9 Great Habits in Boss Management

Woe to the person that fails to properly manage his or her boss.  And don’t confuse the concept of managing the boss with anything that resembles shameless sucking-up or its close cousin, brown-nosing.

While some bosses are more challenging than others, you are well served to give it your best shot to understand as much about your boss’s working style, priorities, expectations and aspirations as possible.

Learning to work with and yes manage the person that you work for is a critical issue in ensuring your short-term success and long-term professional sanity.  Those interested in digging in to some of the formative work on “boss management” are encouraged to check out the work of John Kotter and John Gabarro, including their formative article, “Managing Your Boss.” in the Harvard Business Review.

For now, here’s a quick checklist to help remind you of some best practices that you can apply immediately.

9 Great Habits in Boss Management:

1. Keep the boss appropriately informed. You should gauge his/her need for information volume and frequency and adapt to it.  Also, remember that some bosses are “readers” and some are “listeners.”  Don’t overwhelm a “listener” with reports and don’t expect verbal updates to cut it with “readers.”

2. Prove your credibility daily. Honesty is the only policy.  Never give a boss a reason to doubt your word.

3. Your boss’s priorities are yours. Learn them, live them, work them.

4. Know the boss’s pet programs. See also the priority note. Find ways to support and extend those programs across the organization.

5. Learn your boss’s aspirations. Help a great boss achieve his/her aspirations and you’ll benefit in the process.  Help a lousy boss do the same and you’ve solved a problem.

6. Know your boss’s organizational heroes. Seek opportunities to help bring them and you together.

7. Outside interests? Make them yours if you can be genuine. While it might be hard for you to fake interest in WWF Wrestling or Tractor Pulling or whatever slightly off-the-beaten path interest your boss has, you are well served to show interest if he does.  The best case is finding an opportunity that interests both of you and genuinely finding ways to share information and even time.  In my household, I grew up riding motorcyles and skiing  with my Dad and his boss and coworkers.

8. Resist the urge to publicly disagree with your boss. Speak up respectfully in private if you have to, but, don’t light a boss-bridge on fire in a public setting.  The quick combustion might consume you.

9. Negative Boss Talk. It’s easy to fall into this trap and cathartic for some. Never, ever, ever engage in negative boss talk.  Run, don’t walk in the other direction.

Show Respect by Paying Attention

I trot this anecdote every once in awhile because to this day, it’s still the best example that I’ve observed of a senior manager that missed the memo on the need to engage with her team members.

This individual was uncomfortable making decisions and engaging in difficult discussions, and she had what I describe as a “dodge and deflect” strategy for dealing with the pleas from her staff for face or air-time.  Her response to an inquiry would typically be something to the effect of, “That’s an important issue and we should talk about it at the right time.”

Guess when it was the right time?

If you guessed, “Never!” you’re right.

This senior leader not only frustrated her team members and slowed progress to a halt, but by dodging their need to express ideas to improve the business, she showed extreme professional disrespect for her colleagues.

Another manager that I coached had a habit of engaging in extended discussions while sending e-mails on his p.d.a.  While he heard and acknowledged the words from the individual attempting to communicate with him, we all know that it’s impossible to pull-off this type of multi-tasking and realize a quality communication experience.  In interviews, this manager’s employees indicated that they were both frustrated and offended by this poor approach.

And finally, a senior leader that I coached had invested years in avoiding operational discussions with his team members. While on one hand, he let them “do their jobs,” on the other hand, it was fairly frustrating for the team members to go for years without being able to engage, update, seek advice or even politely show-off what their teams were achieving.  This omission of attention showed a distinct lack of respect not only for the managers, but for the team members of the managers.

Take-Aways:

There are a million opportunities for us to shortchange conversations in pursuit of the urgent important.  It takes discipline and the recognition that your attention as a leader is one of the best ways that you have for conveying your respect for individuals and teams.  These are golden opportunities worth considerably more than whatever efficiency you thought you were gaining from minimizing contact.

It costs nothing to pay attention and the return on investment is priceless!  Perhaps it’s time to slow down and show some respect.

8 Quick Tips to Improve Your Effectiveness with Feedback

Leaders at all levels struggle with this most important of performance tools: feedback. We delay delivering it, we water it down, we sandwich it in praise and obscure the message or, we avoid it altogether.

Like anything else, practice makes perfect, and a few simple suggestions can help ease your concerns and usher in more “practice time” in your workplace.

Suggestions for Improving Your Comfort and Use of Feedback:

1. Frequency and timeliness count! Your job is to deliver feedback everyday….not just at the performance review.  In fact, that’s a horrible time for it.

2. Always base feedback on observable behaviors.

3. Link the behavior in question to business issues.  Don’t make it personal.

4. Describe the appropriate behavior or in the case of positive feedback, specify the good behavior.  Tell a person, “nice presentation,” and while they feel good, they have no idea what they did right.

5. Keep the discussion simple…focus on one behavior, not everything that you can think of for the past three months.

7. Actions and outcomes count! Create an action plan to change the behavior.  Ideally, the target of the feedback creates the action plan.

8. Observe, coach and provide on-going feedback.

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Bonus Tip 1: Take a few minutes before your feedback discussion to jot down your opening statement and plan your conversation.  Use the above as a check-list to make certain that you’ve incorporated all of the key elements.

July Issue of the Management Excellence e-Newsletter: Subscriber Only Content

Today’s “Leadership Tip of the Day” is for e-newsletter subscribers only.  Of course, I would love to have you as a subscriber!

See the note below that I carried on my Management Excellence site.  Also, you are more than welcome to subscribe via the Building Better Leaders site and the offer for copies of Practical Lessons in Leadership below stands for all subscribers, subject to the noted limits.

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The July issue of The Management Excellence e-Newsletter is out, with subscriber-only content.

The current issue includes content on:

• Improving Ideation & Creativity with Your Team

• Surviving and Thriving at the Dreaded Annual Strategy Off-Site

• Ideas for Jump-Starting Your Personal/Professional Development Program

• New Suggestions for the Management Excellence Reading List

• A tasteful promotion at the bottom of the newsletter outlining new beta test opportunities for upcoming Building Better Leaders programs and other services.  (Hey, I am in business here!)

If you’re not a subscriber, please consider signing on and gaining access to content and opportunities not covered on my blogs. As always, I will guard your e-mail information with amazing ferocity!

As an incentive, I will send a free, signed copy of Practical Lessons in Leadership to the 1st, 10th and 25th new subscribers (and every 25th after that, until 500) after this post publishes today.  This offer is good for 24 hours…and you must have a U.S. mailing address to participate.

You can subscribe at Management Excellence (http://artpetty.com) or Building Better Leaders (http://buildingbetterleaders.com) on the far right column under E-Newsletter Mailing List.  And of course, new subscribers will receive a copy of the newsletter and very soon, access to all newsletter archives as well!

I look forward to sharing ideas for development and performance with you in our e-newsletter format!

Happy Reading!

-Art

Want to Lead? Answer These Questions! #6 of 7

Note: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders, are presented in the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.  I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation and discussion.

The first five questions in this series challenged you to think through issues that are both philosophical and powerfully practical:

• Why do you want to lead?
• Do you understand the true role of a leader?
• Do you understand that the skills that made you successful as an individual contributor are not the skills that will carry you forward?
• Are you prepared to give up your domain expertise as your foundation for results?
• What do you believe are the skills and personality traits that you need to succeed as a leader?

If you’ve made it through the investigation of questions 1-5, it’s time for you to consider your new world of accountability.

Number 6. Do you understand that you will be responsible for the output of your team members, and that you will be judged on this output?

One of the transition challenges that many first-time leaders face is recognizing and accepting the new found accountability for the results of others.  You can look left and right, but at the end of the day, you need only look in the mirror to find the person responsible for the output of your team.  This issue underscores your need to focus on talent selection and development, creating the effective working environment and doing everything in your power to knock down obstacles so that others can plow ahead on their endeavors.  You’ve moved from a “me-centric” role to one that is completely “you-centric.”

Consider your responsibility and new-found accountability very carefully and remember that you will now live by the Coach’s Credo: “If we succeed, it’s because of the team and if we fail, it’s because of me.”

Want to Lead? What Skills Do I Need to Succeed? #5 of 7

Note: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders, are presented in the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.  I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation and discussion.

The first four questions in this series challenged you to think through issues that are both philosophical and powerfully practical:

• Why do you want to lead?
• Do you understand the true role of a leader?
• Do you understand that the skills that made you successful as an individual contributor are not the skills that will carry you forward?
• Are you prepared to give up your domain expertise as your foundation for results?

If you’ve made it through the investigation of questions 1-4, it’s time for you to focus in on what it takes to be successful as a leader.

5. What do you believe are the skills and personality traits that you need to succeed as a leader?

This question allows the manager and aspiring leader to dig deeper into the role of leadership and to raise awareness of distinct skills and traits essential for leadership success.  One potential assignment is to ask the aspiring leader to think about leaders that he/she has admired and to describe what it was about these people that made them positive role models.  And as always, I encourage aspiring leaders to sit down with experienced leaders and talk about the role and challenges.  Chances are the answers to this question will sound a lot like: patience, fortitude, comfort in coaching and delivering feedback, ability to connect the big picture to day to day realities and so forth.

All of these questions are about building context for the role and life of a leader, and through studying others, the individual can think about their own skills and how they apply or where they need to be strengthened.

Want to Lead? #3 of 7-Your Individual Contributor Skills No Longer Count!

Note: the Seven Key Questions for Ambitious, Aspiring Leaders, are presented in the book, Practical Lessons in Leadership by Art Petty and Rich Petro.  I’ll explore each question here at Building Better Leaders through individual “Leadership Tip of the Day” posts, offering ideas for investigation and discussion.

The prior questions challenged you to ask and answer, “Why do you want to lead?”  and “Do You Understand the Role of a Leader?” The third question focuses on the issue of skill sets.  For too many early career leaders, it comes as a shock that the skills that brought them to the dance are not the skills that will help them win the contest.

Question number 3. Do you understand that the skills that make you successful as an individual contributor are not the  skills you need to succeed as a leader?

I’ve noticed that new leaders on technical teams (software development, engineering, IT), often struggle with this issue. In part, the dilemma is created when senior leaders promote the best technicians into leadership roles, and then fail to provide the proper mentoring for the new role. This freshly minted leader is used to surviving and prospering on their technical prowess, and without proper context for their new priorities, they emphasize the technical topics over the issues of motivating, leading and guiding others.

One senior manager observing this repeated pattern, offered, “give a technical professional a choice between a technical or a people issue, and I guarantee which way they will go.”

While technical competence is important in many roles, the demands of leadership require that you shift your focus to priorities that emphasize forging an effective working environment and facilitating the development, coaching and achievement of others.  Your job is to help create other technically adept team members, and to use your skills as a tool to cross-check on key decisions and encourage broader and bigger thinking.

Your value as an expert is now worth less than your value as someone that is responsible for creating experts. It’s critical that you focus on internalizing your new role and shift your focus to the people and teams in your environment.

Innovation is for Everyone

Innovation isn’t just the domain of engineers, designers and other creative product types and functions inside organizations.  Everyone and every function has the opportunity to innovate in pursuit of serving internal or external customers, improving business processes and helping the firm achieve strategic objectives.

It’s too bad that many of us don’t recognize our innovation obligation and opportunity.

People focus on the all-new, all-new product and technology innovations that make our news headlines.  This discontinuous innovation while exciting and big and sometimes transformational, is actually quite rare.  Most innovation is continuous in nature…more incremental than of the all new variety.

My working definition of innovation is: “solving vexing problems in unique and reproducible ways.” While I have no doubt that there may be better and even shorter definitions, mine opens up the innovation frontier to the broad range of “problems” inside and outside of organizations.  My only catch is that the solution be both unique and reproducible.

Jump-starting your innovation thinking can be as simple as brainstorming with your colleagues on the headaches, time and cost wasters and bottlenecks that affect your customers and impede goal achievement.  Pick one, apply my definition and solve.

Rinse and repeat.  Happy innovating!

7 Signs that Your Leadership Approach is Working

It’s often difficult to gauge whether your leadership practices are helping improve your team’s situation.  I encourage leaders to look for these signs as evidence that things are heading in the proper direction:

The Seven Indicators of the Effective Work Environment

1. Individuals and teams display a great deal of pride, collaboration and cooperation to meet and exceed objectives.
2. Failure to meet or exceed objectives is met with healthy frustration that quickly is channeled into lessons-learned and “what we’ll do better” discussions.
3. Regardless of individual roles, teams spontaneously assemble to meet specific challenges and then dissolve once the challenges have been met.
4. The group becomes self-policing on quality, timeliness and conduct.
5. The drive to innovate and create value comes from within the team not from management.
6. The teams learn how to fight and to play together.
7. Output tangibly supports strategic objectives and improves the ability of the organization to meet customer needs.

While there is a great deal of subjectivity in judging the Seven Indicators, I’m OK with a little, “you’ll know it when you see and feel it or when you don’t” type of measurement. The weatherman can give you all of the meteorological reasons behind the sunny day you see through the window, but until you step outside of your Chicago office in July and feel the humidity swallow you up like a wet blanket, you don’t truly know what it’s like out there.

The best leaders are critically aware of their role and power in shaping the environment on their teams and inside their organizations. They are also aware that almost no one will ever provide the boss honest, actionable feedback on performance. I encourage leaders to develop an extreme awareness of what is going on around them as the best indicator of their effectiveness. Pay attention, look, listen and then ask questions and take actions that help people solve problems.

Tripping Points and the Leader

Note from Art: this post originally appeared as The Five Tripping Points of Emerging Leaders at my Management Excellence blog. The five points are important and bear repeating.

Firms and teams run into natural Tripping Points in the form of infrastructure and know-how as they work to grow a firm from start-up to $10 million or from $10 million to $25 million and so on.  Often, the only viable solution to get beyond a Tripping Point is to retool the management team with people that have experience creating the infrastructure and programs/teams/processes needed to reach the next few levels.

I can easily apply Tripping Point thinking to the challenges that we as professionals face in advancing our careers and in particular, in developing as leaders.  Awareness of your prospective Tripping Points is an important first step in creating your personal and professional development plan.

The Five Tripping Points of Leaders:

1. Strategic thinking skills-the ability to see the big picture, to look at patterns in the marketplace and assemble pictures that others don’t see into competitive, value-creating strategies.

2. Business acumen-Ram Charan describes this as the ability of the leader to understand how the firm makes money in the language of a street vendor.

3. Inbound communication skills-especially the ability to ask questions, listen intently and interpret what people truly mean or are thinking, which is often different than the words they are voicing.

4. Outbound communication skills-the ability to translate complex ideas into simple concepts that resonate with others and that promote positive action.

5. Diplomatic skills-the ability to broker value-creating relationships and resolve disputes with the finesse of an ambassador.
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The Tripping Points have profound implications for us as we seek to grow and expand in our careers, and they are THE issues we need to focus on as we seek to develop others around us.

As simple as the points are, we are often blind to our own limitations in these areas.  So are the people you are seeking to develop.

Use the Tripping Points as filters to evaluate the advancement and maturity of your team members, and as the basis for creating developmental assignments.  Use these points as the basis for coaching and feedback.

For your own purposes, seek feedback and coaching about the perception of your competence and maturity in each of these areas. Be aware of your limitations and areas of discomfort, and if necessary, design your own developmental assignments to ensure that you gain experience and refine your skills in the right areas.

We all have Tripping Points, and while perhaps there are truly limits to our individual abilities, I remain convinced that with awareness, focused effort and coaching, we can advance our skils and increase our contributions to our firms.

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