Managing Your Manager

In a hierarchical organization, every employee is affected by managers on a regular basis. Your relationship with your manager determines everything from compensation and basic responsibilities to opportunities for advancement, success, and career satisfaction. Many times, management decisions feel capricious, arbitrary, and frustrating, but it doesn't have to be that way. The goal of this video is to show you how to build a relationship with your manager that can be relied upon when crises happen, in a way that preserves your own sense of self respect, and helps you get what you need when you need it.

• Understand how your manager's world differs from yours and how to approach your manager with that in mind
• Learn to employ strategies from game theory that give you the ability to express satisfaction and dissatisfaction in a nonhostile, productive way
• Discover how to diagnose your manager's personality type and use that knowledge to communicate your needs in a way that's most likely to be heard and understood
• Learn to leverage a few best practices that will substantially improve your relationship with your manager

Ken Kousen is President of Kousen IT, a software development, writing, recording, and technical training company. He is the author of multiple O'Reilly titles, including Spring Framework Essentials, Advanced Java Development, and Modern Java Recipes. Ken holds a BS degree from M.I.T., an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I., and an MS and a PhD from Princeton.