What does it mean to “know your place”?  In days gone by, elders and nobles used to say to their children and lower classes “know your place,” to tell their subordinates to be quiet, compliant and un-ambitious.  Ever since then the phrase has taken on a very negative connotation.  It seems to me, however, that in today’s corporate environment, knowing your place has a huge advantage.  Having an awareness of your distinct position allows you to better understand your duties, responsibilities, others’ expectations, and your options for career progression.  Understanding how to best flex your role has been one of the major keys to success of the managers I have known and the correlation seems to be that the larger the company, the more valuable that understanding becomes.

When it comes to “knowing your place” in a superior-subordinate relationship, most of the time both parties are totally off-base from reality.  Both want to act on assumptions that are self-serving, with or without regard for the reality or nature of the relationship at hand and so both usually see themselves as serving much different roles than they actually do.  It would obviously not be that surprising if the peon thinks himself superior to the position he is in but it may surprise many to know that the manager usually greatly underestimates her power as a superior and the responsibilities that entails.

The reasons for this are probably endless.  One possibility is that people are simply misinterpreting or misunderstanding their positions.  The fault for this may lie in poor training by the company or superiors, unusually high or low ego, or just an alternate way of interpreting signals and job descriptions.  Another possibility lies in human nature — people believe what they want to believe.  A subordinate is apt to believe he is in a better position than he really is in because acknowledging a subordinate position may be too disheartening.  A superior may believe he wields less power than he really does to avoid feeling guilty for his success (or failure) and to try to maintain a peer-like relationship with their workers.  Yet another reason is that both are prone to basing their perceptions on prior experience in an attempt to make their adjustment to work relationships and/or positions easier.  This is especially true of new managers and is one of the main reasons why many fail as such.

The main problem lies in the fact that most managers used to be subordinates.  Many therefore approach their new managerial responsibilities still from a subordinate’s perspective.  When trying to decide on behavior in this new role, they use the behavior they exhibited and the responses they had as underlings as their reference point.

THIS IS BAD!

It is bad because being a manger is nothing like being managed.   You now have a whole new set of responsibilities, not the least of which is to oversee (and be responsible for) the work of others.  Understandably, that takes some getting used to and most managers aren’t eased into this new responsibility–they’re thrown in.  Whether you swim or drown is decided by you first admitting to yourself that you are in fact in deep water.   To be successful as a manger, the person has to first know that his place in the food chain has changed and that he is no longer a scavenger of attention–he now has peons to take that role from him.