From "reactive" to "proactive"

What your boss means and expects when they issue this tired cliche

Everyone’s been there, right? Usually sometime in the first few years of a corporate career, when you have put in a lot of effort - with mixed results - in the previous quarter and have prepared a detailed ‘performance self-assessment’, you have a long ‘conversation’ with your manager who hems and haws when you ask for a generous hike or a promotion.

They ramble on aimlessly about ‘next-steps’ and ‘career paths’, and when you still press insistently, they take a deep breath and trot out this hackneyed while looking you straight in the eye: “You need to be more proactive; currently you are too reactive”. Then they avert their eyes and pretend to look busily at their email and mumble “Thanks for the chat. We’ll continue the discussion in our next meeting” and signal the end of the harangue, for now.

You walk out of the cabin feeling a sense of chagrin and bewilderment. But, hey, at least the manager gave you some actionable advice, right? They asked you to “be more proactive.”

Initial misconception

The first time an employee hears this injunction, they think it means that they need to work harder at whatever they are doing. So they throw themselves into their work, causing frayed nerves for themselves and all the people they work with.

Then, the next quarter rolls around, and the dreaded conversation with the manager happens again. The employee moves a few roles and multiple managers and hears the same admonition multiple times. They try several tactics, including aggressively following-up with coworkers and copying the manager on every email, but nothing much changes.

Disillusionment

Eventually, the employee becomes disillusioned and exasperated with this advice, because it doesn’t seem usable or actionable. The employee is left to second-guess what the manager may mean by this, and often feels like they are groping blindly in the dark with a low chance of finding what they want.

Simultaneously, some coworkers seem to crack the code and manage to soon get into the manager’s good books. The employee wonders whether they have some secret sauce.

Unfortunately, these star coworkers often don’t know themselves what they are doing right, and so are unable to answer direct questions from the employee to understand the ‘secret sauce’. The coworkers often respond with vague suggestions like “Try to understand what the manager wants” or “Keep your eyes and ears open” which only serve to further confuse and frustrate the employee in question. They may even feel that they are being taken for a ride and the manager is simply playing favorites!

Solution

The best way to tackle this is to ask the manager bluntly:

• Give me an example of an incident where I was not proactive

• What could I have done instead?

• What does proactive behavior look like? That is, what are the actions that I would need to perform to be viewed as proactive?

Now, this may not always work. The manager may have simply been avoiding a hard conversation or may themselves not be very clear about what they mean by “proactive” and “reactive”. They might equate “being proactive” to “answer all questions I have and make my problems go away”, which is not of much use to the employee.

What can the employee do alternatively?

Becoming “proactive”

This advice from the manager usually comes when something went horribly wrong under your (and indirectly their) watch, and took a long time to detect and fix. The manager had to bear the brunt of leadership ire, and their exasperation causes them to dole out such unhelpful advice.

What you can do is the following:

• The first time something goes wrong, you may not even be aware that there’s a problem, and you will probably take very long to figure out how to fix it and whom to contact. This is what invites the “reactive to proactive” comment in the first place.

• After fixing the issue the first time, set up systems and processes and get to know the right people to contact the next time this (or a similar) issue happens. Problems will still happen, and things will still take long to fix, but at least you will get to know about it quicker.

• After this, keep tightening the loop of Problem: Discovery - Analysis - Resolution to make it faster each time. Figure out what the critical and time-consuming step in the ‘analysis’ and ‘fix’ phases are, and try to reduce them.

• You will soon get to a point where you will get to know as soon as a problem occurs, thus speeding up the “Discovery” process. Inform your manager about when the problem occurred and how long it took you to discover it so that they can make a mental note of your progress from earlier.

• Eventually, you will reach a point where you are able to respond in near-real-time and address a problem as soon as it occurs.

• From here, it’s but a small step to ask the right questions and set up mechanisms to prevent the problem from occurring in the first place, and gathering evidence that these steps worked as designed.

Voila! By the end of these steps, you have moved from being clueless and lost about a problem, to “proactively” preempting problems from occurring and having the evidence that your actions achieved this state.

Congratulations, you are now a “proactive” employee!

Summary

The thing to note is that going from “reactive” to “proactive” is a journey, not a switch that can be flipped on or off instantly. The first time any employee hears this advice, they try and ‘become proactive’ from the very next day, which leads to confusion, frustration, and burnout.

Instead, think of this as a process where the employee gradually speeds up the ‘discover’, ‘analysis’, and ‘resolution’ phases of addressing a problem and improve the turnaround time. Eventually they will be able to foresee and preempt such problems, and that behavior is recognized as ‘being proactive’.

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