Lucky for those of us who bother to try at work, most of the corporate population seems to be focused on escaping work at all costs and avoiding their boss. Managers around the world shake their heads in disgust as their people miss incredibly obvious ways to easily succeed at work almost as though they were trying to fail.

In today’s installment, I’ll cover some instant upgrades you can make to your reputation with your boss in order to go from being seen as one of the crowd to an up-and-comer.

Success Is Easy

The hardest thing for any manager to impart to their employees is their own perspective. “If only my people understood what it is like to sit in this office, they would not do me like this.” I have heard that same refrain from managers my entire career, but I never really understood what they meant until I was a manager myself. We really are not looking for people who work 100 hour weeks. We managers truly only want you to take care of the little things.

The truth is that most employees are such bad employees that it really doesn’t take much to rise to the very top. Success is easy because the bar is set so low. Your competitors are not competing with you at all. Instead, they are down in the weeds mucking around with stuff that their boss truly doesn’t appreciate.

How to Upgrade Your Reputation With Your Boss

These concepts are so easy, you’ll quickly convince yourself that you thought of doing them yourself without ever having read this article:

• Keep a pen and paper handy and take notes
• Remember every single little thing
• Get it on one page
• A chart or picture can do a lot
• Give excellent status
• Show accomplishments
• Measure what you do against a metric
• Do whatever it is NOW

Sounds easy? Think again. Given the number of people I see regularly not doing these things, you probably are not doing so great at it either. In fact, reading that list, I think I will take another look at what I am doing for my boss!

Let’s go through the list.

Keep a pen and paper handy and take notes

Whenever your boss calls a meeting or summons you to their side, make sure you have paper and a pen handy and that you take notes. When we managers are sitting there watching you not write anything down while we rattle off ten things we want to see happen, we are sitting there thinking, “I’ll never get any of this.” After you walk off thinking we just had a very friendly conversation, we quickly jot down what we said to you and find someone more reliable to whom we can delegate those ten things we just thought up out loud.

Be your boss’s best friend and let them see you writing down what they are saying. This has two effects. It builds trust because your boss will see you attempting to remember their ideas. It also shows your boss you think what they say is important. When important people talk, someone writes it down. When unimportant people talk, no one writes it down.

Don’t come to your boss’s office without paper and a pen. If necessary, get a tiny pad of paper and a tiny pen that doesn’t take up too much room to jot down quick notes.

After you take all those notes, here’s a really huge talent you can build easily…

Remember every single little thing

When you get back to your desk, have a spreadsheet or some other form into which you can put all of these tasks your boss wants. Forget none of them. Never. If you forget one, call your boss or send them an IM or an email and ask after it again. They will not be annoyed. They will think, “Gee! This guy is really going to do something about it?” They will be impressed.

Follow up with your boss and show that you are making progress on each task by sending them a regular email of the things they asked for and where you are with them. This is how the executive assistants of the world who make six figures earn their paychecks. They write everything down, and they remember every stinking little thing their boss asked for even after she forgot about it.

Regularly remind your boss of all of the little things they asked for and never let any of them slip through the cracks.

Get it on one page

Your boss is busy. Very busy. Busier than you are. And, your boss’s time is more valuable than yours is, which is why you exist instead of your boss just working even more hours to do the work. Protect your boss’s time as if it were a stack of gold. Let nothing you do or anyone else does waste that time. When you go to see your boss and you have a proposal, get it all on one page, print out that one page, and slide their copy in front of them. Send a soft-copy to them via email after the meeting (remember every single little thing).

One page. Not one and a half pages. One page. If you cannot boil whatever it is down to one page, then you do not understand how to boil things down. If your boss wants more details, they will ask after them, and you can make them available. Don’t expect your boss to actually ever look at those details, but do expect that they will ask for the supporting evidence for your high-level coverage of the topic.

One page.

A chart or picture can do a lot

Your boss is so busy that any page with more than 30 words on it is doomed to be skimmed and not absorbed enough. That’s dangerous. Instead, make a chart or graphic to show a project schedule. Use arrows and a grid. Use pie charts. Use anything other than 3000 characters of text on a page to show your boss what is going on. Keep it brief and simple.

Most bosses want things to be like the graphics in Time Magazine. They don’t want to read the article - they want to read the captions and legends of the pretty charts and graphics. Give it to them.

Give excellent status

Status reports are like golden keys to a magic temple. Inside the temple is a promotion. If you can tell your boss where a project is at and what is going on with it with skill, you cannot fail to impress.

It’s so important, I wrote an article about how to write a decent status called How to Report Status on a Project. Read it.

Show accomplishments

Your boss wants to know what your accomplishments are every month, quarter, and year. Your accomplishments are their accomplishments, and when you don’t provide them, they have nothing to show and have to cobble together a bunch of nonsense from email and waste their valuable time. Keep a running list, at all times, of short, one sentence descriptions of your accomplishments. Add to it every time you accomplish something.

Measure what you do against a metric

Provide your boss with performance reports on your success. If you are an individual contributor, measure anything you can think of, and remember that your stored archives of email are like a database you can mine for this information. How long do your projects tend to last? How many man hours are you spending on them. What percentage of projects are canceled? How much money is lost? How much money is made on your successes? Anything you can think of can be measured in some way, and any measurements you can provide to your boss show creativity, thoroughness, and business acumen.

Do whatever it is NOW

Your boss sent out an email a week ago saying that by the end of the month, everyone needed to take a training class. Don’t want until the end of the month. Stay late tonight and take that online training. Your boss asked for everyone to update some report online with information. Drop everything you are doing and update the tool now.

Your boss wants it now. Right now. Not tomorrow. Not tonight. They want to send you the email and have every one of their directs write back in 5 seconds, “DONE!” Be the one person who does this, and your boss will love you for it.

There are other possible things you could do to enhance your reputation with your boss, but if you make these upgrades tomorrow, your boss will notice this difference immediately, and you will go from being parked to being on the fast-track really quickly.

You may be surprised how rapidly your reputation with your boss improves with just a few adjustments here and there and not a lot of effort.