Recently I overheard one of those hallway conversations that should really take place in a conference room. Two employees were totally trashing their manager and they didn't seem to care who heard. As I walked by, some of the things I heard led me to believe that they really didn't have a great manager, but that was still not the best place to hold such a slam session.

Contrast that with my manager: Just yesterday he gave me high praise for solving a quirky problem in under 2 hours on our SharePoint 3.0 solution that two separate developers couldn't solve when the solution was originally written for SharePoint 2.0 a year ago. I don't know those two developers and can't say whether I'm a better programmer than they, but can only attribute my quick success to specific knowledge I gained of the ASPX page life cycle when writing my article on the ThreadAbortException back in 2004. Anyway, he didn't need to take the time to say thanks since it was my job to solve the problem anyway, but he did.

These two events got me thinking of the symbiotic relationship that I have cultivated with my manager and how we have helped each other along the way. We work so well together in fact that this is the second time we've teamed up because he specifically requested me when a position opened up in his group. In part because of his kind words there are other groups that have approached me with positions when I am available and my career options are many.

With that in mind I'd like to pass along a couple of tips on how to advance your career too by making your manager look good.

Do The Work

If your manager gives you a list of features to implement ask him the priorities so that you can knock out the most critical/visible items first. Try to see the big picture of what is on your manager's plate and be proactive in reducing his mental stress by taking care of your work queue so he doesn't have to micro-manage you. Many managers will actually run more than one project, and if your manager is one who does then make sure his biggest worry isn't the project for which you are developing. Play pinball later. Finish your task list first.

Give Credit

Last week I gave a presentation to the engineering and support groups of my company that detailed the installation, inner workings and support requirements of the product we have developed for SharePoint 3.0. During the question and answer period there were numerous discussions around a process that my manager and I had discussed at great length. When I offered up the answers I was clear in stating that my manager had made the final decision and that I agreed with it wholeheartedly. Many wouldn't bother to give any credit to their manager, but although I argued the case and presented the facts he had indeed made the final decision. It was after all his to make. Crediting him will not only help his career, but he will see me in a positive light as well.

Follow The Leader

If you have a good manager he will understand that you need recognition for your accomplishments too. If you make him look good he will be more inclined to help you along with your career choices as well. Your manager probably has a level of visibility in the company that you don't and he's in a position to be able to recommend you to other managers and groups that may be of greater benefit to you. Perhaps your manager is great and you really love your job and don't want to advance just now. That's okay! Understand that it's perfectly acceptable to ride his coat tails until you're ready to break out on your own.

“But I'm not riding his coat tails” you say. Why not? Have you reached the top of your game? I am someone who is always striving for something better and if that means using a successful manager to get a leg up what harm is there in that?

Don't Be Afraid To Learn

I've been really lucky in that the vast majority of the managers I've had have been bright people who obviously earned their positions through hard work. If you have one of these then don't be afraid to learn from their experience. As a developer it's easy to get lost in the code or see your group with blinders on, but chances are good that there's a lot of company around you that is blissfully unaware of your existence. Your manager most likely has a much broader perspective of the product, group and even company than you do and can shed light on the reasons why decisions were made that you wouldn't even begin to dream up.

If you have a bad manager you can learn something from him too. Although I really don't enjoy learning from negative experiences there is wisdom to be gained from them. If you're stuck in this position you have two positive choices (and a slew of negative I won't mention here…): get out, or guide. If you're not patient or can jump to something better relatively quickly then I would suggest the getting out path, but if you're really stuck there for a while guiding your manager can be a very rewarding experience also. Place a small suggestion here and there as if it came from him and see where it gets you. Implement the suggestions in this article also and see if you can turn him around. You may just get lucky.

Find Out What Would Make Your Manager Look Good

It's hard to make some managers look good. I'm sure most people have had that manager who made some kind of deal with the devil to ascend to the earth's surface for a while and for some reason chose your company to spread his mischief. But that's not the kind of manager I want to discuss today. That's an entire article in itself to be addressed at a future date. No, I'm talking about the manager who through no fault of his own has been saddled with supporting a product that is just so colossally bad it could only have come from the manager who was sent back to hell when his tenure was up.

I was once tasked as a lead engineer for an enterprise-wide product that was used by all 100,000+ employees of a Fortune 50 company, but this was a product that was designed for the desktop but the vendor had assured us it would scale to the enterprise. It was a web application that employed a load balancer, 6 web servers, 6 application servers and a clustered Oracle database. The COM+ components on the application servers were the product of more than one team and they obviously didn't communicate to each other during the development process because half of them were written in the single threaded apartment and the other half were written in the multithreaded apartment.

The object creation and memory usage on these servers was so horrid that they literally took at least one of the servers down every half hour during U.S. business hours. Read that again. I'm not kidding. I was on call every other week 24/7 and I wasn't very happy about that. Without remote access I would have needed to set up a cot at my desk.

We naturally did what any engineer in this situation would do – we complained to our manager. He told us that replacing the product with one that worked wasn't an option the company was willing to take at that time and we would have to make the best of it for now. We did push for and receive approval to develop companion applications to make our lives easier and we asked him what we could do to simplify things for him as well. He told us that the number one complaint he was hearing from other managers, and therefore his manager, was that the system always seemed to be down.

In this instance making my manager look good became more than just trying to get the uptime numbers meet some goal he needed to present to his manager. They became a lifestyle necessity. The first steps we took were triage related as we built monitoring applications and scripts to redirect traffic and restart processes. Once I was getting a full nights sleep I could focus on the quality of the application itself. My manager looked very good to his boss when he presented my findings, proving that the incompetence lay with the vendor. Did I mention that this is a commercially available product? You can imagine the chaos that ensued after that.

Looking Good is a Win-Win Proposition

Did you know that the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing produces 35 million notes a day with a face value of approximately $635 million? Of all the bills printed 95% of them are used to replace worn out currency, but 5% are used to increase the number of bills in circulation. I bring this up because many believe that if one person makes a lot of money then another person must make very little, but in truth there is no correlation. Since the amount of money in circulation is constantly increasing isn't it then possible that everyone can make a little more?

Likewise with business relationships one party doesn't have to suffer for the other to prosper. A bully may believe that he has to make someone else look bad to make himself look good, but he will always be seen as a bully. You don't have to be seen in a negative light just because your boss is seen positively.

Do what you're being paid to do. Give him credit where you can and honestly strive to reduce his mental workload by being proactive with your tasks. Listen and learn and form that kind of relationship where he helps you as much as you help him and the two of you may be able to rise together. If you honestly work to make your manager look good it will make you look good as well.