Key to Success – How not to approach your supervisor

Here is a simple trick for success, whenever we are faced with a challenge, we should not go to our supervisor with that problem. The supervisor will soon start seeing us as another source of problem and would start to avoid us if possible.
What we should do instead is go with a possible solution to the problem along with the original problem and discuss it.
Suppose there are some quality concerns with the feature developed by a team member. The wrong approach would be to directly go to the manager and complain. By doing that we have placed the ball in manager’s court and the manager must figure out what to do. Everyone is busy and as people go higher in their career, they have less and less time. The manager now must take time out of his/her busy schedule and address the issue.
The proper approach to this would be that we try to identify where the gap is, if possible. Suppose we find that the employee actually has strong design and coding skills but given the fact that he/she is new to the domain, the employee is often not able to take the right decisions required for the problem. So, now when we approach our supervisor, we not only know the problem but also can suggest some potential corrective actions to it (like organizing domain sessions). Of-course, the supervisor may not always agree with the solution we provide, but the supervisor will be really happy that we saved a lot of his/her time and brainstormed some potential solutions up front.