Keeping an eye on the bigger picture at your company. Knowing what the current initiatives are. Knowing and working towards what will make your boss a hero. Empathizing with other parts of the organization and understanding where your team fits in.
“Make your boss a hero” is one of the most deranged things I hear managers say. At my first job out of university, my manager told me my job was to make him look good. I instantly wrote him off as a moron. We worked for a publicly traded company. Nobody cares about how you look or your little empire. This isn’t your money. You are hired to manage it for the shareholders, not to look cool or be a little rentseeker
Sounds like the expression rubs you the wrong way.
How about this instead: a manager is a representative of a team, and vice-versa. Not every senior leader in a company has time to get to know and evaluate every individual member of every team; instead, they evaluate a manager as a proxy for the whole team. You, as a team member, will be evaluated through your manager. It's up to you whether that evaluation is positive.
"Make your boss a hero" isn't a very endearing way to phrase it, but it's a concise way to say that in a traditional corporate hierarchy, your fate is aligned with your boss's fate.
Idk, on the job I was in at that point I worked my specified amount and then worked on developing my skills and education outside work. I watched as my boss’ project floundered, he ran out of budget for contractors, employees who were less weak started leaving and their positions not filled. As my boss started trying to tell me I needed to fulfill more of a “leadership role” I could tell he was trying to pass off a terrible project to me so I demurred. Anyway, I got laid off, got a big severance, got to continue educating and doing things like that while collecting unemployment as I applied for jobs after, and ended up getting basically a position at more or less my dream lab.
I understand it’s different if you’re older with kids and a mortgage or lot of health bills or whatever but I haven’t really felt like my fate has ever been tied to any of my employees.
I feel like it’s just headgames for your manager to try and convince you that making him look good is essential to your career.
Edit: in case this is relevant the shitty project was actually the best project in our department as far as I was concerned before my former manager ran it into the ground by trying to look good by promising dozens of features for people who didn’t use it instead of building something that worked and was extensible
I think the flips side of this is that a great manager deflects most or all of the credit to the team.
Therefore the team works hard on things that will make the manager and the manager's managers look great in the woder scope of the company, and the manager says, correctly, that the team is responsible for the work.
I think this kind of manuevering is fundamental to large human organizations with scarce resources (you know, all of them) so the goal is to make it as healthy as possible.
"Make your boss a hero" is one of the most deranged things I hear managers say.
Why? If my bosses boss is happy with my boss then our department gets a bigger budget, more interesting projects and, most important, we get more autonomy and get left alone more. All of those things directly improve my quality of life. If I can keep my bosses boss off my bosses back, then my boss won't be on my back.
The challenge for some people is the issue of whether to accept and forgive your boss for appearing to be stupid or mentally deranged. Bosses may fail to share all the information they have. The results are that their decisions may look crazy stupid, having no apparent justification. And some bosses ARE stupid or have mental problems. (For example, I once worked for one who had a brain tumor.) For some people this starts a vicious cycle of resentment -> poor communication -> more resentment -> worse communication. Other workers accept that part of a job is to supervise bosses and try to diminish their foolish/harmful/incompetent behavior -- to make them look good in spite of themselves. For these accepting reports, there is no perception of injustice in the need for reports to manage wayward supervisors: it's just how things are. This sets up a virtuous cycle of improved communication -> more mutual good will -> improved communication -> more good will. The boss-critical employees tend to endorse meritocracy. The boss-accepting employees see no moral issue in who is assigned leadership responsibility and compensation. If you see nothing morally wrong with your having to rescue your bosses from themselves, you're probably a boss-accepting employee.
Your boss is entrusted with other people’s money, resources, employees to manage it in a way that generates value for them. How he looks and how his image impacts you feeling like you got an interesting project is irrelevant except exactly insofar as it influences this.
