What are the hallmarks of a great boss?
We can all think of people who have inspired us at work.
We can also think of bosses who we really didn't appreciate at all and actually led
us to move on in our organisations.
But, what are the attributes that actually separate out the great bosses from the less
good ones?
My colleague, James Manktelow and I decided to get to the bottom this issue.
We’ve surveyed 15,000 managers around the world asking this exact question: what are
the attributes, the techniques and tools that great bosses use?
The findings can be summarized in terms of three concentric circles.
The Inner Circle is managing yourself.
In other words, it's about the things you do to ensure that you understand your own
strengths and weaknesses, your own capacity to manage time effectively, your ability to
cope with stress.
All of those things together to ensure that you are actually spending your time on the
right things and to the best of your ability.
The Middle Circle is managing others, and we explicitly separate out managing tasks
and managing people.
Managing tasks is things like problem solving and decision making, very kind of functional
activities.
And typically, those are things of course - that most of us were already pretty good
at before we became members.
Managing people is such things as hiring people, empowering and delegating work to other people,
managing difficult conversations, getting the best out of our team.
And of course, those are generally harder things to do because of course, personalities
and differences of opinion tend to intrude.
But ultimately, managing tasks and managing people are two sides of the same coin.
We've got to make sure that we do both of those equally well.
The Outer Circle is managing your wider context.
This means first of all, building relationships with others within your organisation but outside
your area of formal responsibilities, your boss and your boss's boss, people in other
departments.
It also means building relationships with people outside the company customers and suppliers,
and so forth.
And, it means being very conscious and aware of changes in the wider business environment
to make sure that you're making the right strategic choices.
Those three circles are mutually reinforcing.
In other words, you can't be good at managing tasks and people if you're not conscious of
how the business world is changing.
And, neither can you be good at managing tasks and people if you aren't even aware of your
own strengths and weaknesses, because you're likely to emphasize the wrong things.
So, these three circles actually fit together quite nicely, but the other point to bear
in mind is that there are cross-cutting themes that any really good manager is aware of.
One is what we can call Transparency.
In other words, being very open and thoughtful about sharing your ideas and your insights
with others.
Another theme is what we can call Simplicity.
In other words, deliberately trying to take away obstacles and try to simplify the processes
through which work is done.
Because, most people actually work much more effectively with fewer rules rather when there
are more rules.
And the third is what we can call the sort of Pursuit of Meaning.
In other words, the desire in all of these activities to try to link up what we're doing,
and how we're looking at the world with some sort of bigger picture goal.
Because, it's well known that to the extent that you as an individual and the people around
you see value in what you're doing in pursuit of meaning; the more likely you are to do
your job efficiently.