What your team members want from you
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Coaching clients ask it. People who come to a program ask it. If you're a boss, you've probably asked it at least once.
"What do my team members want from me?"
In class, we get at the answer by having participants identify what they want from a boss. Then groups of participants come up with a list. The lists are always similar. Here are some common things.
Your team members want you to help them succeed as a team. Management books rarely mention this, but it's important. Nobody wants to be a member of a losing team.
Your team members want you to help them meet their own objectives. They want you to do things that help them grow and develop and succeed as an individual.
Your team members want you to keep them safe. That means safe from The Powers that Be and safe from each other. They expect you to confront poor performance and bad behavior.
Your team members want you to be fair. Consequences should match up with performance and behavior.
Your team members want you to be consistent. They want you to enforce the rules even-handedly all the time.
Your team members want you to treat them like people. Exploit their diversity and creativity. Allow for their differences and human fallibility.
Your team members want you to make good decisions. They want you to know when it's time to decide and then to pull the trigger.
Boss's Bottom Line
You've had bosses. Some were good and some were not. So you have an idea about what your team members want from you. They want you to act like a good boss.
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
Categories: Supervision,Boss,Management,Leadership
Tags: Boss
I think all your points are very true. Yet the problems with bosses still persist.
I remember seeing an interview with a man who wrote a book about bad bosses a few years ago (I don't remember the name). He said, "do you know why bad bosses can never get better? It's because they don't think they're bad."
I hate being cynical about the quality of bosses and crappy leadership, but it really does seem to be a crap shoot on what you get.
I wonder if the best thing we can do is look to join an organization with the right culture: one of standards, accountability, and pursuit of excellence where people are valued and people development is a core component of the organizational beliefs.
If we're leaders in an organization where the culture is not positive like this, it is incumbent on us to work tirelessly to be agents of change and failing that, we must move on to somewhere where we can contribute positively.
Thanks for your post.
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Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Bob. Your comment reminded me of the joke about "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?" The answer is "One. But the lightbulb has to sincerely want to change."
There's very little hope for a crappy boss to change unless he or she recognizes the need, seeks out help, and is willing to do the hard work of change. Our organizational processes make this a big problem.
We promote people based on something other than the demonstrated likelihood that they will do a good job.
We give most new bosses zero help in learning the skills they need and adapting to their new role.
Only a few organizations include "boss work" in the performance review for bosses.
And very organizations have systems for supporting bosses in their daily work and career development.
Those things have to change before we witness any significant reduction of crappy supervision. But that won't solve the whole problem because even good bosses sometimes do the wrong thing. That's because this stuff is way easier to conceive than it is to do consistently.
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Even with everything you've listed here, of which I agree, I believe teams want and need help to elevate their performance so they can in turn elevate the performance of their team, their boss, their company - to succeed. To win.
You're right on the money there.
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I think that's true, Kevin and I think it's primarily the job of the supervisor. In great organizations there are systems to support the supervisor and help the team improve. In great organizations, the team gets the resources it needs to succeed.
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Wally, excellent blog as usual. One of the ways I trained my behavior towards my team was to relate with what I wanted from my boss when I was reporting to my boss.
Vish Agashe
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Thanks for sharing that. Modeling good behavior is an excellent self-development practice.
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All so true. Unfortunately, you failed to point out that it is not all about THEM. Count the number of times you repeated that word. It is also about surrounding yourself with a team that is dedicated to corporate goals and professional ethics and standards.
How about a column on what is expected of "them".
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Thanks for sharing those thoughts, Sam. I rarely write about "surrounding yourself with a team that is dedicated to corporate goals and professional ethics and standards." My sense is that most of the readers of this blog have only limited influence on who is assigned to their team.
I've also found that, beyond the basics that I blogged about in An Elevator Speech for Bosses, most of what you expect of "them" depends on individual corporate cultures. Ritz-Carlton expects different things than Toyota or Publix Supermarkets or Sykes Enterprises.
In companies with strong cultures, those expectations are usually both explicit and simple. Here's one Atkins and Pearce, a specialty textile manufacturer in Covington KY.
"Adopt a standard of persuasion
Offer fact-based analysis
Follow channels of communication
Innovate, probe, problem solve
Accept constraints"
And here's what Nucor uses as its replacement for a policy manual.
"Know the job,
Ask questions and experiment.
Share what you learn
Do what it takes to be sure something goes wrong only once.
Let us know how we can help."
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Excellent points and comments...
It is important to remember that Leadership and "being the boss" are two very different things. While a great leader will usually be a great boss, a lousy boss is seldom a leader.
Leaders lead by example. Great leaders respect boundaries and lead their peers, subordinates and the senior leadership of their organization.
A great organization recruits and retains great people. In that environment, there is significant peer pressure for substandard "bosses" to rise to the occasion and become a better leader. If they don't improve, great organizations must remove substandard bosses if they intend to keep the talent they have worked so hard to find and develop.
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Thanks, Larry. The comments always add richness and perspective.
I differ with you slightly on how to define leadership. I see it as a kind of work, one that every boss has to do. From where I sit, a boss doesn't have a choice about whether he or she is a leader, but they do have a great deal of choice about the kind of leader they are.
You make an excellent point about how, in great organizations, peer pressure helps some bosses raise the quality of their game. Thanks for coming by and adding to the discussion.
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Lack of strong, fair and consistent leadership is a problem area we see over and over with small businesses - particularly businesses started by families or a group of friends. These points offer a simple and effective set of "rules to live by" for business owners and following them will head off potential disasters later on. Thanks Wally!
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Thanks for the kind words, Elizabeth. As with so many things leadership, "God is in the details." What here are some basic guidelines that working bosses have to use to guide their own behavior.
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I think that what team members want from the PM is an environment in which they can succeed. All of the detail you mention in your post lead to his, but in general team members want to be put in a situation where they can do their best. In return, project managers want their team to do well so that the project succeeds and the PM looks good.
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I think that's a good way to summarize, Chris. But I think the best bosses also want to help their people succeed individually. After more than 40 years, I still follow a concept of leadership that I learned in the Marines. A boss has two jobs. He or she must accomplish the mission and care for the people.
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Wally,
From reading your posts/articles I think you know that we don't need bosses: we need mentors and coordinators, people who would look for our interests and square them with the interests of the team, organization and even larger society. And the best way to make sure that these people are really into helping us is to have them chosen (as in selected) by us from our peers, like at W.L.Gore and Semco SA.
To succeed in the workplace as well as the market place, we need no bosses, we need friends. But company owners don't get this and continue to parachute down their ill-chosen bastards, starting from CEOs and down. Hence the management problems that never end.
Tell me if I'm wrong.
Happy New Year!
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Thanks for stirring the pot, Andrei. I think friends are important, but I think we need bosses. The two companies you mention (who happen to be favorites of mine as well) have bosses, but they choose them differently than most US companies today. Both know that there are times when someone needs to decide and times when someone must be responsible for confronting poor performance or unacceptable behavior. But they use peer pressure as well as boss pressure to do those things.
I'd like to think that we'll wind up choosing leaders the way that those companies do, but we have to supplement the choosing method with changes in the day-to-day operating culture. I don't think you're wrong, but I would quibble with your use of the word, "friend."
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Wally,
Thanks for you reply.
Mulling the word use(and English isn't my first language,) let me say this:
If your coach and mentor isn't your friend, try an enemy.
I used the word in this context, not as "a drinking buddy" one. Besides, you likely know that "bosses" at W.L. Gore and Semco have little resemblance to what the word "boss" means to any wage slave around the world. Hence my assertion that we need no bosses... You don't need one, do you?
best,
and a happy bossless New Year!
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Thanks for returning, Andrei. You get special points for mastery of a second language. I would never have guessed the English was not your first.
The key issue as I see it is that you're using the term "boss" to describe a type of behavior and I'm using the term to mean a job that can be done in many different ways. Either way, I think we agree on what we want to experience and to see in our organizations, regardless of what we call it.
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