The Secret Art of Managing Your Boss, part 1

UPDATE: Be sure to check out the screencast of The Secret Art of Managing Your Boss.

I was at a conference yesterday where I gave a talk about how to manage your boss (irony: my boss asked me to give the talk).  The audience was primarily customer service and accounts receivable professionals and they seemed to dig the stuff I said, so I figured it might be worth posting here.  I use PowerPoint for talks like that, but instead of bullet-pointing people to death with a million slides, I try to compress things into a small number a slides and then talk, talk, talk.  Yesterday’s talk took about an hour, but I only had five slides-four if you don’t count the ‘intro’ slide.  But I’m digressing…

Since I was mostly talking, I’ll have to work up my notes into
something that’s readable here.  That’s why this is ‘part 1.’  There
will probably be a total of three or four entries on ‘The Secret Art of
Managing the Boss’ and I hope you find something useful.  This stuff is
pointed at the workplace, but as one of the participants noted
yesterday, she had about six ‘bosses’ and this information works well
for all of them.  She was talking about her boss at work, her family,
her outside commitments-all the places where she had to manage a
relationship with one or more people.  These relationships don’t need
to be unequal, like the boss/subordinate relationship, for this stuff
to work.  This advice will be adaptable to any of those situations
where you have to work with someone else to achieve mutually acceptable
goals.  Actually, I guess it’ll work even if you are working toward
mutually exclusive goals, but that opens up an entirely new can of
worms, so I won’t venture down that path.

Three Things
The
stuff coming up focuses upon three things.  I kept it to three things
because it’s often said that in any given line of business you only
need to know three things.  The trick is in knowing which three.  I
don’t know how true that is, but I’m running with it.  The ‘three
things’ in the business of managing your boss are: 1) Understanding
Yourself; 2) Understanding The Boss; 3) Understanding The
Relationship.  Sounds simple, eh?  Like I mentioned earlier, it’s
highly compressed. 

Perception
There
is one other element that I think wraps around these three things and
affects them.  That’s perception.  Perception will get you every time.
As you read this, you probably don’t perceive it the same as the next
person reading the same words.  That holds true for verbal
communication, body language, etc.  Our perception of reality is often
very different from the reality that others perceive.  Here’s an
exercise that has great impact in a group setting because it really
underscores how perception messes with us.  It won’t be as remarkable
as you’re sitting there reading this by yourself, but I think you’ll
get the idea. 

Read the following text:

      Finished Files are the Re-
     sult of Years of Scientif-
     ic Study Combined with the
     Experience of Many Years

Got it?  Makes no sense, huh?  Don’t worry about that.  Read it
again and just count the number of times the letter ‘F’ occurs. 

How many did you count?  If you counted less than six, go read it
again and count the number of times the word ‘of’ occurs.  In a group
of 20 people, 2/3 of them will see the letter ‘F’ occurring only three
times.  Often, you can have them read the paragraph over and over and
they’ll still miss the word ‘of.’  You probably get the idea, but in a
group of people, it’s a pretty dramatic example of how all of us
perceive reality in different ways.  We’ll see things differently from
the boss, who will see things differently from our co-worker, and so on.

Okay, that’s it for the intro part.  Part 2 of the Secret Art of
Managing Your Boss will be about ‘Understanding Yourself.’