1.

Bring solutions, not just problems

If you just bring your manager problems, she has to solve them, but think how much
more valuable you'd be (and how much time you'd save her) if instead, you brought
proposed solutions. Even if your manager wants to respond differently, having a
proposal to react to is easier than having to start figuring it out from scratch.

2. Everything has a trade-off

When you're responsible for only one piece of the pie, it's easy to think that
solutions are obvious. But when you're responsible for the whole pie, it gets far
more complicated; decisions that seem easy for you may require a trade-off
somewhere else.
For instance, you might not understand why your manager won't approve your request
for new software. But approving your request might mean that she has to cut her
budget somewhere else, plus explain to a different employee why she can't have the
training course she requested.

3. Your attitude matters almost as much as your work

Managing a team can be exhausting, and it's significantly harder when a team member
is resistant to feedback, difficult to work with or just plain unpleasant. Even if
your work is good, many good managers will refuse to tolerate poor attitudes, and
you could find yourself without a job or hampered significantly in your current
one.

4. If we say yes to you, we'd have to say yes to others

It might be just fine for you to work from home two days a week, but not for the
whole department to do it. And if your manager allows you, it's likely that others
will want to also.
One way is to understand her perspective, and the perspective of a manager can be
very different from yours as an employee. Here are eight things your boss probably
wishes you knew.
Managers can make exceptions for individuals, but in many cases, it will cause
morale problems or even prompt accusations of treating one group differently than
another. (There are times when this is OK - for instance, it's OK to treat high
performers differently than others - but your manager is considering a wider
landscape of impact than you might be.)

5. Feedback is meant to help you

Really. It can sting to hear what you're not doing well enough, but imagine if your
manager never bothered to tell you: You wouldn't progress in your career or get
merit raises, and you might wonder why others were getting better assignments and
promotions while you were passed over.
Managers (most of them, anyway) don't give feedback to make you feel bad or put you
down; they do it because they want you to do well at your work - both for the
company's sake and your own.

6. Taking ownership is huge

It might be fine to merely execute a project that someone gives you. But it's far
better when you can truly own the work - meaning that you're the one driving it
forward, obsessing over it, spotting problems before they arise and addressing them
and generally taking the same sort of responsibility for it as you might expect
your manager to with her own work. Approaching your work like this can be what
takes you from a B-player to an A-player and can pay off dramatically in the course
of your career.

7. We expect you to be a grown-up

That means that we expect you to try to find the answer yourself before asking us
for help, to resolve your own interpersonal issues with co-workers, to have a work
ethic that means your work doesn't change when we're not around, to avoid causing
drama in the workplace and to otherwise behave like a professional adult who
doesn't need to be told to do these things. That said...

8. We want you to ask for help when you need it

Most managers do want to hear when you're struggling, whether it's with a
particular problem on a project, a difficult client or an overwhelming workload.
Don't hide your problems in the hopes that they won't be noticed - speak up when
you're struggling and ask for advice. Good managers will welcome it.