How to be the boss everyone wants to work for

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  BY SHANNA A. HOCKING

Who is the best boss you ever had? What made this person the best boss? I’ve been fortunate to work for many amazing leaders throughout my career, and I’ve learned from all of them about the kind of leader I wanted to be. I’ve also worked for not-so-great bosses who made my work life very difficult, and, well, I’ve learned from them, too.

Many leaders believe their role is to mold their team members into what the organization wants. Or worse, into mini versions of them. This will only get you so far.

It’s an incredible privilege to lead people, to be responsible for developing future leaders. My goal as a boss is to support employees in being the best version of themselves (as defined by them) and help them reach their potential. As a leader, I want to bring out the strengths already within my team members and help them live their why.

This doesn’t mean I’ve always been the best boss. Despite my best efforts, I have unintentionally shut down conversations or rushed people along. I’ve held back on feedback because I didn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, which ended up becoming a bigger deal later. All of that to say, being the best boss doesn’t mean being perfect. It means continuing to show up as the best leader you can be, because you want to serve others. Sure, it takes extra effort to understand what people need from you as a leader; help them feel valued; communicate what’s on your heart, even through uncertainty; and be truly inclusive. And when your team thrives, you’ll know it’s all worth it.

YOUR ‘ABOUT ME’ DOCUMENT AND USER MANUAL

As I transitioned into a leadership role, I read about and reflected on the kind of leader and colleague I wanted to be. Around that same time, I came across an article that explained the concept of a User Manual, which is really just a description of the best way to work with someone. The piece, written by Abby Falik, founder and CEO of Global Citizen Year, who learned about the concept from an article by Adam Bryant, the former “Corner Office” columnist for The New York Times, really resonated with me, as I wanted to help my new team understand who I am and how I approach my work, so we could build trust faster and I could learn how to best support them.

After reflecting on Falik’s post, I spent time writing my own thoughts about my leadership style and values, and I sought input from others on what they wished they had known about me earlier on. From there, I developed what I call an “About Me” document, which I shared with my new team in a group meeting in my first week on the job. Since that meeting, it’s become a foundational part of my leadership approach.

Creating your own About Me document can build trust and clarity with a new team or with a team you’ve worked with for a long time, particularly as a reset in the remote/hybrid world. Don’t take for granted that you know each other at work. Ask people to tell their own story.

Here are parts to the About Me document and prompts that will help you create your own. 

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Nine steps to meaningful change

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By Eli Amdur

“Change is the law of life,” said John F. Kennedy, “And those who look only to the past and present are certain to miss the future.”

 

Easier said than done.

By nature, we humans – along with virtually all other creatures – like what we know and distrust what we don’t; seek our comfort zones and shun our wilderness experiences; prefer the familiar and fear the unknown.

Now, if each one of us is that way (until, of course, we learn to value newness, uncertainty, and ambiguity), then dealing with an entire organization of skeptics could be a Sisyphean task.

That’s all the more reason to approach change in a planned, thoughtful way. As we will never again live in a world without significant change, here’s a suggested nine-step road map, especially when change has to be interventional.

1. Establish the sense of urgency. If change is not needed, either is leadership. Status quo – sometimes a good thing – requires great management. But the minute change is needed, it becomes urgent, and great leadership steps in. Urgency creates momentum, and the gloomy alternative is inertia. Great leaders treat change as an urgent matter, even tough much change is slow and gradual. Deciding on that change is where the urgency is.

2. Create a steering/guiding coalition. Given either the fear of or the resistance to change, not just on the part of humans but of most creatures great and small, a small core of influencers at what could be different levels of the organization should be established to conceptualize this change and agree on how it will begin, unfold, and ultimately take shape.

3. Gather diverse but not uncontrollable input. That you need input here is a given. What it should look like and be like is the real issue. It should not be monolithic, because, as it is said, if everyone is thinking alike, only one person is thinking – and that leads to the always dangerous and almost always disastrous phenomenon: called groupthink. On the other hand, you don’t want wild, uncontrolled anarchy here either, as that will likely derail the process right here. Exciting, energetic, and even competitive ideas crashing into each other are what you’re after at this point. Continue reading →

Quiet quitting: It’s the wake-up call employers need

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by Neha Mirchandani

Employees are putting employers on notice. By “quiet quitting” or flat-out resigning, the U.S. labor force is sending a clear message about its priorities and expectations. According to a Gallup survey, half of the country’s employees define themselves as “quiet quitters,” or people who get the job done without going above and beyond.

This trend comes in the wake of a tidal wave of actual resignations, with more than 47 million people leaving their jobs last year as part of the ongoing Great Resignation. In other words, employee stressors and demands are evolving. Work/life balance, holistic wellbeing and workplace culture matter more than ever, and HR leaders now have the opportunity to look at the big picture and mend the gaps in culture and employee benefits. Here’s how employers can learn from these trends, foster engagement and ultimately boost productivity.

Understand the root causes of disengagement

What’s fueling the quiet and not-so-quiet quitting trends?

In a pandemic-hued world compounded by an economic downturn, employees are struggling with everything from added workloads, increased anxiety and childcare woes, to inflation and market volatility. So, the simple answer to why people are “quiet quitting” is their desire to avoid high stress and burnout by taking work/life balance into their own hands. To address this growing workforce need, employers need to evaluate how they are fostering employee wellbeing in all its interrelated forms: mental, physical and financial.

While the pandemic brought mental wellness to the forefront, financial wellbeing is increasingly top of mind for employees. According to BrightPlan’s 2022 Wellness Barometer Survey, financial stress is the biggest source of worry for employees (72%), which affects other dimensions of wellness. For example, PwC’s recent survey found that anxiety about finances impacts mental health, sleep, self-esteem, physical health, relationships at home, and productivity and attendance at work.

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The Rising Importance of Soft Skills in Driving Productivity

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by Maria Guadalupe and Bryan Ng

 

The economy of the future requires a workforce with strong soft skills. Investing in these crucial skills can result in increased productivity.

Soft skills – the behavioural and social traits that enable individuals to work harmoniously with one another – are not just nice to have, they’re essential for the growth of a nation.

In France, 60 percent of employers consider soft skills, such as the ability to organise, adapt and work in teams, to be more important than technical competencies. However, France is far behind other developed economies when it comes to its stock of soft skills.

In our report for the Conseil d’Analyse Economique, an independent advisory group for the French Prime Minister, we estimated how much France could benefit by closing its soft skill gap. Our findings suggest that investing in soft skills will result in higher individual, firm and aggregate productivity, and enable the expansion of sectors that are projected to see total factor productivity growth in years to come.

Measuring the gap

To estimate France’s soft skills deficit, we ranked 18 developed countries using data from the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The results indicated that France has the third-lowest average level of soft skills, ranking just above Germany and Japan. The United States, Czech Republic and Denmark took the top three spots.

Furthermore, this skill gap was as prevalent among highly educated individuals as those who have not attended university, implying that France’s soft skills deficit is not limited to certain education groups.

Soft skills gap

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What’s stopping you from reinventing your career?

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by Heather Cairns-Lee and Bill Fischer

 

 

A recent Microsoft study of 30,000 people revealed that 46% of workers are considering a major career pivot or transition after the Covid years. For many, this search goes beyond just a change of role and into the realm of personal renewal or reinvention. In our experience, many of the professionals who express such an interest in reinvention ultimately fail to follow through.

The hardest part, we’ve found, and where many professionals get stuck, is simply getting started on leaving the status quo. This is particularly true for senior executives. Personal reinvention requires reappraising life choices and imagining alternate paths — but this becomes more difficult when the path a leader is on is seen, at least outwardly, as successful. Because leaders’ identities are so dependent on their work, it can also be hard for them to consider different possibilities. And while these executives have been educated in strategic planning and change at the organizational level, reinvention at a personal level is not part of the curriculum at most business schools.

More ironically, there are also habits that are core to executives’ success that stand squarely in the way of personal reinvention. In our work teaching and coaching thousands of managers, we have identified four traps – self-sufficiency, overthinking, procrastination, and searching for the answer – that prevent leaders from taking the first steps necessary for considering and exploring possible new versions of themselves for the future.

In our work, we have found ways to help leaders recognize which traps they are falling into and start imagining a way out — largely inspired by design thinking principles such as rapid prototyping, making ideas visual, and getting quick feedback. Understanding what these traps are can help you take those first steps — and succeed in your quest for reinvention.

Self-sufficiency
Leaders often talk of their self-sufficiency with pride. These leaders rely on their own contributions, work well independently and seldom require motivation or management from others – behaviors that have earned them their senior roles. However, self-sufficiency has a flip side: It can limit connections with others, resulting in restricted access to new ideas, feedback and encouragement. It can also hide a leader’s doubts and insecurities from others. Individuals who are highly self-sufficient need others to help them overcome this trap of self-sufficiency and asking for help may seem obvious, but it also takes courage, especially when admitting to career vulnerability. Continue reading →