Evidence-based advice we've found on how to be successful in a job
For the objective of the OP, my single most important piece of advice is:  And may I have the envelope please?  And the nominees are, work harder, improve your knowledge and skills relevant to the job, get noticed by the C-level people, come in early and leave late, and play politics.  And the winner is [drum roll, please] by a wide margin<p><pre><code>     Play politics.
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For more, usually assume that your direct supervisor does not want you to do more or better because that might get you promoted over him.  Instead, he wants you to do not very well.  Then he can have an excuse to fire you.  Then he can argue that he has to pay your better replacement more, and then, since the supervisor gets paid at least 15% more than his highest paid subordinate, the supervisor gets paid more.  And he is sure to hire someone, really, less good  than the one he fired.  Really, what the supervisor wants as subordinates is a lot of people who can&#x27;t challenge him and, from their large number and relatively high salaries, get him paid more.<p>For more, there may be some cliques; join them and appear to be loyal to them.<p>A lot of the advice in the OP will scare your supervisor and cause him to try to get rid of you.<p>Net, play politics.<p>For one step more, the <i>politics</i> you are playing is well known in the literature of public administration, organizational behavior, and sociology and is called <i>goal subordination</i> where the workers <i>subordinate</i> the goals of the organization to their own goals.<p>Goal subordination is common in middle management in an organization big enough to have several levels of management.  There commonly a middle manager wants to arrange that his position is relatively well paid and stable.  To this end he wants to build an empire of subordinates who will not challenge him.  The middle manager gets paid more because of his relatively large number of subordinates.<p>In a lot of medium to large organizations, an employee who is a <i>star</i> gets attacked.  E.g., an employee A who sells more makes the other employees look bad, and they can retaliate by sabotaging employee A.<p>E.g., in a research university, never tell the others how your research is going.  Instead, say nothing until the corresponding papers are PUBLISHED -- then it is too late for the others to sabotage the research, e.g., cause you to waste time by constantly dropping by your office to talk,  putting you on silly committees, assigning you new courses to teach where you have to do new preparations, etc.<p>Net, instead of working to make the organization more successful, it is super common to replace reality with easier to do&#x2F;defend processes and to fight with others in the company, especially just down the hall.