Managing Leadership^®

Have you ever been told that the best career advice you can follow is simply to make your boss happy? Just do whatever your boss – whoever that is at any given time in your career – wants – whatever that may be without any questions or advice – with single-minded intensity, and you will find yourself among the powers that be in to time at all.

We’ve been talking about how we sometimes find that we have an unanticipated and urgent need to reconcile our personal and work lives, or even to review our commitment to our careers. As it happens, following this sort of advice is one of the things that can provoke such a wake-up call.

There are a lot of problems with the approach. In the terms of our current discussion, the principal one is that it is about your boss, you, and how you relate to him or her – it is not meaningfully or essentially about how the two of you together relate to the work. What’s more, your relationships with your peers and juniors are entirely defined and driven by that one. This unleashes story lines that almost always end badly.

But the question of what your boss needs is a good one. And that of what your peers and juniors need, as well. In particular, as you interact with them at work, you should always be asking yourself not only what that is, but also what it is that you want from the interaction – with respect to the work purpose for which you all enter into it.

You will begin to engage in a multi-dimensional calculation: what will advance your goals or benefit your projects, what will do that for your partners in the exchange, and how your and their possible responses will affect these potential outcomes for all of you. The key is to always look for the result you want to obtain, but to do so mindful of the needs of your seniors, peers, and juniors to do the same.

This seems on the face of it to be coldly calculating. But what you are really doing is looking beyond yourself to others. You are considering yourself as a provider of answers to their problems, rather than just them as answers to yours. Moreover, you are beginning to see all of you as answers to organizational needs.

You are asking the questions regarding them that they ought to be asking themselves. You’re doing so from the perspective of the organizational work you all are engaged in. And in doing so you are beginning to understand their wants and needs better, and in a proper and sustainable context.

As you develop this instinct, you also begin to develop richer, more reliable, even warmer relationships with your colleagues. You become a more alert, aware manager with a broad ability to comprehend organizational issues and anticipate collaborative responses for all of your seniors, peers, and juniors alike.

But there’s more to do. We’ll look at that next week. Tomorrow: a review of a terrific book. See you then.

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This post is a part of a series. You can learn about and link to the other articles here: Managing life, work, and life at work

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Today’s tip: So, you don’t always do what others – even your boss – want. But how do you say “no?” This list from Michael Wade will not only tell you how, but why.

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