A good boss wants you to convince them to do things differently20 years of fashion photography + stoop coffee (Issue #297)Published inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min readJust now--Most workplaces are (at least somewhat) hierarchical. Even flat org structures usually give rise to unspoken hierarchies, and prevailing wisdom for getting promoted tends to go something like this: Try your best and (generally) follow your bosss directions.On Medium, Julie Zhuo (former VP of product design at Facebook, co-founder of Sundial) adds useful nuance to this advice. Managers tend to have a different idea of what makes a valuable employee: Every great manager I know, Zhuo writes, tells me that the reports they find most valuable are the ones who convince them to do things differently. This flies in the face of how most individual contributors think of their jobs. They believe they must (by and large) follow orders to get promoted.Zhuo explains this paradox via the following breakdown:The worst employees do what they want in a way that hinders their teams success.Average employees simply please their bosses.Excellent employees do what they want in ways that accelerate their teams success.This hierarchy reminds me of Venkatesh Raos six-part blog post, The Gervais Principle, an anthropological investigation into employee motivations mapped to (yes) characters in the legendary British mockumentary The Office. (It went super viral a decade ago.) Raos taxonomy is slightly different (and far more cynical) than Zhuos, but the same basic principles hold true: high-performers and low-performers act in their own interests, yet in different ways. The middle tier is made of people who either genuinely believe that following orders will lead to a promotion (which may be true in some workplaces) or theyre optimizing for comfort/ease.The basic lesson? If you want to excel, find a job where you can do what you genuinely desire and those desires align with your teams goals. As Zhuo concludes, if you want to be a leader or among the most valued folks at your company, youre probably not going to get there by yes-bossing (unless your workplace is one of those super-hierarchical types). Youll get there via intelligent, well-informed pushback that moves you (and your team) forward.And, if your boss doesnt value this type of feedback, it may be a sign of a larger workplace culture issue (but thats a topic for a different newsletter). Harris Sockel From the archiveIf you (like me) enjoy falling down weird rabbitholes on the internet, I recommend the archival Medium publication Timeline. There, youll find the stories of lesser-known people, places, and events, like a 20-year experiment in which Dutch photographer Hans Eijkelboom snapped photos of pedestrians on the exact same street corner for two hours at a time over several years to demonstrate that were all sheeple in the consumer matrix. Essentially, everyone at any given time and place wears more or less the same thing, though we believe were making individual choices.via Hans Eijkelboom; photos taken in the span of a single hour on a street corner in Amsterdam, April 2005 Your daily dose of practical wisdomIf you live in a city or suburb and enjoy drinking coffee, try taking it out to the sidewalk, rooftop, or stoop on a weekend morning and watch your neighbors follow suit.