Student Question: For day-to-day work issues, I communicate directly with the person mentoring me, confirm things, then share updates in our team group chat. My manager mostly sees me owning a module — spotting a problem, solving it, reporting back, closing the loop. Overall I work in a pretty low-key way. I prefer to quietly get things done, and I rarely communicate upward (because most issues I can resolve on my own without needing a management decision).
But a colleague of mine — also on probation — takes every problem straight to our senior leader, gets her attention, and then calls a meeting to discuss a solution. She’s very visible about it. When she solves something, she makes sure everyone knows.
The result: my boss seems to prefer solving things through meetings. She thinks it makes people take issues more seriously. But the problems I deal with don’t warrant a full meeting — 20 minutes in the group chat or face-to-face is enough to sort it out. Turning that into a meeting would just be going through the motions.
So my questions are:
- To get promoted and earn more, do I need to cater to my boss’s preferences — lean more toward the working style she likes (being more visible, calling meetings to discuss and resolve issues)?
- For someone in my supervisor’s position, does being high-profile generally win more favor from the boss?
Master Chi’s Response:
1. If I had to put it plainly, the overarching principle is this: be humble as a person, keep a low profile while you work, and be high-profile once you’ve delivered results.
2. If your personality isn’t naturally suited to socializing and working every room, I’d encourage you to pursue efficient, principled ways of working — rather than simply catering to your leader’s preferences.
Because this won’t be the only boss you have in your life. You can’t let one person’s preferences reshape your entire working style. The right approach: put in your best effort, produce results, grow your skills — and if this place doesn’t appreciate you, move on.
3. “High-profile” is actually a fuzzy concept. A more precise way to say it is: ensure information transparency.
Most leaders are busy. They can’t track the details of your work.
If something was genuinely difficult — if you poured time and energy into it before cracking it — and your leader has no idea, that’s an information gap. And information gaps aren’t just a personal career problem. They affect how the whole team and the whole business runs.
Here’s an analogy. You’re a scout. Your commander sends you out to gather intelligence. On the way, you run into a handful of enemies and neutralize them without breaking a sweat. When you get back, can you say, “It was nothing, not worth mentioning” — and leave the encounter unreported?
Accurate feedback and information-sharing is itself a demonstration of competence.
You might decide a meeting isn’t warranted — fine, skip it. But anything important, anything your leader needs to be aware of in time, should be proactively and quickly surfaced. Less critical details can go in a weekly report or project summary after the fact.
Yes, leaders have their preferred working styles. But as I said — you won’t have just this one boss. You may well become a leader yourself someday. Pursue working methods that are principled, rational, and efficient. Don’t blindly mimic your manager, because your manager isn’t necessarily right, and what works for them may not work for you.
4. Meetings, quite often, aren’t primarily about communication — they’re about moving things forward.
Say you’re hitting a wall: progress is stalled and you can’t push it through on your own. You bring in your boss to call a meeting, and suddenly your colleagues bump the task up the priority list — not because the meeting itself solved anything, but because the boss’s presence carries weight.
Meetings are frequently more significant as a political act than as a communication tool.