How To Impress Your Boss

Most of us who are employed in the IT field work under a boss. Working under someone has its advantages - somebody to manage our workload and provide direction for our long-term assignments and duties. Nevertheless, to get ahead in your career you need to be able to persuade your boss that you’re good at what you do. You'll need to be able to impress them. In this post, I’ve listed a few tips to help you do that - impress your boss.

Do Great Work

This looks pretty simple, but it’s worth referencing. The single best way to impress your boss is to do great work. I don’t just mean the typical, average, day-to-day work that anybody does. I mean, excellent work. Work that makes you stand out from your team and other people in the company. Other individuals will notice this great work, and importantly, your manager will notice it.

Great work could be implementing a good idea, providing a high quality solution for a problem, or just going above and beyond your duties. Any of these things would get the awareness of your boss and likely impress them.

Discover Your Boss’ Goals

A different way to impress your boss is to actually figure 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 business. The goals which are set by their managers and higher up the business.

It could be areas such as reduce network downtime, enhance user adoption, improve sales, reduce support requests, anything like that. Why would you care about this? You should be aware of this because it can help you do your work better. Once you learn what your boss’ goals are, you can impress them by assisting them to achieve them. This will be reflected in the work you do and the choices you make when performing your work.

Lead By Example

This is kind of linked to the “do great work” part, but it’s more than that. Leading by example means you need to display the behaviours and tendencies that you might want others to show, and that your boss wants to display. If your boss treats punctuality as essential, start being punctual, even if nobody else is. If they value other traits, like quality, professionalism, friendliness, try to incorporate them into your work. Your manager will notice this and it will put a big figurative tick next to your name.

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 supporting them with their roles. This is likely to make the overall team perform better, and satisfy your boss in the process.

This can be achieved either directly or indirectly. Directly aiding them would be actually assisting them with a task they are working on. Solving a support request, debugging some code, setting up some network cabling - things like this will directly help them out and help out the team.

Indirectly helping them can be doing work that doesn’t directly assist them to 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 might be things that have just been lying around waiting to be done. Getting them done can help your team and also impress your boss.

Be Positive

An excellent 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 others you interact with. Try to avoid negative attitudes and behaviours. This often can’t be helped, but try and lower it where you can.

People enjoy other positive people. Possessing a positive attitude will go a long way to improving your job performance and also impressing your boss.