In many cases, you only see your boss when you fail to meet expectations, or they know that there is some deadline approaching. This also inspires fear in many employees because your manager only appears when something is wrong.

What if you had a different relationship? What about your peers? Do they know what to expect from you when you work together? All of these things require management. You need to manage your boss, your coworkers and your career.

Managing Your Boss

This may sound strange if you have never heard it before, but you need to manage your boss. Obviously, I do not mean telling them what tasks to do and when to get them done. I mean managing the relationship that the two of you have. There is no bullet-point guide or foolproof methods to managing your boss because they are all different people.

For example, a previous manager you had could have been more of a friend, telling you about their kids and asking you to work on various tasks. Your current manager may be one of those people screaming at their team that they are going to stay late until they get the project right.

Obviously, these two people cannot be managed in exactly the same way. However, there are some things you can do to manage many aspects of your relationship with your boss.

First, you need to let them know what you are doing at least once per day. If you manage your own deadlines, send them a quick status email to say that you should be done that high priority task by the end of the day. Managers may be continuously asking for status of tasks from their employees mainly because they have to report on the status of a project to their boss. B

y proactively giving them information before they ask for it, you make their job just a little bit easier and they will love you for it. Just do not go overboard and email them with every task you are completing. There is managing the status and there is “brown nosing”, learn the difference. This leads to my next point, you need to manage expectations.

Managing Expectations

There are a few things you can do to manage expectations. If you are good at your job, expectations will change without your knowledge. Are you comfortable with the higher expectations? In some cases, you may even get more responsibility. Some managers fully assume that when you are given new responsibilities that you will understand everything and be competent at your new job. In reality, we know that this is never true. There will always be tasks that you are not familiar with or even situations that you have never dealt with.

For example, in software development a senior level engineer will likely be named the team lead. This person is expected to manage the technical aspects of the projects as well as the daily work of each engineer on the team. If you are a new team lead and have never dealt with employee conflicts before, you need to ensure that your manager understands this and that you will ask for their help if something arises.

This is good for two reasons. First, it sets the expectations your manager will have. There are always some conflicts on a team, sometimes they are simple things and other times two people basically can not work together. If you have told your manager about your lack of experience, they will be glad to help you because they knew it would happen eventually.

The other side of this is you have given your manager time to prepare for a few things. They know a situation will arise, so they will watch for it. They also know that you are skilled at your job, but admitting your inexperience gives them time to move up the corporate ladder before you take their job. Yes, your boss is probably afraid of one of their competent employees taking their job. By admitting inexperience, you are basically saying that your boss is better at their job than you would be right now. Making sure your boss feels secure is something that can make your job a lot easier.

Managing Your Peers

When it comes to employees that are not your boss, you need to manage them as well. This is not about being their manager, but giving them an idea of who you are and whether you can be depended upon. With your peers, actions can carry a lot more weight than words.

Being someone that everyone knows will finish their work on time and do a good job is immensely important. If you can not do this, then your job needs more help than this post can provide. Is doing a good job enough? Absolutely not, you want to be awesome. So, if you are that person that everyone knows will do an excellent job, do not tell anyone how good you really are. Once you start talking about how good you are, you become a widely hated person, labeled as “arrogant” or even “not nearly as good as he thinks he is”.

Another important way you can manage your peers is by helping them. Helping others, even when the help is unsolicited, is seen as unselfish and for the good of the team. Helping also keeps you in good favor with your coworkers as long as you avoid arrogance. The flip side of this is that other people will be more willing to help you when the need arises.

Another point of note is distractions. If you can manage your peers correctly, they will learn when you are best interrupted and when you are not. For example, some people need to have a cup or two of coffee before they can be approached with a problem. People quickly learn when others do not want to be bothered. Sometimes, a well timed comment or email can set the boundaries. Something similar to, “I get so much work done in the morning before 9 because nobody is in the office”, will alert people to the fact that mornings are a bad time for interruptions.

Managing Perception

Disappointingly, your actions are not the entire story when it comes to your job. When salary or promotion reviews are being completed, opinions and perception rule. Actions definitely help in those cases, but only in determining people’s opinions. Managing other people’s perception of you is probably the most difficult task in this post. You want to talk about your successes throughout your job, but you can’t talk too much about it. You want to talk about how much you know, but you can’t talk too much about it.

So, how do you get your abilities known? First, by doing many of the things discussed above, you are taking the first steps in managing perceptions. Second, when people are talking about successful projects, make sure they know that you worked on that project as well. A simple comment about how hard the project looked at first, or a joke about how tight the deadlines were may get people asking you or other people how you were involved. More importantly, when it comes to perceptions, having other people speak on your behalf is a major benefit.

So, what are you doing reading this? You know what you should do. Go and manage your career for success.

The first thing you must do is figure out what type of commitment you want to make to your social media sites. You can pick a few of your favorite social sites to focus on. If your day job is sitting in a cube or corporate office somewhere, then you will need to limit your activity in some way. If you want to be like Robert Scoble or Louis Gray, you will have to give up some sleep to stay active on several sites.

Personally, I like a decent amount of sleep and it helps with staying focused at work. So, I focus on a few sites, like Google Reader, Twitter and FriendFeed. I am a heavy user of Google Reader and I scan about 500 items per day and share almost 40 of them. That type of activity requires a significant commitment by itself. For Twitter and FriendFeed, I can only check in a few times per day.

Tools of the Trade

To increase your commitment on various sites, you can hook the sites together with RSS. For example, I have all of my Google Reader shared items being fed into FriendFeed. I also set up a special tag in Google Reader for those items that I want to send to Twitter. You can then use a tool like HootSuite, TwitterFeed, or even FriendFeed to read the RSS feed and send those items to Twitter. If you have a Facebook account, you can have your Twitter updates sent to Facebook as well to further spread out your activity.

Another small idea that can help with your interactivity is email alerts. Almost all of the social sites have a way to notify you through email if people are commenting on your posts, or even commenting in the same thread as you. This allows you to maintain the conversation without slavishly checking each site for comments. A similar feature that exists on Twitter (which does not have email alerts) is RSS feeds for your saved searches. So, you can setup a saved search, grab the RSS feed, and save it to Google Reader. You can also do the same with your Twitter mentions so that you never miss a mention. Third party tools help greatly with this, especially for Twitter where you have several excellent tools like Seesmic, TweetDeck, HootSuite and Brizzly.

Another way to control your activity better is to use each site for a specific reason. So, Google Reader is my news and blog reader. Twitter is my quick comment tool, or I may reply to some interesting comment. FriendFeed is where I may post something that I want conversation about. You might even use Facebook only for those updates that you want to go to your “real life” friends. Each site has its strengths and you should work with those strengths. Forcing Twitter to be your RSS reader, or on the other extreme making Google Reader the way you read much of your Twitter traffic is not the best idea.

Your Daily Schedule

Another important thing to do is to set up a daily schedule for yourself. As an example, I will use the schedule that I tend to follow. I wake up early and get to work early as well, so this schedule should modified to fit your daily routine. Generally, the boundaries of my day are 5AM and 10PM, and this gives me some buffer at night if I need it as well.

• 5:45AM – Before going to work, have a cup of coffee and spend 30-45 minutes checking social media:
  • Read news and blogs in Google Reader
  • Review Twitter for replies/mentions and various saved searches
  • If you are a blogger, check your stats and make notes for your next posts
• 7:00AM – Once you are at work, do a final check of the same sites you checked before work
• 12:00PM – While eating lunch, do a full scan of your social sites for about 30 minutes:
  • Review Google Reader
  • Review Twitter for replies/mentions and various saved searches
  • Scan FriendFeed for interesting posts and comments
• 6:00PM – Once you return home and have eaten dinner, you can dedicate a full 2 hours to social media interaction. I find 2 hours to be a good limit for me as I still can have time for my family.

An important thing to remember for us cube dwellers is that social media is not paying our bills. If your work load is very heavy one week, then you should scale back your social media activity. Even in social media, some things will be more important than others. As a software developer, Google Reader is an integral part of my job. I read plenty of programming related articles with Google Reader, so it will never be cut from my schedule. However, FriendFeed and Twitter will always be a lower priority if my schedule does not permit much time.

Just remember that social media is supposed to be about community. If you find yourself trying to compete with people like Robert Scoble or Louis Gray, you will typically lose. Scoble’s job is social media, so he basically gets paid to use sites like FriendFeed and Twitter. In addition to being a tech blogger, Louis Gray helps companies with marketing and getting those companies’ marketing integrated with social media and the internet in general. Again, it is his job to use social media. Until you have a job like theirs, you can never be as active without having your work suffer. In this economy, your work cannot suffer, so you need to find some way to balance the time.