The Life-Changing Magic of Managing Up: Strategy # 2: Close Loops
Last week, we talked about the importance of responding to your leaders, and how your response times imply the level of importance you attribute to them. This week, I want to turn to a related strategy- closing loops. What I mean by closing loops is simply ensuring that every question, issue or task that you are assigned by a leader is eventually closed. This means that not only do you do what you are asked to do, but that you tell the person who asked you in the first place that you are done.
Now, I get that you might be feeling a little resentful at this moment. I’m sitting here, telling you that not only do you have to do whatever thing you got asked to do, but now you also need to report that it is done?!? Come on! Isn’t it enough just to do the thing?!? Quite simply, no, it’s not.
Why? Well, consider the typical day for your manager. If they are anything like my former leaders, your boss is sitting in meeting after meeting after meeting. Some of them are totally mind-numbing, some of them are spent fighting for you and your team’s initiatives, and some of them are full of people fighting your boss for what they need. Over the course of a day like that, your boss probably has at least 10, if not closer to 100 (or more!) things that they need to get done. How do they do that? By asking other people for help. That’s right, not only is your boss asking you to do things, they’re also asking other people. Depending on the size of your company and team, they might be asking A LOT of other people do stuff. And that, my friend, is why strategy #2 matters. You boss has so many open loops out there, my guess is that they probably don’t even remember half of them. I find my old favorite, Winnie The Pooh, nails it in the following quote:
The experience of Winnie The Pooh in that moment is something that our leaders feel daily, hourly, maybe even minute-by-minute. And, if you can ensure that every open loop on your end gets resolved, you will quickly sky-rocket to the land of “count-on-able.” If you do that consistently, day-after-day, you could become your bosses’ right-hand person. And that is a recipe for success.
PRO TIP: ASK FOR INPUT
Before you go and report out the status of every item on your to-do list, I want to make the caveat that every leader is a little different. There are some who will want to know when every box gets checked (preferably on the day it is checked). And there are others who just want to know that it got done, eventually. Maybe in an end-of-the-week report (spoiler alert: stay tuned for more content on this in a future post!). Your boss might not care about knowing that you sent an email, but definitely wants to know that you put in an invoice for that software program they asked for. The point here is that it’s on you to ask the level of loop-closing your boss prefers, and then make sure that you execute.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Essentially, this entire strategy is its own mini-process. I like to think of it this way: being assigned a task starts with the request being made. Then, I do it, but it’s not done until I tell whomever asked me to do it that it’s finished. In its entirety, the process looks something like this:
Strategy #2 Challenge:
Your challenge this week is to start closing loops! When you are asked to do something, or answer a question, make sure you do it, and then report back to whomever asked you that the task is complete. If you want extra credit, ask your boss their preference on reporting back- do they want to know when every single task is complete, or just a few important ones? Do they want to be kept informed real-time, or in a single email at the end of the week? Try it out, and watch the magic begin! Leave your comments and thoughts for me along the way- I’d love to hear what’s working (and what’s not)!