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Manage Your Boss

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Manage Your Boss
How do we make our time most productive? What could be a more effective use of time than ensuring we have a mutually effective relationship with our own line managers? Here are our 8 tips to help manage up: 1. First try to understand your boss. 2. Don’t try to be a transformer. 3. Build on strengths. 4. Focus strengths on things that matter. 5. Find out what works. 6. Build your relationship. 7. How to avoid being overloaded or having your time wasted. 8. Build a bigger network.
1 – First Try to Understand Your Boss
On This article suggest several ways to achieve this.They state that we need to ensure you understand your boss, and her working context, by understanding her/his:
Goal and Objectives
Pressure and Issues
Strenghths, weakness and blind spots
Preffered workstyle
Then, we need to do the same our yourself.
As Kotter and Gabarro discovered in their research, it may seem an unusual expectation to “manage up” but the need to do so is obvious.
“Just think of the job and how to be effective in it. How do you get the resources you need, the information you need, the advice, even the permission to keep at it? The answers always point toward whoever has the power, the leverage – that is, the boss. To fail to make that relationship one of mutual respect and understanding is to miss a major factor in being effective.”
Trying to manage your boss makes sense because it makes your job easier.
2 – Manage Your Boss: Don’t Try To be a Reformer!
Accept that your boss is human, with strengths and limitations just like yourself.it’s a far more productive approach to build on strengths, than trying to remedy limitations. If that’s good advice for managing your own staff, it’s equally good advice when trying to manage your boss.
So ask yourself: “what can your boss do really well?” Where do her/his strengths lie? It is tempting to try

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