Hey, this is Chris with Hacking Leadership on today's discussion and employee engagement. I want to talk about a listener question that we received that I got on LinkedIn. Actually, someone reached out to ask me what I would do in a situation where they were trying to kind of advance their career to move up to, you know, take the next steps forward, and their direct boss, their direct
leader was just completely disengaged. And it wasn't from a standpoint of, you know, trying to hinder their career or trying to you know, hurt anything. It was just that person had basically checked out. That person was just kind of phoning in their role. Nice person, easy to get along with, just not not not easy to depend on for career development or personal growth or opening doors, you know that kind of thing. What do you do in
that situation? And I thought it was a great question because you know, there's there's that's different than if a person is intentionally trying to subvert you or trying to you know, trying to hurt your career, and if you address that relationship from that standpoint, but it doesn't mean that it's not important. It doesn't mean that it doesn't
impact a lot of people. And I think that you know when you have when you have people in roles for a long time, If a person who's had kind of lost the desire to move up themselves and has been in that same role for you know, ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty years or more, that can be a real good indicator that that might be what is happening, is that they're not necessarily that they've lost the will or the ability or the desire to help other people move up.
Yeah, so much to unpack here so little time. Yeah, because I think that they're they're not typically like it's it's not a one for one as far as like the amount of the amount of time that somebody is in a role and the same role over time, and like their cap their ability to be engaged with like the career progression of their people. Like, it's not as simple as that, But I will tell you that it
leans very heavily in that direction, is it. If if you have people that are in the same role for a really, really, really long time, It's it's rare that they just don't want to do the next thing. It's more locked into either they really really really enjoy that exact thing. It works for them, it's at the level
of their capability. But if you're in that space and you're not trying to advance yourself, if you're not constantly looking to like develop yourself and and take learning and take feedback to whatever you can get to even prepare yourself for the next role, even if you don't you know, necessarily want to go down that path.
If you're not.
Doing that, it's really hard to then inspire and motivate others to want to do that for themselves, which is I think why it does lean heavily in that direction. Typically you have someone who's in a role, and again it's industry by industry, but let's say that they're in a typical role for you know, two to three to five years, and that's enough time to really be able to be not only really effective and efficient at the job, but have success over time and have the opportunity to
train and develop some of your people. Like that time frame makes a lot of sense to me in a lot of spaces now, especially when you're leading people, like I think in the individual contributor world. If you're a if you're an engineer, if you're a doctor, if you're if you're in spaces where you can continue to level up and maybe you get into project management, but eventually
you get into people leadership. Like that, to me is where the constant movement is most helpful in helping to move others along as well, because number one, it opens up a spot for somebody to kind of promote into, and number two, it shows that that leader is continuing to grow for their own for the for theirselves and in their own professional career, and that then allows them to be so much more engaged in bringing up their backfill and making sure that the next person or the
next people on their team are ready for what's next. If they're stacked it, it's a lot harder to make a movement when you yourself are not moving.
I completely agree with that, you know, I think it's on a little side note here, if you are a leader of leaders, I'm not saying that that there's a one to one you know ratio or you know, if this then that case here, But if you are a leader of leaders and you have a particular leader who has not promoted anybody, has not gotten anybody promoted up from with underneath them, or gotten you know, people to move up from underneath them within you know, six months
or a year. It would be something to dig into, right, It'd be something to look in do to figure out
why why is that the case? Because you want to make sure that if if the scenario we're talking about here is what's going on, then you, as a leader of leaders might have a responsibility to step in and help somebody else when you know someone when when your direct report isn't doing it, isn't doing their job responsibilities correctly, and you can address that and and make sure that they have the support that they need, because oftentimes a
disengaged leader is Sometimes it's the scenario I said, they're just kind of phoning it in because they're just burnt out and they're tired and they've been doing the same thing for twenty years. Other times there's another cause of it. And if there's another cause of it, then it doesn't mean that that person is unsalvagable. It just means that you still need to help them get through whatever it
is and move forward. But I want to go through a couple of things that you can do as an employee to advance your career to make sure that a disengaged boss is not hurting you as much as they as they could. But first, let's give it up toward
tom more sponsors. All right, if you're trying to advance your career in spite of the fact that your boss might be disengaged, your direct leader might be disengaged, the very first thing that you want to do is be very clear on the feedback and intentions that you're asking for.
And so if you want to move up, if you want to go to the next role or the next step, or get promoted or whatever happen having this door opened for you, be very very clear, both verbally with your boss and with a follow up email, that this is what you want to do, and you're asking for feedback on how to get there. And if you don't get a response, then send a followup email again and I
follow up conversation again. Make sure that you're creating a paper trail that is respectful, like this isn't a why are you ghosting me? This is a Hey, I'm really interested in doing this. How do I make this happen? What advice can you give me? What feedback can you give me? What should I be doing differently? Always approach it from the standpoint of assuming positive intent from them, while also creating that digital paper trail that said that
you did your due diligence in asking for feedback. So if it ever comes to a point where you have to get somebody else involved, then you have that history to say you made your best efforts, you made the attempts you didn't just you know, want and done it, and then you know, go to that person's boss. That's
the first thing. The second thing is you want to seek out of mentor find somebody in a role that might be a hear of your boss or somebody else and ask them to mentor you, not in the context of hey, my boss is disengaged, just in the context of, hey, I want some differing perspectives. You know, I work with this person, this person's my boss. I'm getting feedback from them.
I'd love to get some feedback from you too, because there are people of all over the all over this organization that have different perspectives, and I think it's valuable for me to get the perspective of other people too,
not just my boss. So there are ways to do this and to create relationships that don't that don't open up the door to you being accused of throwing somebody under the bus, but also don't allow you to have your wagon hitch to a single horse, And whether or not that horse makes it is whether or not your career makes it.
Yeah, I think it's I think two things. And the first thing I think about is like, you've got to be doing great work in the current role that you have, Like there is a kind of shure, like because the first of all was like, well, I give people advice all the times, say hey, go talk to the decision makers, Go talk to the people that are going to be a part of the process of you getting the next job, and do exactly what you're saying, which is like, go
ask them questions. But if the answer is like you need to make sure that you have, you know, time to show the consistent success in your current role, that's also an answer that you have to be prepared for and ready for and you should you should get and like you should want to be able to have that because to walk into the next role being able to talk about the success stories of your current role is
really really critical. But I think that the second piece of that is, like I get these specific details if you are doing well in your current role, if you're seeing success over time, and again I don't want to get specifics into how much time that is exactly, but just over time. It's not like you know, you just got this responsibility and then you've done one project or you've had one month or two months of doing good work, Like you want to see some success over time here.
But if you have done that and then you're asking those questions and have that person be very specific, don't just settle for like, hey, keep doing what you're doing, You did great with that, keep that up, like you need to say and ask questions like, well, hey, if I was going to be in this role tomorrow, like what would you expect of me today? Like what exactly
are you looking for? If I think about three months from now that I would want to do the next job, what would you have seen me accomplish in this one and how would we measure that and what would that be? Like get into the really really specifics because that's going to help you build the best possible plan. And if you ask multiple people, be prepared to get different answers.
And that's a part of figuring out that if you have multiple people in a decision making process, they're all going to have some elements of their own perspectives or thoughts on what you should do and how you should.
Get there right, and it's important for you to be able to speak to it from a standpoint of making all of them happy. And it is what it is that this is the bias they might bring. And when I say bias, I don't mean it in a negative way. I just mean a factual human way. We all bring our own biases to the table when it comes to what we put value on in promoting and hiring decisions. And if you if there are multiple people involved, then you need to be able to see it from their perspective.
The other thing I want to bring up too, and I think this is equally important, is if you're This isn't just from the standpoint of of getting feedback or engagement from a boss who is disengaged when you want to move up, but advancing your career could also be in fixing the problems that are happening in your in your own you know way of doing things. And so this isn't just you know, go to your go to people once you have all your ducks in a row.
This is make sure you're high performing in your role before you ask for these things. I agree with that. But if you're not high performing in your role and you want to get better at it, this applies also. So if you if you need to get this the feedback from a disengaged boss who won't tell you how to get better at your current role, and you think that you're you're inability to perform at a high level in your current role is holding you back from getting promoted.
That's a very real thing too, And so the advice is still the same advice. Absolutely, ask your boss for feedback, and if they're disengaged, I'm not giving it to you, ask a mentor or somebody else for feedback. But you don't necessarily have to approach it from the standpoint of I want to get promoted now. You can. You can start the conversation with I want to make sure that this is on the radar for six months or a year from now, or the next time one of these
roles becomes open. And I know I'm not prepared for it now, but I want to be how do I get there? And as long as that conversation is framed in that way, you're gonna get the You'll get the right response from that person, you know, just don't go to that person giving them the impression from you that you want the role now or that you think you're ready for it now. If you're not, you're not ready
for it. You're not ready for it. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be having the conversation, and it doesn't mean that you can't have these conversations with other people. Thank you all for joining us in this discussion and employee engagement. We'll see you next Thursday for the next one. You have a great day.