Chapter Twenty: Spotting Opportunities, Skirting Land Mines

Management styles are as varied as the personalities of the managers themselves . However, when a manager starts a topic with I think you should consider he is invariably alerting you to focus on an important issue, and you had better address it.

Opportunities abound in our industry, but you have to recognize them when they come along. And, to avoid explosions, you must also learn to spot the land mines that lurk beneath a suggestion or a request for opinion from your boss.

What Is Your Manager Really Saying?

I think you should consider This is the polite form of I want you to

Management styles are as varied as the personalities of the managers themselves. However, when a manager starts a topic with I think you should consider he is invariably alerting you to focus on an important issue, and you had better address it.

Common sense? Apparently not. I ve worked with bright and talented colleagues who were mystifyingly deaf to suggestion and blind to opportunity, even after many years in the business.

Here s an example of a missed opportunity. On one consulting job I was assigned to an empty desk in the accounting department, where I could observe everyone and listen to all the office chatter, even through my requisite earplugs. One day, the CFO said to one of the trainee accountants : I think you should consider taking some accounting courses at the community college at night, and of course the company will pay for them. The employee responded that he would try to find time, but that he was really busy after work.

Obviously, the manager was giving his employee a significant clue that he needed additional education. He was even offering to pay for it. Perhaps he was giving this clue to prepare the employee for a promotion. Perhaps he was alerting the employee that his current job performance was inadequate. Either way, the employee should have discerned that even a soft suggestion from a boss has weight behind it. His reaction should have been graceful acquiescence, or some acceptable alternate arrangement. He offered neither .

Your programming manager may see a coming departmental need for skills that you don t have, and suggest that you acquire them. He or she may need to send you to work in a location away from your hometown, or to work on a less-than -exciting project. The programmers who respond positively to their manager s request will be the ones who get the promotions, the raises, and the consideration for corporate jobs. So don t take what may seem like a light suggestion lightly ”not from a boss.