AskABoss: 'These interactions leave me feeling like I am constantly failing at my job, but am I off base to feel like she is setting me up for failure?'
Photo: The Cut Frequently, my manager will assign me a project and not give me very much instruction. When I ask questions, she tends to get frustrated and tells me to just figure it out. So I do my best! But when I come back later on with the work mostly or completely finished, she’ll tell me that I didn’t do it the way she wanted me to and admit that she should have given me more instructions.
These interactions leave me feeling like I am constantly failing at my job, but am I off base to feel like she is setting me up for failure? Is there any way to get out of what feels like a never-ending cycle?When she assigns you projects, she clearly has an idea of what she wants , because when you complete the work and show it to her, she’s able to identify that it’s not what she had envisioned.
To be fair, it is true that at a certain level of seniority, it becomes more reasonable for a manager to expect you to figure out the details and to know what doing a particular project well looks like. But even then, if that’s clearly not happening, a good manager knows she needs to invest the time to get more aligned on those things — not just keep going through this cycle over and over.
If your boss responds by again saying she wants you to take ownership, you can say, “I want to take ownership for my projects, and to do that with confidence, I want to be sure I understand what you’re envisioning. Right now I’m often just guessing, and sometimes we’re picturing different things. If we can take a few extra minutes to make sure we’re on the same page, it’ll be much easier to take ownership from there.
Even doing all that, though, there will still likely be times when you turn in a piece of work and hear it’s not what your boss wanted. That happens even with managers who delegate well. That doesn’t necessarily mean you failed; sometimes it takes several rounds of back-and-forth to figure out exactly what something should be.
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