I Realised I Had Been Managing My Manager Instead of Growing

At the Japanese electronics company where I worked in Osaka after university, the relationship with your direct manager was the most important variable in how your career moved.

My manager, Yamada-san, was experienced and precise and had very particular preferences about how things were done - the format of reports, the timing of updates, the level of detail required before a decision was brought to him for approval. I was good at reading what he needed and providing it.

Within my first year I had earned a reputation as reliable and easy to work with, which I found quietly gratifying. By my second year, I realised with a low-level unease that I had invested almost all of my working energy in managing upward and very little in developing the skills that would matter beyond my current role.

I was good at what Yamada-san needed and had stopped asking whether what Yamada-san needed was developing me. The annual review at two years produced decent feedback and no meaningful forward movement. I asked, carefully and in the indirect way the culture required, what the path forward looked like.

The answer was supportive but vague - keep doing good work, the opportunities would come. I spent a few weeks thinking about what the people who had moved faster than me had in common, and the pattern was not the quality of their work or their manager relationships.

It was that they had built visible expertise in areas the company needed to move toward, had participated in cross-functional projects, and had made themselves known to people two and three levels above their direct managers. They had invested in their development with the same intentionality that I had invested in my manager relationship.

I started making deliberate changes. I volunteered for a digital transformation initiative that was outside my department. I asked a senior director I had been introduced to through a project if I could learn more about how strategic decisions were made at the divisional level, and she agreed to occasional informal conversations.

I started building skills in data analysis that I could see the organisation moving toward. None of this was disloyal to Yamada-san - I maintained the quality of my work and the relationship was fine. But I had reoriented from managing my immediate situation to building my longer-term position.

At 30, I moved into a role that was a genuine step forward. The lesson that preceded it was that no one, including a good manager, is responsible for your development but you.