Hi! Want to get promoted?
You have strong technical expertise, and can solve thorny problems. That’s great! An important skill. But depending where you are in your career, it might not be enough.
For better or for worse, ultimately your promotion depends on the perceptions of another human being: your boss. And today I want to talk about one important but sometimes-overlooked thing that influences those perceptions: organizational skills.
I am not, by nature, an organized person. But when I think about what makes me effective— and, yes, what makes my bosses happy with me — it turns out that organizational skills are pretty high on the list. (I was surprised, a while back, when my manager called me “detail oriented”!)
So here are some very simple tips for how to make sure that your capacity to “get stuff done” isn’t getting in the way of your advancement.
WARNING: I said these tips were simple! You may roll your eyes and think that I am not really saying anything interesting here. That might be true, and maybe you don’t need these tips! But my observation is that many people have quite a lot of room for improvement in these areas. (I’m still improving, myself.)
1. Do what you say you’re going to do
This one is so obvious, I shouldn’t have to say it, right?
How often has your manager (or your tech lead, or whoever) had to remind you to do something?
As a manager, there are a million things competing for my brainspace. Being able to offload some of those things is absolutely necessary for me to be able to function in my job. If I can ask you to take care of XYZ and trust that you will actually take care of it, that’s one less thing that I have to track, and I will think of you as somebody who I can depend on to get things done.
Similarly, if you tell me that you’ll have Project Q done by Friday, and it’s done by Friday, I will think of you as someone whose estimates I can rely on when planning. (Estimation is its own challenge, of course—hard to get right, but valuable to practice.)
One note here is: as demands on your time increase, in order to be able to do what you say you’re going to do, you will probably need to say no to some incoming requests, which is a skill in and of itself.
Being reliable is important for managers too: are you going to see me as an effective boss if I don’t follow through on the things I commit to? If I tell you I’ll get you a raise, but then I never even follow up with you about it, how will that impact how you see me? This is an issue of trust, and it goes both ways.
When you follow through on your commitments, you make other people’s lives easier, you build trust with your teammates and your boss (and your reports, if you’re a manager) … and—as many people are not so reliable—you stand out from the crowd.
2. Calendar like a boss
I’ve told you before, “feel free to put time on my calendar.” But you never do. Not even when you need to reschedule a 1:1. Instead, you ping me and say “hey, can we reschedule?” And then you wait for me to find a new time.
It’s easy to assume that I, as a manager, can handle administrivia like finding time on our calendars. You’re right — I can. But you can bet that I will notice and appreciate if I don’t have to do that because you just handle it.
That’s just one example. Whatever calendar tool your organization uses, learn it well and use it proactively to make others’ lives easier. It’s a simple but meaningful way that you can be a value multiplier.
An important note here is that different organizations (or bosses) have different expectations about calendaring. In some orgs, asking permission first might be exactly the right move. Find out what the cultural norms are in your environment, and then figure out how to be as useful as possible within those norms.
3. Don't make your brain do all the work
So… There’s a spreadsheet you need to update every Monday. Your boss wants it, because his boss wants it, because the CEO wants it, and you only sorta kinda understand why it’s valuable[*]. But your boss strongly implied it’s part of your job, so you agreed to do it. And you want to be reliable and get it done.
Okay, but how the heck do you remember?
After all, there are probably a million things competing for your brainspace, too. There’s your top-priority roadmapped project that’s running two weeks behind, and there’s this thing that some other team urgently needs from you to unblock their very important work, and you got paged last night and lost two hours of sleep.
So there’s no way your brain is going to remember to do some weekly record-keeping task that will never feel as urgent as the servers that are on fire or the product that needs to be delivered — amirite?
This is why you need brain extensions. Y’know, tools. The aforementioned calendar is one. If you’re using Google Calendar, you can set a “Reminder” which, unlike a normal calendar event, will follow you around from date to date until you mark it as done.
There are task tracking apps, like Asana and Trello.
There are note taking and capture apps, like Evernote.
There are productivity “systems” like GTD, and corresponding software like OmniFocus.
If you use Slack, there's the /remind command to ask Slackbot to remind you of something at a specified time in the future (or on a schedule).
There are super-high-tech, newfangled devices like pens and pieces of paper on which to write TODO lists. ;-)
It takes some experimentation to figure out which tools work for you. You may occasionally want to try out a new tool or system. Don’t get caught in the trap of spending all your time reading Lifehacker and playing with the latest new tool. But definitely invest some time in figuring out what systems, tools, and habits work for you.
Make sure your tools are working for you, not the other way around. Remember, the point is to increase your capacity and reliability, so your colleagues can count on you.
[*] This is a problem in itself. It will be tremendously useful to get aligned with your manager about the value of the work you are doing, including the stuff that feels like administrative overhead.
A motivating value: Service orientation
While the above tips mostly focus on how to track work and make sure you get stuff done, the real theme here is service.
When I was learning how to be a manager, I came across the idea of “servant leadership”. The idea is that being a “boss” isn’t about power, it’s about service. Initially, I thought of this in terms of serving my direct reports — removing obstacles, making their jobs easier. Then one of my peers said something that kind of blew my mind — he said, “I think of my job as to make our boss’ life easier.” I took a while chewing on these seemingly contradictory ideas. The question was: who am I serving? My manager? My company? My reports?
The answer is YES.
As a manager, I should constantly be in service to the business, and to my boss, and to the people who report to me, and to my peers, and my cross-functional colleagues… you get the idea. (Sometimes these things are in tension with each other, and then it’s my job to figure out how to best align those different interests/viewpoints.)
Maybe you’re not a manager, but you too can benefit from thinking in terms of a service orientation. How much are you making other people’s lives easier? How much value are you creating — for your colleagues, for your boss, for the world at large?
The nice thing about thinking in these terms is, it’s win-win. You get to feel good about yourself because you’re helping others. But also, people notice and appreciate that you are a "remover of obstacles" and a force multiplier. The better you are at doing this, the more you will be seen as a leader — and given corresponding opportunities.
All these tips boil down to this: the most valuable teammates are those who can be relied upon to help others, get things done, and move the business forward. The better your organizational skills, the greater your capacity and reliability, the more you will succeed in building trust and helping others — and the more likely you will be able to get that promotion!