This week I have been reflecting on a number of clients who have been telling me about issues they face with their line managers. Some report that their boss is always on their case chasing figures, some are saying that the executive group are unusually hungry for information, some are talking about how they micro manage and some are talking about never seeing them.
Does anyone have the perfect boss? Do you remember an old boss positively in the light of the new one who is terrorising you? Is your new boss a breath of fresh air?
Line managers come and they go, we ourselves are line managers and our managers have a manager of their own. So how do we manage in these ever changing circumstances?
The most common problem I hear about in my role as an executive coach is something to do with the boss having a different style to the coachees. Perhaps the coachee is very supportive and team focused and the boss is task focused and driven by results. Perhaps it is the other way round. Your boss might have done something which has tainted your view of them going forward. You are unable to view them in the same light as before. You may not respect them because they have not got the skills or expertise you would expect of someone in their position – It is possible that your direct reports think some or all of these things about you.
So, what is to be done?
Relationships, including the one with our boss, comprise 3 different spaces
· The space you are in
· The space the other person is in
· The space between to two of you
In which space are you most influential?
Which can you do something about and how quickly?
It is probably the space you are in and the space between to two of you. The space they are in is their domain and, unless they are prepared to meet you in the space in the middle, it will be hard to change them significantly.
Starting on the positive side, Jo Owen (see reference below) identified a few standard expectations of team members in interviews and surveys with over 1,000 bosses. The five most common expectations that bosses had of team members were:
1. Adaptability.
2. Self-confidence.
3. Proactivity.
4. Reliability.
5. Ambition.
These are relatively low hurdles for team members to jump over. Many team members manage to fall over them: just by consistently displaying the five characteristics above you will be ahead of the pack. Many team members fall into the traps of excessive analysis, negativity, can't-do, backwards looking and complaining. That is not a recipe for impressing any boss.
"The essence of the relationship between the boss and the team member is built on trust: once trust disappears on either side, then the relationship is effectively over."
Successful management of a boss has four elements:
1. Decoding the rules of survival and success. Ask around, get to know your boss, invest in the space between you and them and find out what makes them tick. Speak to others and learn from how they experience this person.
2. Building trust: avoiding career limiting moves. Bosses do not like being upstaged or surprised and need to feel they are in control. Good surprises are not good, but bad surprises are even worse. Bosses can deal with bad news, provided they hear it in private first and early enough to do something about it.
- Building a career network. It makes sense to build a career network beyond your own boss. Get to know people who sit alongside your boss and the people in HR who run the assignment and promotion process. Find a powerful sponsor in the organisation: someone who is at least two levels above you. They can be useful coaches and can guide you towards the right assignment and the right bosses.
- Turning moments of truth into moments of magic. Some moments of truth are entirely predictable, and need to be managed well. The three most important moments of truth are:
- Assignments.
- Budgets.
- Major presentations and meetings.
Beyond these strategies and techniques it may be ‘just a style thing’. It may be a personality clash and the solution could be in addressing the way you think about the situation rather than changing anything about what you are doing in the situation.
Some of the thinking about this appeared originally appeared in Industrial and Commercial Training, Volume 39 Number 2, 2007.
The author was Jo Owen.
Piers Carter
Leadership Coach & Consultant
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