Manager as Gatekeeper
Picture this. You are on your career journey through the workplace. You wander wearily along that road in a strange land. It’s a bleak land of twilight with only occasional rays of sunshine breaking through the clouds that beset your journey. It is a land inhabited by strange and sometime fearsome creatures that plague your journey and seek to impede your progress. But you press on with your travels along that road strangely compelled by the annoying gnawing in your gut and that buzzing about your head from those blood sucking insects trying to drain you of your vital juices. The going is rough and you are making slow but sure progress when you come across a huge iron gate that blocks the path. On the other side of the gate is the land of your new career. A land of plenty where the grass appears greener, the sky bluer, the air sweeter, and the inhabitants a wait to greet you welcome you to your new home. At that gate is the gatekeeper. There is something about the keeper that seems familiar but you can’t quite place it. As you draw closer the image of the keeper becomes clearer, you focus harder on their personage and to your surprise looks remarkably like your manager. A sudden rush of realization washes over you and you are certain that the keeper is your manager.
There the gatekeeper stands before you, with the keys to the gate in their hand, the power to grant you entrance in to the land beyond the gate. Will the gatekeeper open the gate for you ushering you through the gate to that new land of opportunity? You present your qualifications, you argue for your skills and past service, you make the case for entry skillfully but it seems to have little effect on the gatekeeper. Will the keeper be moved to open the gate or will the keeper stand fast ignoring your pleas for entrance … Your past “merits” mean little at this point. The decision now entirely depends on your past treatment of the gatekeeper.
OK. Maybe my little tale is a bit melodramatic, but the truth of the matter is your manager is the gatekeeper to you career. Read on.
As an employee who desires to advance your career the one thing that you must understand is that your manager, for good or for ill, is the gatekeeper to your career within your organization. For those with a poor relationship with their manager it is a sad fact of life. For those others, with good relationships with their managers it is encouraging news. For those of you that have not thought much about it, now is the time to start tending to the relationship and cultivating it into something positive.
Your manager can be of a good deal of use to you career plans. If you manage your relationship well, if you tend that relationship, if you foster and nurture it your efforts will be rewarded when the time comes. Whether you believe it or not, you in truth, need that relationship to be a good one in order to advance in any meaningful measure even if your boss is a jerk. Especially when your boss is a jerk.
Consider this; your manager can speak good or ill of you (and does) in conversations with his/her peers and superiors inside your organization. He/She can either help build your reputation or help destroy it in the course of a simple conversation. If you are planning a career within your organization, these will be the very people you will be interviewing with in the attempt to advance your career.
You must realize that managers talk with each other about their employees and so your reputation may proceed you even before you try for that other job. When you try to move to another position within the company the manager that you are interviewing with or has authority to hire you will, before the job offer is made, call your current manager to find out about you. Your reputation, your work habits, your interpersonal skills will all be up for discussion. And understand this; managers will also tend to tell each other the truth about an employee when asked because there is no advantage for them not to. Even if you are a “bad” employee managers will not tend to pass their problem people off to others because there is a price they will pay later in that relationship if they do.
So you say, “This doesn’t apply to me; I’m looking for opportunities outside my current company where my manager can’t undercut me”. Sorry, same rules apply. You never really know who your manager knows, what professional contacts he/she might have, who they see socially. And let me warn you, even though your company’s HR department has an official policy of “name, rank, employment dates and salary” only, more often than not managers across the industry will talk and will “warn off” a fellow manager from a hiring a bad employee. There are many ways to do it both overtly and covertly.
So what does all this mean? Some of my clients react negatively to this concept of “manager as gatekeeper”. They are quick to say “I’m not a suck up” or “I don’t kiss ass” or “I don’t play that …I keep it real.” I tell them this. “You may not like it, you may not want to acknowledge it but that is how the workforce operates”. Fail to recognize that your manager is the gatekeeper to your career or fail to manage that relationship in a positive way and you will have a more difficult time trying to improve your lot in the workplace.”