9 simple ways to make your boss love you

Every manager and every workplace is different, but speaking generally, the best way to get your boss to like you is to do great work.

That said, if you're looking to really bowl them over and potentially even become their favorite team member there are a few simple strategies you can use.

Business Insider looked into scientific research and expert opinion and came up with 11 tricks to help you wow the higher-ups.

Try to solve problems on your own

In his 1948 book "How to Stop Worrying and Start Living," Dale Carnegie includes an anecdote about Leon Shimkin, who was then a general manager at publishing house Simon and Schuster.

Shimkin told Carnegie that he'd devised a way to drastically cut meeting times: He informed his team that they couldn't present any problems unless they'd first tried to think of a solution.

Impress your boss with your problem-solving skills (and spare everyone from hearing you drone on) and only bring dilemmas to meetings when they've proven absolutely unsolvable.

Always demonstrate your value to the company

Your boss doesn't need to hear about how you want a promotion because you want a more prestigious title. If you're asking for anything a title bump, a raise, or more responsibility show how it will benefit your boss, and the organization as a whole.

As counterintelligence expert Robin Dreeke previously told Business Insider , you always want to ask yourself: "How can I inspire them to want me?" Sometimes it's not enough to do stellar work. If you want your boss to love you, you'll have to demonstrate how you're critical to their personal success and the company's.

Tweak your communication style to match theirs

Again, part of your job is to make your boss' job easier.

As professor Michael Watkins told the Harvard Business Review , it's on you to find out early on how your manager prefers to communicate. Is it Slack? Email? Face-to-face conversations? And how often should you check in?

Watkins also said that if there's a mismatch between your style and your boss' style for example, one of you prefers to check in more often it's important to have an open conversation about that.

Ask for advice

You might be wary of asking your boss anything whether it's how they got to this point in their career or which marketing strategy they think you should go with.

But research from Harvard Business School suggests that asking for advice doesn't make you look stupid it can make you seem more competent , which is presumably how you want your boss to see you.

In one experiment, 170 university students worked on a series of computer tasks and were told they would be matched with a partner who would complete the same tasks. (The partner was really a computer simulation.) When they'd finished the tasks, the "partner" either said, "I hope it went well" or "I hope it went well. Do you have any advice?"

As it turns out, students who'd been asked for advice rated their "partner" more competent than those who hadn't been asked for advice.

Remember, too: It's better to ask for their advice than their opinion. As psychologist Robert Cialdini previously told Business Insider , asking for advice creates a partnership between you and your boss and encourages them to be more supportive of your idea.

On the other hand, when you ask for their opinion, they take a step back and become more of an objective evaluator.

Get to work early

Research from the Michael G. Foster School of Business at the University of Washington suggests that employees who get into the office early are generally perceived by their managers as more conscientious and receive higher performance ratings than employees who arrive later.

And it doesn't matter if those who get in later stay later, too.

If you feel that you'd be more productive working from, say, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. instead of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., consider explaining the situation to your manager and confronting their potential "morning bias" head-on.

Manage up

"Managing up" is a term for learning what your boss really cares about and making sure you deliver on that.

As Dave Kerpen, founder and CEO of software company Likable Local, previously told Business Insider , "It's about helping your manager look great to his or her manager. And ultimately by doing that you're going to position yourself better for success."

Kerpen expects his team at Likeable Local to manage up to him. For example, he doesn't care that his head of marketing shows up late almost every day as long as she's on time Monday morning, delivering a great report at the company-wide meeting.

Kerpen recommends either asking your boss directly what's important to them or subtly trying to figure it out on your own.

Set stretch goals

Leadership-development consultancy Zenger/Folkman spent more than five years collecting upward of 50,000 360-degree evaluations on more than 4,000 individual employees.

According to their findings, there's one behavior that can make employees stand out (to their boss and the rest of their coworkers): Setting stretch goals .

In other words, Zenger/Folkman execs write in The Harvard Business Review , top employees "set and met stretch goals that went beyond what others thought were possible."

Interestingly, most people didn't realize that high goals were so important, suggesting that setting stretch goals is meaningful because it's not expected.

Pay attention to detail

If you consider yourself more of a big-picture person, you'd best start attending to the small stuff , too.

Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite, wrote in a LinkedIn post that at his company, "even what seems like a small technical glitch can end up affecting a lot of clients in a short period of time. An employee who can be trusted to catch such small errors truly begins to stand out among the crowd."