If you want your business or department to do more than survive but also to thrive, you need to think about how your Boss Effect will impact on everyone within it.
Investing the effort in working out your boss style can save you time and money and help you to manage more confidently and competently. One of the most obvious and useful development opportunities is to learn from the good habits of successful bosses and the bad habits from others.
The main trap to avoid is trying to be something you are not. It is unlikely to work and will make for an unpleasant experience for you and your employees. The more you understand about yourself as a manager, the more these skills are going to prove useful in managing others.
If you haven’t already done so, consider investing in training designed to help you to identify your leadership and management style. As part of considering your style of leadership and management, ask yourself the following questions:
1. What are your work values and how do they translate into your work behaviours?
For example, do you want your employees to feel valued, supported and included at work? Or are you not really bothered about how they feel, as they are only there to do a job?
2. What is your approach to life?
Are you a ‘work hard; play hard’ or ‘it can wait until tomorrow’ kind of person? How will that translate into the working environment of your organisation? What employment experience do you want for you and your employees?
3. Why are you doing what you are doing?
If you are in a particular job, or have set up a business, even if you didn’t start out intending to employ people, what keeps you doing it? The reasons may range from self-preservation because you need to work to pay the bills, to being self-employed because you are not good at being employed by someone else. If your answer to this question is that you are a reluctant boss and have found yourself doing by it accident rather than design, then an additional question for you is “Do you really want to be a boss?” If the answer is no, I suggest you consider a change of role that doesn’t require you to manage others. Focus on work you enjoy doing, rather than risk becoming a bad boss.
Working out the answers to these three questions will help you with many aspects of People Management including recruitment, reward, training, development and team motivation. Understanding your ‘boss effect’ and the impact it has on your people can take you a long way towards building a more productive team.
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