work.
3. Lead By Example
This is kind of related to the “do great work” part, but it’s more than that.
Leading by example means you should demonstrate the behaviors and tendencies that you want others to display, and that your boss wants to display.
If your boss treats punctuality as important, start being punctual, even if nobody else is.
If they value other traits, such as quality, professionalism, friendliness, try to incorporate them into your work.
Your boss will notice this and it will put a big figurative tick next to your name.
4. Help Out Your Team
A great way to impress your boss – and to make their job easier – is to help out your team.
Try to go to the effort of helping them out with their roles. This is likely to make the entire team perform better, and please your boss in the process.
You can do this either directly or indirectly.
Directly helping them would be actually helping them with a task that they are working on. Solving a support request, debugging some code, installing some network cabling – things like this will directly help them out and help out the team.
Indirectly helping them would be doing work that doesn’t directly help them finish a task, but helps the team out. This could be documenting team processes, coming up with more efficient ways of doing things, or general maintenance work that needs to be done.
These could be things that have just been lying around waiting to be done. Getting them done will help your team and also impress your boss.
5. Be Positive
A great and often forgotten way of impressing your boss is just to be positive.
Have a positive attitude towards your work, your boss, your teammates and other people you interact with.
Try to avoid negative attitudes and behaviors. This sometimes can’t be helped, but try to minimize it where you can.
People love other positive people. Having a positive attitude will go a long way to improving your job performance and also impressing your boss.