Hi, I'm Sarah.

And I'm Helen.

And this is a squiggly career short, a five minute summary of the topic that we've talked about on the podcast this week.

It could be just a useful reminder or maybe something that you could use as a team to learn together.

And today's short is on why understanding your manager will make you better at your job.

So why is this a topic for you to focus on or talk about together in a team?

Well, managers make a big difference to our development and also how engaged we are at work.

So effort understanding them pays back in lots of ways.

But very often our relationships are defined by what gets called the parent-child dynamic.

So we can fall into a bit of a pattern or a bit of a trap of talking to our managers like there are our parents where we are looking to them for direction and approval.

And actually what we really want to do is use insight so that we can almost talk to them a bit more like peers.

So we get away from the idea of sort of the

organizational hierarchy holding the relationship back. You don't need to be best friends with your

manager. So that's not what this is about. This is about understanding what is important to them

and using that to inform how you work better with them. And so what we've designed for this is sort of

a one month deep dive into understanding your

manager, which sounds a bit manipulative, but we promise we think it's just a way of being smart

about kind of how you get your work done. So week one, you're going to channel your inner

anthropologist. And if you think about what an anthropologist does, they observe, they notice, they almost

have a bit of distance from this kind of situation. They're watching or watchful, which again,

does sound a bit like, oh. And what we're looking for here, though, is people do have relatively

predictable patterns of behaviour. So very practically, most people ask similar kinds of questions.

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