Posted by Justen Collins on February 2, 2013
Last week’s article about the living, breathing Seinfeld characters that fill our lives generated a lot of discussion. I enjoyed hearing your stories about the oddball characters that each of you work with and endure. Let me encourage you to share those amusing tales in the comments on our website or our Brush Fire Forum Facebook page so that all the members of our community can laugh along with me. Several of you are much more entertaining than me, and I chuckled all week about some of the emails that you sent.
If you saw the title for this week and the picture above, you might think I am going to use another beloved television sitcom from my childhood to help me illustrate my points. As much of an impression that a young Alyssa Milano made on a young BDC, I did not take any lasting life lessons away from Tony Danza’s exploits. It was a great show, but only the title is applicable for our discussion this week.
This week’s Cubicle Survival Guide tip is to understand your boss. Notice I did not say to like your boss or to love your boss or to tolerate your boss. All of those are admirable goals, but the key to understanding the crucial dynamics of your office environment is to first understand your boss or manager or supervisor or whatever you call them. Each of us has to ultimately answer to someone in our careers. Even if you own your own company and work alone, you probably have a boss of some sort. It might be your clients or family or investors, but we all have someone that we need to satisfy in order to keep our paychecks coming.
Like many of you, I have had some good bosses and some not-so-good bosses through the years. A couple of them were unstable individuals that I would not trust to watch my belongings while I ran to the airport restroom. (One of them literally had framed motivational self-portrait on their desk.) A few of them – on the other hand – became close friends over time that I still keep in touch with even though we no longer work in the same companies. Obviously, having a boss that you can develop a friendly relationship with is preferable, but having a boss that you genuinely dislike – perhaps even for valid reasons – does not have to create a roadblock for your career survival and advancement.
The key to keeping your relationship with your boss in perspective is to remember the phrasing of this week’s tip. Your goal is not to befriend or wow your boss, but to first simply make every effort to understand them. This is going to require more than a cursory assessment of the man or woman in charge, mind you. Luckily, the office is the perfect place to conduct this analysis.
The range of interactions between your boss and the rest of the world that an average week affords you is the greatest psychology laboratory you could ask for. Every situation – from stressful emergencies to medial tasks to the settling of disputes that arise – provides a window into the internal motivations of your boss. It becomes your responsibility to play armchair psychologist and gather enough puzzle pieces to begin to see the bigger picture as it comes together.
One of the big factors that you are looking to identify is what style of management that your boss “thinks” they are employing. I say “thinks” because – deep down – most of the people managing you are trying to make up the dance steps as they go along just as much as you are. They have likely been sent to countless seminars and training sessions on effective management, but at the end of the day, they are winging it and hoping for the best. What you have to decipher as their employee is what behavior they are hoping and expecting from you. Some managers will be grateful if you proactively work to solve a problem before they are even aware of it. Other managers will see the same behavior as insubordinate and prefer that you keep them regularly informed of your activities and run any plans by them before acting on them. It is entirely up to you to properly gauge the boss that you have and act accordingly to keep things running smoothly in your world.
Another important factor to unravel is what communication style your boss utilizes. This is going to help ensure that you do not end up with unnecessary hurt feelings or find yourself saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. We all have different ways of communicating in the world, but the employee-boss dynamic is one of the most important to nail down. Sometimes you will have a boss that you can speak very frankly and openly with and not have to fear any repercussions or misunderstandings as a result. With another boss, this same conversation might be unheard of completely. I have had bosses so overly analytical and sensitive that I literally considered and weighed every word that I used during our encounters. It was not the most fun I ever had at work, but it kept me out of the doghouse with that boss more often than not.
If you don’t take the time to understand the style, motivation, and personality of your boss, you are essentially running onto a proverbial football field without wearing your helmet. You may spend your days doing the best work you know how to do, but if you don’t understand what your particular boss is expecting or needing from you, it could all be for naught. There is nothing worse than spinning your wheels on your career journey, and misunderstandings or strained feelings between boss and employee are surefire recipes for that disastrous outcome. If you have been spending more time making voodoo dolls of your boss than psychoanalyzing them, I encourage you to give it a try. To close with another paraphrased memory from my childhood; get to know what makes your boss tick “because knowing is half the battle.”
