Your Manager is Your Strongest Resource

Hey folks, I'm Swati.

Welcome back to my weekly newsletter.

This newsletter is those conversations: what I'm seeing, thinking, and what I'd tell you if we were grabbing coffee.

This week's edition is about delegating upward.

But before that:

I needed an AV (audio/video) vendor for a campus event recently.

The team spent three days researching for vendors, building a shortlist, sending emails, and waiting for quotes.

I had two LinkedIn connections who run event production companies.

These are friends who I went to college with, or met somewhere along the way, who ended up building agencies. A message from me would have started the conversation the same day.

Nobody asked to access my LinkedIn.

And this happens constantly.

Someone spends a week on outreach that a single introduction would have solved.

A deck gets built on assumptions I would have corrected in the first ten minutes, if anyone had shown me a rough version.

And I'm sure you can relate.

You've been stuck on something and didn't want to bother anyone.

You waited until you had something polished before asking for input, and by then it was too late.

Team’s time and bandwidth is expensive.

Twenty minutes of my early inputs in a project can save two days of team’s bandwidth going in the wrong direction.

And this hesitation isn't laziness.

The fear of asking is a consistent overestimation of rejection. You think you'll be refused or seen as a bother (contrary to data).

And it gets more counterintuitive.

Asking your senior for input early tells them you know who has relevant experience and are smart enough to use it.

So where does the hesitation actually come from?

Seniors don't know they're intimidating while juniors assume their seniors are.

Nobody asks and everyone loses time.

So here's what I'd actually do.

If you're about to spend two days on something, ask for 20 minutes first.

Tell your manager what you're planning to do and the direction you're planning to take. You'll find out in the first five minutes whether you're on the right track.

The message doesn't need to be elaborate. "I'm working on X. Before I go deep, can I get 15 minutes to align on direction?"

A bullet list, a skeleton, a rough slide. Whatever you have.

When someone sends me a finished version that's wrong, I have to break something they built.

When they send me a rough direction and ask "does this feel right?", I can redirect in two sentences.

The loop gets much faster and the output gets much better.

If your manager/senior says "we need an AV firm," they most certainly know three already.

Ask for the names / an introduction.

Ask if you can use their LinkedIn to reach out if they don’t know one personally (easier to find through mutuals / or get a response).

Network access is one of the most underused assets sitting right next to you.

It doesn't require much of the senior's time and most people will give you that if you ask for it specifically.

There’s an Index called Hofstede's Power Distance Index which measures how comfortable a culture is with hierarchy. The higher the score, the more people defer to authority rather than question it.

In India we score 77 on it, nearly double the United States at 40.

Approaching a senior with an unfinished question can feel like a sign of disrespect, so people default to doing everything themselves and presenting a finished product.

Seniors are resources so don’t just treat them as evaluators.