The Number One Rule of Being a Good Employee
When we are assigned with a task, we are usually expected to:
- Provide an estimation of how long it will take to finish the task
- Go ahead and start working on it
- Report problems and issues preventing the work from being done
- Finish the task and report the result
Generally, the boss only cares about the estimation, the progress, the problems, and the result - in most cases (e.g. except from the period in which we are coached on a new work or position) he does not care how we are going to do that nor does he wants to be a problem checker of the result. Unfortunately, some people that I know really have problem with this when they assume that their bosses need to pay close attention to how they are doing their work and scrutinize their outputs to make sure nothing is done incorrectly and tell them whether there are things which should be adjusted. The boss is not supposed to do that.
I remember one time when an analyst sent me a technical spreadsheet which was supposed to be sent to the client. After a quick look at a few numbers in the summary tab to make sure that they did not look ridiculous (outside acceptable ranges), I forwarded the document to the client. A few days later, I received a many complaints from the client about the quality of that document which presented many inaccurate information and the fact that they expected a much better work than that. But that was not the worst thing of the day, what the analyst later told me really knocked me on the face “I thought you would review it and tell me if it had problems, and I thought you would not send them the document if it was not good enough”.
What he actually said was that he expected me to scrutinize the details of his document in order to tell him any single problem with it. That should never be the expectation and it was my fault for not making this point clear up-front with the team members. I told him that although I, as his manager, was supposed to assist him in resolving any problem he had when doing his work, he needed to tell me about the problems first because I was not supposed to figure out the problems for him, that he must be solely responsible for the quality of his work product and if he sent me the result without telling me about any of its problems, my assumption would be that the document came up with all the expectations he were communicated with when being assigned with the task, and if it was not, he was not doing his job well.
So, what is the first rule of being a good employee? Be autonomous, i.e. independent, self-directed and self-managed. Except from the period in which one is coached to learn about the new job or position, he is expected to be autonomous at all time. He is expected to do whatever he has to do in order to accomplish a task well, including seeking for help, escalating issues, and not relying on others to help him examine his work and telling him what goes wrong with it. Autonomous employees do not waste their bosses’ time, yet never silently produce a pile of crap. And bosses like autonomous employees.
Abou the story of your case:
- You may be too neglect to send it to the client! It might be because you hadn’t had enough time for review or you were not paid to do that! However, you should have had a scan over the document once or a few times to recognize the incompleteness of it and returned it to the employees, at the first time you saw the lack of quality (hehe, quite career-holic :P), for modification and completed it upon forwarding! If you have more time, then you can review it carefully for details (but it’ll take time, of course, and that’s lots of value to the manager!!)
- The employees, on the other side, is too dependent, in this case, the manager who had more rights and responsibilities! Another thing to say is, he was not right to blame you on what he’d done! These kinds of employees should take time to train themselves to be independent and take responsibilities for what they are assigned to do! Managers are just accountants of these things!
Back to the article, autonomous, is a very interesting point. It is a very important characteristic for the success and improvement of an employee. But I think it’s not the number one rule, it’s among many other rules (not countless) to make up a good employee, isn’t it
Thanks for your comment, Thinh. I would say the entry wasn’t clear enough on the boss’ responsibilty. In fact, the boss in the story (aka me) failed to set the expectation up-front and that was why the analyst innocently said “I thought…”. Besides, he should have made a thorough review process to assure the quality of work. Finally, in the end of the day, if the project is doomed for whatever reason, it is mostly the boss’ fault as he failed to fulfill his role of managing people to make the project successful.
In addition, in that situation, the document was really complete and the boss did perform a quick check-up. What was problematic was in the details, something that the boss did not have enough of the time or expertise to perform an effective assessment.
Having said that, the entry focuses more on the valuable characteristic of being autonomous than trying to point finger. I like to work with autonomous people since they would not waste my time and I can always rely on their work (since at least they would tell me if they need help or think there is problem that I need to look at). And of course, being a manager, my job is also to help my members to become autonomous if they are not there yet. If I failed to do this, I am NOT autonomous.
And sure, autonomy is just one of the many characteristics which make up great employee.
The story brings back me 2 core values in my company’s PA (Performance Appraisal) system. Let’s see I mapped with the story
Integrity: Some people think it’s identical with honesty, for me, its boundary certainly is more than. Rate of integrity shows how much people trust you in person as well as in your working outputs. The analyst certainly cannot be rated at a high level because of lacking integrity in his/her output.
Diversity: is able to work with various kinds of people. This guy assumed output from the analyst was at his expectations. He was standing on his shoes and forgot to put even, one foot on his member’s shoes. The argument with his/her boss in the story told us that immature output of analyst was consistent. It was not an incident. The boss didn’t know or knew but ignored both subject to receive a negative feedback in this core value. I don’t want to figure out what should the boss do in this case as it would solve this particular problem. Buu also mentioned some good points his reply. Keep in mind, “Diversity” core value will solve similar issues.
Hmm, how do you know that ;-)? In fact, it was the first time the artifact produced was so bad that the clients were very unhappy with.
But does he, as a manager, have the right to expect that the work from an analyst with many years of exp must meet the expectation? I would say yes. Regardless, the boss should constantly validate his assumptions until they because obviously true :-).
Let’s see the analyst answer:
You think with such working attitude the analyst has been delivering mature outputs consistently? I don’t believe at all except exceptional cases. And I didn’t expect the boss in the story can know this prior. And no matter he know or not, he couldn’t have positive point here since he was fail to work with this kind of people.
Yes, the PM has right to make assumptions but not an assumption of member alway outputs at good quality. He has to be responsible for executing, controlling and monitoring to ensure member’s outputs meet expectations.
I agree that “autonomous” or “integrity” is a rule of being a good employee. This rule also applied to PM, although he has permit to rely on his member’s outputs he needs to be defensive in some certain cases. Seeing something like a driver in road, s/he has permit or even right to go but not always assume other drivers obey rules strictly.
Well, as I said, I want to focus this entry on the working attitude, not so much to argue who is to blame. And regarding that, I did mentioned that both the boss and the analyst need to improve on many aspects.
I think this view is a bit over-simplified. However, exploring this matter would require another blog entry :-). Stay tuned for that.
Two points on the top of my head
1. You do need to assume a lot about the drivers’ adherence to the rules. Thinking about driving in the free-way without this assumption, would you make any good progress? If in a project, anybody can assume that s/he can product any crap and there would always be some other people to review their works and pick the problems for them, would that project make any progress? Again, there are many cases in which there are “accidents” (aka outputs with bad quality), but they are just that, accidents, and not something resulted from the dependent (non-autonomous) attitude.
2. In software project, the “driver” is not always arbitrary. The PM can pick those who are able to produce high-quality work. (And don’t forget a point I mentioned: it’s not always possible to produce high-quality work, but the obstacles and issues must be made into the PM’s awareness, instead of being silently buried.)
Yes, that’s what I tried to say ;-). The most significant point of this post is to convince people that they need to be autonomous in order to be good employees. Organizations and even project teams may specify different responsibilities for different project roles, as long as people are autonomous with their responsibilities, they are doing good. So no need to argue as to what a PM and analyst in your project are supposed to do - since it may be different from mine (because I am demanding a great deal from my team, esp. from those I handpick :-).)
Well, you two are arguing from 2 different assumptions :D. Buu, I think it’s best to further this writing with other characteristics (or rules, as you said) and make it top 10 or 20 (whatever number you come up with) to be a good employee. Just a suggestion
Driving on free-way is a very interesting sample. Yeah, if we don’t make assumption we can hardly make a good progress. But the more assumption you make the more risk you own. Levelling them…? I prefer it to art.
Yeah, thanks your comment, Thinh. The discussion was turned over the scope of this post. Hope we have an appropriate one to go with sometime.
The supervisor of the analyst in question must take first responsibility for the failure of the product as delivered to the client. Once this is made perfectly clear the rest of the article is spot on.
Thanks for your comments, Dao Shen.
I totally agree with this. As I said in one of the responses, “in the end of the day, if the project is doomed for whatever reason, it is mostly the boss’ fault as he failed to fulfill his role of managing people to make the project successful.” In the described situation, the manager, i.e. me, failed in several ways:
1. Not set the expectation of autonomy clear up-front to the team members and coach them to make sure they can come up with that expectation
2. Not have an effective reviewing process in place to ensure that no bad quality documentation can reach the client.
That was a good lesson for me, though.
[...] month, I wrote about autonomy being the number one characteristic of any employee and that the boss should be able to expect his/her staffs to produce satisfactory work all the time [...]
[...] Read More at Buunguyen [...]
You didn’t mention specifically in your blog but I assume this happened in Vietnam. Enough said above about the employee vs. the boss. This case is one extreme of the typical employee habit. The other extreme would be someone who keeps asking for *every single* things every second. I’m sure you know what I mean. Things can’t go wrong this way but it’s nonetheless annoying and efficient.
All in all, it requires a unique skill set to be lead people effectively in Vietnam.
Thanks for your comments, Khoa.
Well, I think things will go terribly wrong that way. The boss needs those who can produce at least equivalently to him/her in a specific area, even if coaching and training are required. In the long run, if the boss still has to involve in the details of the work to be performed by his staffs, either the boss or the staff or both should be fired since companies can’t grow that way.
Each context, either country or organization or even project setting, will have different challenges for the leaders. some management practices may work better with Vietnamese people than others, but that does not necessarily mean leading in Vietnam is harder than in or countries.
Hi,
I agree with this blog. Especially to the last phrase written.
So being autonomous is the best thing to be a good no perfect employee.
This will refined your job and will have more interest on your work.
But i think up to the assignment, the task u expect from ur mgr or concerned person.
After getting the assignment, you need to be follow this being autonomous to finish
the task.
Hi,
The company where I work (SSW) has a page of expectations of what is required of them to be good employees.
Have a look, I think you’ll find a lot of what you’re talking about above on this pge:
http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/Standards/Rules/RulesToBetterTeamMembers.aspx