[sqircles]

There are a lot of factors that go into achieving success in the workplace. There are usually competing ideas of what success is to you, versus what it is to the one rating you or paying you. You have to, at some level, appear to be good at something they think is good to have around. Sometimes that aligns with what you think is good, sometimes it doesn’t.

Of course the advice in OP is going to be relative, but it’s not a bad rule of thumb to have a good sense of what your immediate does, how they think, what metrics they value, etc. If not for your own advancement- keeping immediate leadership off tilt can greatly increase QOL, or vice-versa. I personally would love to have leadership above me that I think "damn, I'd like to be a little more like that guy" but in almost 20 years of being in the workforce, including military and the likes, that kind of leadership has been hard to come by.