[TBD]Learning from Manage your manager

Tips for Understanding boss

• Understanding boss starts with understanding yourself first

  • Where you are

  • What you feel

  • What you should do

  • How do others see you?

  • What are your short-term N long-term goals?

  • Who in your professional network can you connect with your boss? Means that who in your network can help your boss?

  • Your social capital

• Understand their responsibilities

  • If they are right, revenue grows and new job created

  • If they are wrong, job creation can go to jeopardize

• Understand work pattern of your boss

  • How they tend to approach a project

  • Which task they take first

  • Identify their favorite goto people, tools and methods

  • When they like to arrival office, eat lunch, how late they work

• Understand work load of your boss

  • Budget cycle

  • Hiring pattern

• Understand boss' motivation

  • Need to attention?

  • Desire to control?

  • Helping others?

  • Need for achievement?

  • Need for affiliation and belongings?

  • How they behaved in last 6 to 12 months?

• Understand What are 1 or 2 primary motivations of your boss?

• Understand your boss's expectation with you

  • Sop assuming that you know what your boss is thinking about you

  • 
    

Building social capital

• Papers in journal

• Public accolade

• Consistent in helping others

Knowing your social capital

• think about feedback from your boss you got recently

• How have people been interacting with you recently

• Whether people are willing to connect you with their professional network?

Executive level communication tips

• Be as brief as possible as higher ladders has time as very precious resource

• Be bottom line oriented. Don't delve into unnecessary details unless they ask for

• Use the right lingo (language)

• 
  

Tips for success

• Be prepared for your performance evaluation

  • Understand that boss may miss one or two points

• After the evaluation, follow-up once in person

  • Note only once in few(2-3) months or else they may think that you are trying to manage them

• Understand how will your boss judge the performance of your team?

  • Know the team metric they will use for judging

• Understand how will your boss assess your citizenship behaviours?

• Never let your boss be surprised by what you are working on or what your progress looks like

  • send FYI mail of biweekly update of your work

• Help your boss

  • Do your job really well is the best form of help

  • Provide direct physical assistance. For example, stepping up in case your boss is not around and something needs to be done

  • Help only those, who are also willing to help you

  • Advocate boss in his/her absence

    • It means that explaining your boss point of view to team so that it is heard of

  • Ensure to share your future goals and aspirations to boss so that he will help you as well

    • A small conversation every 4-5 months will be great

• Help your boss make decision

  • Make it feel like their idea

  • Appeal to higher level goal and values

  • Use advantageous data

  • Speculate about other's reactions to decision

• Understand risk of making promise

  • Know that when you breaking promise, it means that you are breaking word

  • Promises are risky since people are not good to calculate odds of success

  • Promise can break if circumstance changes

  • Although it might not be your fault, following can happen

    • You create negative emotion

    • You lose social standing with boss

    • Repeated break of promise will underestimate relationship

• Right way to commit without promising

  • Promise only work if task is quite small in size

  • If boss tells that so, you are promising then tell him/her as below

    • "I will do everything in my power to get this done. Don't worry"

    • If pressed again, then tell "if it can be done, I will do this"

• Risk of promoting yourself always

  • People think that you are self centric

  • People think that you are in-sincere

  • People think that you lack integrity

• Effective way to promote

  • Know the followings

    • What to promote

      • Focus only to promote smaller wins. For example, if you could connect with a new customer for the first time

      • Big wins will be noticed by all anyway

    • When to promote

      • Not more than once per quarter

    • How to promote

      • Promote your wins as well as group wins

      • Do evidence based promotion

      • Use different channels for different times

      • Promote yourself during performance feedback

        • Don't promote yourself when boss is giving negative feedback

          • Say nothing even if it is asked for. Interact little only if at all needed. and this should be query to understand it in detail

            • If you have strong reason for defend yourself, you put your point just for a while and then also tell that you might be right

          • Nod

          • Listen

          • Take note

• Benefits of Documenting conversation

  • Documenting meeting will let others signal what your next move will be

  • Document can help you to cover yourself down the line.

• Documenting approach

  • Use if others are involved, document decision so that it will be treated as informal commitment

  • Document only if it is very important

  • Biweekly mail to your boss about

    • What you are doing

    • Why you are doing

    • Amount of progress you are making

• Avoid following

  • Over agreeing to boss

  • Blaming the boss. It is considered as disrespect and lack of loyality

  • Not doing what you tell boss you are doing

  • Overly critic of boss's idea

  • Failing to keep boss in the loop

• Learn by coaching others for this skill as and when you learn

Mode of communication with boss

• Face to face

  • Can provide huge amount of information

  • Ability to clarify misunderstandings

• Telephone

• Email

  • Can keep record of conversation

  • 
    

• Video conferencing

• Physical note

Rule

• • If message is urgent, uses fastest channel

  • If message needs confidentiality, use face-2-face

  • 
    

Tips for working with new manager

• Let him/her know

  • Your scope of work

  • Your progress

  • Major milestones

• Don't assume that new manager everything about people, tools

  • Meet biweekly and check how he/she doing N try to help

  • Don't try to manage them

• If boss ask for politics

  • tell that you are not involved and direct to talk with people who were involved

• Make sure they know your long term aspirations

  • Initiate conversation at some point of time

Tips for working with unavailable manager

• Indications of an unavailable manager- They are closed instead of being open N interactive

  • Don't check on you

  • Don't email the team

  • No open door

  • Lots of

    • Unanswered phone call/messages

    • Missed meeting

    • Unexplained absence from office

• Reason of unavailable manager

  • Personality

    • By genetics, wired to be more quite

  • They don't like you

  • Dealing with personal/professional crisis

• Risk

  • Not proper support for team

  • Your contribution not recognized

• Handling approach

  • Talk to them about communication issue

  • Be more proactive on your own

    • Focus on those items which are most important for your boss

    • Try to have 5 mins chat each day or each week

Tips for working with manager you don't like

• Challenge

  • You will be uncomfortable, upset

  • You feel helpless and thinking you will not have power to change the situation

• Approach

  • Using rituals and habits to try and live with the relationship as is

  • Don't speak negatively to them and negatively about them

  • Keep your interactions to a minimum

  • Create atleast one or two positive response

    • Call your best friend

    • Have something which you like

  • Be cautious if you want to head-on

    • Mention the issue but not explain it

    • Put your partial ownership on this issue

    • Choose the words wisely

• 
  

• 
  

Tips for working with remote manager

• Challenge

  • How to manage the boss when he/she is never in office

• Approach

  • Clearly state about your expectation and their expectation

  • Take permission on acting for issue in their absence

  • Schedule regular updates

    • Regular meeting

    • Regular update mail

    • Use video based conferencing

  • In person meet atleast couple of times in a year

  • Meet your team regularly and explain how you are communicating with your boss. It will avoid any conflicting messaging which team might be getting from various sources

Tips for working with self-important person

• Sign

  • They believe that they caused every idea and wins

  • They are sensitive to status

    • They want to show that they are at higher hierarchy above then you

  • they see themselves above the law

    • They ask team-mates to work on weekends, but they themselves will not work

• Approach

  • Don't try to manage them

  • Talk to HR

  • Don't talk to aggravate the situation

  • Protect your future in same company or others based on your networking

  • Use this as Opportunity to learn from them what not to be done

Tips for Working with less competent manager

• Reason

  • They are promoted due to their skill, in current role, not based on the necessary skill at the next level

  • Political appointee

  • Favoritism

• Challenge

  • You feel down working with person who is not competent

• Approach

  • Avoid going over head.

  • Try to make them agreed that they will delegate their task to you

  • Document your work well so that your achievement is not stolen by them

  • Discuss with boss about your aspiration

  • Communicate to boss of boss about your milestones and achievements occasionally

  • Identify their weak point and try to help overcoming them

Tips for working with mean/inappropriate manager

• Signs

  • Annoying and awkward

  • Break policies, laws or mean

  • Whenever you meet, you feel that little negativity is approaching you

  • 
    

• Approach

  • Try to mean you in personal/public

    • Politely tell no

    • Document the event and consult HR

  • Share opinion on non-work topics

  • Try to distance yourself

    • Interact only if necessary

  • Address the issue or seek help from HR

Tips to repair damaged relationship

• Indicators to see if it is impacting you

  • Frequency of interaction has really reduced a lot

  • they stopped seeing you as a resource (like they used to always have in the past)

  • Have they stopped including you in various types of reports, emails or other form of communication

  • Direct evidence based on what they directly told to you

• Approach

  • Apologies for your part of contribution for this damaged relationship

  •