My Take on COMMUNICATION with Your Boss and Something Else
Before going directly to the topic of “how to deal with your boss”, I will take a detour and talk about another hot topic - how to improve your written English. In the end you will find that these two topics are related to each other, just like everything else under the sun.

Quite a few of Career Forum dwellers here want to improve their English writing skills but need some guidelines of how to pull it off.  First let me ask you guys: do you READ English articles on a daily basis?  If your answer is yes, great!  We can talk about improving your written English.  For those of you who don't read English article that often, my sincere apology: it's very difficult to upgrade your writing skills.

Reading and writing go hand in hand -- one helps the other.  Neither is easy as beans.  For most Chinese immigrants, the only serious work they wrote in English was his or her graduation thesis.  Boy, I remembered what a struggle that was!  I was caught flat-footed because I was a lab rat and didn't pay attention to practicing writing while studying for my degree.  Granted, I read scientific papers on a regular basis but my focus was on the experimental sections, not the way how to tell a good story with logic and rationale.  In scientific research, data are critical. In the business world, as I later found out, explaining the data to a wider audience with style is more important.  Luckily, my Ph.D. supervisor was kind enough to lend me a hand. He gave me a few proposals he wrote in the same research field and asked me to STUDY them.  In the end, my thesis was well received by my advisory committee.  A lesson learned: Reading definitely can help you write good articles.

It might sound offensive to some, but the truth is that most of us only complain about our inability to write English without ANY effort to look for help.  When was the last time you asked your colleagues to proofread your writing?  When did you enroll in a writing class in a community college?  How often do you write a message in English at WXC's career forum?  When was the last time you search online "How to improve writing skills"?  I can reel off a long list of things you might want to consider if you are serious about improving yourself.  But I would rather leave that daunting task to you for a good reason:  There is tons of information out there on the web, and you have to separate the wheat from the chaff, including analyzing this post.  Don't pay lip service to hard work. You don't know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out!  Start to put your acts together NOW.

Okay, enough of the detour.  Let's circle back to the topic of how to deal with your boss.  Again, let me ask you a few questions first: Do you interact with your boss regularly?  What is his personality, hobbies, career path, likes and dislikes?  Do you like him as a manager?  Why?  What do you want from him for your own advancement and what can you offer him in return?  Is your boss a micromanager and control freak or a leader who delegates jobs with empowerment?  How he or she deals with success and failure of a task?  Basically I want you to finish a research paper on your boss and your expectation thereof.  Then give a reality check on your research by inviting your boss to a lunch meeting or a bar chat and figure out to what extent your research is valid.  This is similar to the READING requirement if you want to improve your written English.

Most conflicts at work place stem from misunderstanding and miscommunications.  To know what type of manager your boss is should be your top priority if you want to survive at your job.  If your boss is a micromanager and ask you to go from A to B and somehow you decide to go to C on the basis of efficiency, you will be whipped to the bone even if the end results justify your initiatives.  It would be a totally different story if your boss is a result-oriented person who rarely pays attention to the actual process involved in the problem solving.  Once you figure out the boundary within which you can maneuver under the watchful eyes of your supervisor, you are half way towards victory.  The other half depends on your skill set and how you play your strength according to the well choreographed game plan which has been tailor made to your boss' style.

Sounds reasonable?  Give it a try and review your strategies regularly.  I hope that my boss is not reading this post, who, based on my research, might give me a lecture if he finds out I had this PERFECT plan from the very beginning.  Wait.  Does my boss frequent a Chinese Forum called WenXueCity?  I have to do some research on that right away.  I know he doesn’t speak Chinese, but his wife does.  More research is warranted. See you later!

One muggle