Managing your relationship with your boss is as important as managing relationships with your subordinates.
You should spend time building this relationship. Taking a passively reactive stance with your superior often hurts the relationship and makes both of your work less effective.
The relationship between you and your boss is between two fallible and imperfect humans who depend on each other more than they realise. Understanding both parties’ strengths, weaknesses, work styles, priorities, pressures, needs, and goals is the first step in building trust, mutual respect, and effective work relationships. In most cases, your boss depends on you more than you realise to do their job effectively.
Spend time to understand your boss. Is he or she a listener or reader? Does your boss strive on conflict or try to minimise it? Seek out information about the boss’s goals and pressures, recognise the changes in priorities and concerns, and be sensitive to a boss’s work style. If your boss is a listener, schedule the meeting and send a follow-up memo. If he or she is a reader, send the details with context first and then schedule a meeting to review the points.
Understanding your boss’s expectations can be challenging when he or she is vague, tends to avoid uncomfortable conversations, or doesn’t like to express their expectations explicitly. The following methods can help you get that information.
- Draft a detailed document, such as a PDR or a simple document, covering all the key aspects of your work and then send it to your boss for approval. Later, organise a face-to-face follow-up. Discussions like this will surface your boss’s expectations.
- Informal discussion about ‘good management’ and ‘our objectives.’
- Ask the people who have worked with or for your boss for insights.
To build successful relationships with others, you also need to understand yourself. Codependent or counterdependent behaviours can both lead to strained relationships with your boss. Such predispositions may be deeply rooted in your personalities or upbringing and hard to change, but knowing where you are on the spectrum can help you predict your reactions to conflicts and make deliberate adjustments to avoid overreactions.
Use the checklist below to build a good relationship with your boss underpinned by unambiguous mutual expectations.
Checklist for Managing Your Boss
Make sure you understand your boss and his or her context, including:
- Goals and objectives
- Pressures
- Strengths, weaknesses, blind spots
- Preferred work style
- Listener or reader
- Likes to be involved or prefers delegation
Assess yourself and your needs, including:
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Personal style
- Predisposition toward dependence on authority figures
Develop and maintain a relationship that:
- fits both your needs and styles
- is characterised by mutual expectations
- keeps your boss informed
- over-communication
- add value to the information
- communicate in the language the receiving party speaks or cares
- is based on dependability and honesty
- selectively uses your boss’s time and resources
References
- Gabarro, J.J. & Kotter, J.P. (2005) Managing Your Boss. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2005/01/managing-your-boss.