9
Hidden Qualities of Stellar Bosses
What your employees see you doing
matters. But often it's what they can't see that matters more.
Good bosses look good on paper.
Great bosses look great in person; their actions show their value.
Yet some bosses go even farther.
They're remarkable--not because of what you see them do but what you don't
see them do.
Where remarkable bosses are
concerned, what you see is far from all you get:
They forgive... and they forget.
When an employee makes a mistake--especially
a major mistake--it's easy to forever view that employee through the
perspective of that mistake.
I know. I've done it.
But one mistake, or one weakness, is
just one part of the whole person.
Great bosses are able to step back,
set aside a mistake, and think about the whole employee.
Remarkable bosses are also able to
forget that mistake, because they know that viewing any employee through the
lens of one incident may forever impact how they treat that employee.
And they know the employee will be
able to tell.
To forgive may be divine, but to
forget can be even more divine.
They transform company goals into
the employees' personal goals.
Great bosses inspire their employees
to achieve company goals.
Remarkable bosses make their
employees feel that what they do will benefit them as much as it does the
company. After all, whom will you work harder for: A company or yourself?
Whether they get professional
development, an opportunity to grow, a chance to shine, a chance to flex their
favorite business muscles, employees who feel a sense of personal purpose
almost always outperform employees who feel a sense of company purpose.
And they have a lot more fun doing
it.
Remarkable bosses know their
employees well enough to tap the personal, not just the professional.
They look past the action to the
emotion and motivation.
Sometimes employees make mistakes or
simply do the wrong thing. Sometimes they take over projects or roles without
approval or justification. Sometimes they jockey for position, play political
games, or ignore company objectives in pursuit of personal goals.
When that happens it's easy to
assume they don't listen or don't care. But almost always there's a deeper
reason: They feel stifled, they feel they have no control, they feel marginalized
or frustrated--or maybe they are just trying to find a sense of meaning in
their work that pay rates and titles can never provide.
Effective bosses deal with actions.
Remarkable bosses search for the underlying issues that, when overcome, lead to
much bigger change for the better.
They support without seeking credit.
A customer is upset. A vendor feels
shortchanged. A coworker is frustrated. Whatever the issue, good bosses support
their employees. They know that to do otherwise undermines the employee's
credibility and possibly authority.
Afterword, most bosses will say to
the employee, "Listen, I took up for you, but..."
Remarkable bosses don't say
anything. They feel supporting their employees--even if that shines a negative
spotlight on themselves--is the right thing to do and is therefore
unremarkable.
Even though we all know it isn't.
They make fewer public decisions.
When a decision needs to be made,
most of the time the best person to make that decision isn't the boss. Most of
the time the best person is the employee closest to the issue.
Decisiveness is a quality of a good
boss. Remarkable bosses can be decisive but often in a different way: They
decide they aren't the right person and then decide who is the right
person.
They do it not because they don't
want to avoid making those decisions but because they know they shouldn't
make those decisions.
They don't see control as a reward.
Many people desperately want to be
the boss so they can finally call the shots.
Remarkable bosses don't care about
control. As a result they aren't seen to exercise control.
They're seen as a person who helps.
They allow employees to learn their
own lessons.
It's easy for a boss to debrief an
employee and turn a teachable moment into a lesson learned.
It's a lot harder to let employees
learn their own lessons, even though the lessons we learn on our own are the
lessons we remember forever.
Remarkable bosses don't scold or
dictate; they work together with an employee to figure out what happened and
what to do to correct the mistake.
They help find a better way, not a
disciplinary way.
Great employees don't need to be
scolded or reprimanded. They know what they did wrong.
Sometimes staying silent is the best
way to ensure they remember.
They let employees have the ideas.
Years ago I worked in manufacturing
and my boss sent me to help move the production control offices. It was
basically manual labor, but for two days it put me in a position to watch and
hear and learn a lot about how the plant's production flow was controlled.
I found it fascinating and later I
asked my boss if I could be trained to fill in as a production clerk. Those two
days sparked a lifelong interest in productivity and process improvement.
Years later he admitted he sent me
to help move their furniture. "I knew you'd go in there with your eyes
wide open," he said, "and once you got a little taste I knew you'd
love it."
Remarkable bosses see the potential
in their employees and find ways to let them have the ideas, even though the
outcome was what they intended all along.
They always go home feeling they
could have done better.
Leadership is like a smorgasbord of
insecurity. Bosses worry about employees and customers and results. You name
it, they worry about it.
That's why remarkable bosses go home
every day feeling they could have done things a little better or smarter. They
wish they had treated employees with a little more sensitivity or empathy.
Most importantly, they always go
home feeling they could have done more to fulfill the trust their employees
place in them.
And that's why, although you can't
see it, when they walk in the door every day remarkable bosses make a silent
commitment to do their jobs even better than they did yesterday.
And then they do.
http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/9-hidden-qualities-of-remarkable-bosses-mon.html?cid=em01014week06a
No comments:
Post a Comment