 Creating a good relationship with your manager is pretty vital if you want to be happy at work. Get a bonus, get promoted and progress your career. In this video I share 10 great tips to manage your manager. When they're people just like you and me, and by making their life easier and more enjoyable, you and your career are going to benefit. My name is Jess Coles and I've spent 25 years working in corporates and household names through to SMEs at all management levels. I've had many great managers and a few terrible managers in my career, with a whole range of personality types. Learning how to manage my manager helped me enjoy being at work a lot more and it definitely helped my success. If you're new to this channel, Enhance.training provides online business courses to help professionals, managers and business owners improve their performance. If you like this video please give it a thumbs up, subscribe and share it with friends. So let's get started. My first tip to managing your manager is to do a good job. If you're delivering what you say you're going to deliver or what you need to deliver your manager has less to worry about. You don't need to be doing an amazing job, although of course this does help. Being average compared to your peers or better is enough. Average and above puts you in the category of helping your manager rather than being a problem. My second tip to managing your manager is to learn what your manager wants from you. It is very hard to do a good job if you don't know what good looks like in the eyes of your manager. So go through your job with your manager, ask what they want from you in each area, set objectives and goals together, agree what OK looks like and what good looks like. Get your manager's input. And keep asking for feedback until you are confident you are delivering what your manager wants in the way that they want it. My third tip is to understand the pressures your manager is under. Ask about their work, what projects need to be done, what requests are coming from their manager, what their current challenges are. Listen carefully to what they say. Ask what can you do to help and tailor your work to help alleviate those pressures as much as possible. Take opportunities to help your manager look good. My fourth tip to managing your manager is to bring solutions, not just the problems. Bringing solutions shows you are taking responsibility for the problem, not just dumping it on your manager's lap to sort out. They are going to be busy too with their own challenges so don't add to the list. Bringing solutions will build your manager's confidence in you. Your manager will appreciate your effort to create a solution and it still gives them the opportunity to input or put forward their preferred solution as needed. My fifth tip is to learn how your manager prefers to communicate with you and tailor your style accordingly. Is your manager very hands off or do they tend towards micromanagement? Do they want to meet face to face or do they prefer email updates? How often do they want updates or do they just want you to deliver the results? Do they prefer diarised formal one to one meetings or for you just to drop by their desk? Ask your manager what they prefer, observe or ask what others around you are doing and what seems to work best. My sixth tip to managing your boss is to make sure there are no surprises. Managers hate surprises because they can't account for, plan or implement a solution if there is a negative surprise. Even if it's a positive surprise it may cause them problems with their boss. No one likes surprises. So keep regular communication with your manager and be honest. Judge how often and what you tell your boss based on the situation. Just make sure there are no surprises where at all possible. My seventh tip is to take responsibility for managing the relationship with your manager. Your boss is a person with interests, hobbies, possible family and so on. Get to know them, learn what they do outside work and get them talking about it. Do some homework. Everyone likes talking about things they care about. Taking a few of these steps means you are helping them to like you more which will result in an easier more enjoyable professional relationship between the two of you. My eighth tip to managing your manager is to take on work that will reduce the pressure on your manager. This might be looking after a project or helping a team member learn about an area you already know about or coming up with solutions to a set of problems instead of your manager doing it or it might be day-to-day tasks that just need to get done. Look for opportunities to help, to take pressure or work off your manager. Ask for the work. Expect to start small and then get bigger as your manager builds confidence in you. My ninth tip to managing your boss is to give your manager positive feedback. This is not about sucking up which can have a negative impact. The higher you climb the less feedback you get. Your manager will appreciate feedback on what is working for you and when they do something well. Positive reinforcement works. Make use of it. Everyone likes compliments particularly when they've earned them. My tenth tip to managing your manager is don't complain about your boss to colleagues. Your manager will not do everything right and they will annoy you at times and be a pain. Don't succumb to the temptation of venting your negative feelings or frustrations to colleagues around the water cooler for instance. It is unprofessional and it won't help your standing with your colleagues and it will probably get back to your boss at some point on doing a lot of the good work that you've already put in. Resist the temptation to talk badly about your boss at work. By all means vent to friends or others outside work if you have to. I've got two further bonus tips for you that will help you if you've already worked hard at the ten actions already mentioned yet your relationship is not going as well as you want. My first bonus tip to managing your boss is don't try and fix or change your manager. Your boss sets the rules not you. You will not be able to change your boss or it's very unlikely you will be able to. If things are not great or even if they're bad between you and your manager ask yourself what can you do to change about what you do to improve the relationship. I appreciate that this is not easy to do particularly if you're angry about how you've been treated but be honest with yourself. Change what you can about what you are doing to improve the relationship. This really is in your best interests. And my second bonus tip if you've done everything you can and your manager has it in for you for whatever reason then take steps to document as much as possible. Keep key emails and examples of your treatment. Write notes about key conversations that have happened straight after they've happened with the dates, times and locations etc. Keep this information on your own computer or disk drive not on the work computer. Whilst this may seem a little drastic if you have to take the situation to HR you'll have a lot more evidence to back up your version of events and the behavioral issues with your manager. Documenting events will help you get a much fairer outcome for you. So there you have 12 key actions that you can take to help you manage your manager and build and maintain a great professional relationship with your manager. Having a good relationship with your manager is absolutely in your interests and it will impact your happiness at work, the bonus you get whether you get promoted and how quickly your career progresses. A good relationship is absolutely in your best interests so do everything you can to build a good relationship. And if you like this video please hit the thumbs up button below and subscribe and hit the bell to get notified of our weekly video releases. This really helps us to produce more videos to help you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to seeing you again soon.