In the past few weeks, I have written about how colleagues can make significant requests of each other and how a boss can approach big requests of one of their direct reports. This week, I’ll complete the cycle by thinking about how you can make a big ask of your boss.
Before discussing some specific issues, there is a general point to make. You’re probably more worried about making this request than you should be. First off, good bosses support their direct reports. If the request is reasonable, then your boss wants to say yes. Rather than thinking of what you’re doing as imposing on your boss, remember an important (if often implicit) part of any supervisor’s job description is to take care of the team.
Second, your boss is likely to be asked to do things all the time from people across the organization. Another request isn’t going to be as big a deal to them as it is to you. And even if they can’t support what you want, they’re unlikely to resent you for asking.
Do the cost-benefit analysis
When there’s something you want from your boss, it means you’re asking for one of the resources at their disposal. It could be their time, but it might also be a request for political capital (to support something you’d like to see get done), finances, or human resources. So, the request has a cost. Often, that cost is an opportunity cost. The resource given to your request can’t go somewhere else.
And, of course, the request has a benefit. That benefit might be coming directly to you (say, if you’re asking for a reference for a job or the chance to participate in a project). It might benefit the team, or perhaps it may be something that influences the future of the organization.
Before you make the request, map out the costs and benefits. On the cost side, you may need to ask around a bit to figure out what would actually be required for your boss to fulfill your request. Would it require financial support or other people? You don’t want to put in the request until you’re fairly certain you understand what would be entailed for your boss to agree.
Ultimately, you want to shift the cost-benefit calculation in your favor as much as possible. So anything you can do to minimize the costs or expand the benefits increases the chance of getting the outcome you want.
Lower the costs
Once you’ve considered the costs and benefits, you shouldn’t take the list as fixed. You should figure out how to make the cost to your boss as low as possible.
Take a simple example: If you want a recommendation, make sure you provide all the information they’ll need to complete the task without having to look for it. In some cases, that might involve actually writing a draft of a letter for them. But often it requires giving them a list of key pieces of information they should include in the letter, as well as all the information they might need about the purpose of the recommendation.
More generally, when you frame your big ask to the boss, you want to consider which costs are necessary and which are just nice to have. One way to approach this is to develop “Silver,” “Gold,” and “Platinum” versions of your request. The lowest tier is the bare-bones version that has a minimum cost, but also provides the smallest benefit. The top tier has the highest cost with the biggest benefit. And then there’s a middle option.
There are three advantages to this framing. One is that your boss will see that you’ve considered the range of costs involved in the request. The second is that it will give your boss ideas about how to modify your request to achieve your goals in a different way, while understanding which elements are “nice to have” and which are “need to have.” Third, there’s some evidence that people like a compromise , so giving decision-makers a middle way often gives them a reason to select one of your options.
Determine whose problem you’re solving and why
On the benefit side of the equation, your initial list of benefits was probably framed from your perspective. That is, you have a problem you’re trying to solve, and you’re trying to get your boss to agree to support what you want.
Remember, your boss is likely to get a lot of requests for support. For your boss to part with any of their valuable resources, the outcome has to hold some worth to them . So when you do that cost-benefit analysis, don’t do it from your perspective. Do it from your boss’s perspective. What problem of your boss’s are you solving with the request you’re making?
The best way to get what you want is to help your boss see that supporting your request helps them accomplish something that matters to them. That doesn’t mean hiding the reasons why the request benefits you, but it does mean trying to understand any broader organizational perspective that relates to what you’re asking for. Not only does that approach make it more likely your request will be granted, but it also helps prepare you to take on a management role of your own one day. The ability to take an organizational perspective when planning is a critical skill for organizational leaders.
