The Boss Show Blog

Making It Real: Female Bosses

As much as we’d like to deny it, were all sexist.  Every man, every woman among us.  This week, take an honest look at how your own sexism plays out in your work life.  For example, think about your female colleagues – in what ways would you regard them differently if they were male?  How do your expectations of your female colleagues compare with your expectations of your male colleagues? If your boss were the other gender, what difference would that make to you and your working relationship?

And once you’ve answered those questions for yourself, have a chat with a colleague or three about them – especially someone of the opposite gender.

Female Bosses: We Need More

We need more women in positions of authority at all levels in all our institutions, AND we need more feminine capacities in all our leaders, male and female.

The rising tide of the male-dominated culture has lifted many boats in the last few hundred years.  Stunning accomplishments in science and technology have eased enormous poverty and misery in human populations across the globe.

But that testosterone tide is turning into a tsunami that threatens to overwhelm the planet.  The horrific, life-threatening, nature-destroying crises we face globally will not succumb to technology and muscle alone, will not succumb to the individualistic , competitive, nature-dominating orientation that has characterized the masculine approach to progress.

The dominance of the unhealthy masculine is robbing us of our children’s future.

Now of course every individual and every culture benefits from a well-developed masculine side AND a well-developed feminine side.  This is not about subjugating the masculine to the feminine in retaliation for centuries of the reverse.

This is about balance; about tipping the scales in a healthier direction to meet the world’s needs – a world that must value collaboration over competition; empathy over victory; respect over righteousness.

These are the qualities that women — genetically programmed to be caretakers — are uniquely suited to offer.  The suffering in our world – rampant across income levels, across cultures, and across species – cries out for caretaking before it’s too late.

Making It Real: Leadership Agility

If you want to be able to work better with your boss, you have to understand his level of development – what Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs call “Leadership Agility” (in their book of the same name).

To develop that understanding, we offer three suggestions:

1. Next time you find yourself wanting to ream your boss an entirely new bodily orifice, take a moment to try to understand what it is about the lens that he looks through – his stage of development – that makes the way he acts look right to him.
2. To get clearer on that, pick up the book Leadership Agility. Its stories of leaders at various stages will give you some insight you didn’t have, guaranteed.
3. Finally, pick up another copy of the book – for your boss.  Maybe drop it on her desk anonymously.  Why?  The stories it tells about how leaders’ behavior changes as they develop might just give your boss something concrete to shoot for if she’s really interested in becoming better at what she does.  (And if she’s not, well, never mind.  No point in leading an un-thirsty horse to water.)

Why Your Boss’s Stage of Development Matters

Like to tell you a story about a graphic design studio called 5-Color Graphic Arts.

Angela is the founder and boss at 5-Color.   Now Angela, interestingly enough, only sees … five colors:  she sees red, blue, yellow, orange, and purple.  Everything she designs is in those five colors.  What she can’t see, strangely, is green.  Anything green is actually invisible to her.

Now Angela’s employees like to criticize her behind her back because she can’t see green.  Jonathan is the worst offender.  “Why can’t Angela see green?” he asks his colleagues daily in a bewildered voice.  “She oughtta be able to see green!  What’s wrong with her that she can’t see green?  Hey, Boss, look – green!  See that?  It’s green.”

Now if I were coaching Jonathan (and this is an executive coaching trick – don’t try this at home), I might say, “Hey, Jonathan — how’s it workin’ for you to demand she sees green?”  I might suggest that he try showing up for meetings with Angela in colors that she can actually see.

On the Boss Show today, we talked about stages of leadership development.

What will this knowledge get you?  It’ll get you what Jonathan hasn’t gotten – a level of understanding of your boss that helps you to work with him better.  It’s that simple.

See, your boss’s developmental stage is a lot like Angela’s color sense.  It tells you what he can and can’t see – tells you what he’s capable of and not capable of, tells you what motivates him, and what kinds of strategies make sense to him and why.  If you want him to have a green consciousness, and he can’t see green, well maybe you can learn to forgive him for that – and maybe you can get some insight into how to work with the other colors that appeal to him.

The alternative is being Jonathan — criticizing your boss for what she can’t see, expecting her to be someone she’s not – expecting her to get over her colorblindness, like, now.  How well is that workin’ for ya, Jonathan?

See, we’re all trapped within our level of development.  We’re not trapped in it forever.  We can grow to the next level.  But that doesn’t happen overnight.    So we might as well accept where we are and where our boss is – and work with it in two ways:

1. deliver what the boss needs at her level, to the limits of our capability and our integrity, plus
2. help her fix whatever she can fix without the ability to see green.

Now if you’re at a later stage of development than your boss – and you’re really skillful – you can help your boss see green where she hasn’t seen it before.  But you can’t expect her to see it overnight. And first, you have to understand that her stage of development matters to you.

Making It Real: The Boss’s Influence

As never before, this world needs leaders.  In fact, given the state of Spaceship Earth and all its life forms at this fateful juncture in history, this world needs everyone – needs you – to step up as a leader.  As I said in my High Horse, if you have influence on another soul – influence, the topic of today’s show – then you wear the responsibility and the opportunity of leadership.  I beg you not to wear them lightly.  It is far too late for despair; it is time for leadership and action.

Who are you?  How do you show up in the world?  In my High Horse earlier in the show I suggested that these questions govern your capacity as a leader.  I offered up four qualities to attend to:  authenticity, openness, ethicality, and commitment to a cause greater than yourself.

To make it real this week, rate yourself on each of these qualities:

1. How authentic are you?  How willing to stand up for what you believe, to show up as your highest self, to live up to your full potential?
2. How open are you?  How good a listener?  Do you regularly question your assumptions? Do you invite others to challenge your perspectives?
3. How ethical are you?  Anything you do that affects another living thing has ethical implications.  How often does that still, small voice of conscience rear its little head and challenge you, asking you to step up to a higher bar of behavior?
4. And finally, to what extent are you committed to something larger than you?  What are you committed to?  And does your behavior reflect that commitment?  That’s called integrity.

To lead a leader’s life, you have to ask and answer these questions constantly, day after day, year after year.  They become the fabric of your life.  And your life demands no less.

And then, to build skills of influence atop that personal, who-you-are foundation, check out Plank 7 of our book, Land On Your Feet, Not On Your Face.  Many of the tips we’ve offered in this show are there.  Practice those tips and you’ll be “making it real.”

Anthony Weiner & The Boss’s Influence

Yes of course I’m going to mention Anthony Weiner in my High Horse today.  What kind of talk show host would I be if I didn’t?  But you’ll have to wait.  The theme of the show, after all, is bosses, and working with bosses.  I promise, I will make a logical  connection with the Weiner.

If you held a gun to my head and requested a one-word answer to what leadership is all about?  I’d say … influence. If you have any influence on another human being, you’re a leader, like it or not.  And the more influence you have, the more successful a leader you are.  Obvious, right?

In today’s show we’ve got strategies to offer you to become a better leader, a more successful influencer – strategies that come from Plank 7 in our book Land On Your Feet, Not On Your Face: A Guide to Building Your Leadership Platform. And we invite you to call or write us with some strategies of your own.  But none of these strategies will work unless you set them in the context of the Most Important Thing.  The Most Important Thing? It’s not what you do, or how you do it.  It’s Who You Are.

In the groundbreaking book Fierce Conversations, author Susan Scott says there is no viable separation of our personal and professional lives. “We are ourselves all over the place, and it is our real self that is experienced at a deeply personal level by everyone on the receiving end of us, whether we acknowledge it or not.”  Who are you, all over the place? …

We’ve gotten some pretty nasty insights in the last couple weeks into who Anthony Weiner is – a man previously considered to have gobs of influence.  Suddenly, because Who He Is now shows up in a tragically comic way, his ability to influence is stripped down to nothing — pun intended.

So as we discuss strategies for wielding influence – strategies which, by the way, can apply to bosses and bossees alike – remember that the limiting factor on how well these strategies work is  “who you are.”

As I ride this week’s high horse into the sunset, let me suggest four simple guidelines for the “who you are” piece:   Authenticity, openness, ethicality, and commitment to a cause larger than you.

Now each of these four qualities is useless on its own.  Like threads in a tapestry, they are inextricable one from another.  Anthony Weiner proved himself, in at least one way, to be open.  But open, without ethical, does not a leader make.  Hitler was committed to a cause larger than himself:  the supremacy of the Aryan race.  But that commitment, minus the ethical, made him worse than dangerous.  You get the idea.

Authentic, open, ethical, and committed to a cause larger than you.  How would you measure yourself on those four scales?  In that measurement lies the true assessment of your leadership capacity – your capacity to influence.

Making It Real: Motivation II

On each of the following six questions, rate yourself on a scale of 1-5.

• Question 1:  “I’m given as much freedom as I can handle, and as my job allows, so I can take ownership of my work, and feel proud, creative, and trusted.”  (self-determination)
• Question 2:  “I feel a valued part of my organization and of my team.  I have excellent relationships at work.”  (connection)
• Question 3:  “My job responsibilities has meaning and value to me – it fits what I see as my career purpose.” (meaning)
• Question 4:  I see how my work fits into a greater whole in a way that motivates me to do my best.” (context)
• Question 5:  “My talents, skill set, and temperament are perfect for my job responsibilities.” (fit)
• Question 6:  “I have all the opportunities I need to grow personally and professionally at work.” (growth)

Each of the 6 questions above reflects one of the 6 “shovels” of motivation we discuss in our book Land On Your Feet, Not On Your Face: A Guide to Building Your Leadership Platform

Now once you take this little survey, look at your lowest 1 or 2 ratings and have the courage to have a conversation with your boss about how to raise those scores.

If you also ARE a boss, give the survey to each of your direct reports and schedule a conversation with them, one-on-one, to discuss the results.  Actions leading from these conversations can in short order produce happier, more productive employees.

Remember from our Boss Trivia Factoid of the Week that employees who have positive attitudes – and they get it from the six shovels -  evoke half again as much customer loyalty and produce almost half again as much, as the average workplace Eeyore.

Visualizing Motivation

Welcome to Steve’s Guided Visualization Moment.  Leadership guru Stephen Covey said that all peak performers are visualizers, so I’d like to give you a chance to become a peak performer.  So close your eyes …

It’s Groundhog Day, and the hero of our little tale … is you.

You wake up to go to work.  You’ve been working there for a year.  It’s a job you were excited about when you saw it advertised.    It seemed a perfect fit.  You hoped against hope they’d offer it to you, and when they did – whoa! ecstatic.  Couldn’t wait to tell everybody.

But as you think about commuting to work this morning, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach, and in your heart and various other vital organs.  You don’t know how it turned out this way.  The last thing you want to do right now is spend another eight hours – or god forbid nine, or ten – in that place.

Un-motivated?  The word doesn’t even begin to cover it!  All you want to do is get back in the bed and hide under the covers– so … what the hell, you go back to bed and hide under the covers … and you cycle down into this depressing spiral, ruminating on all the ways you are not motivated to go into work.  And as you ruminate, you say to yourself, “Man, I should call or write into The Boss Show.  I know what motivation is, because I know that I ain’t that.  I know exactly what pieces of the puzzle are missing for me to feel motivated to do good work…”

… and as you enumerate those missing puzzle pieces – what would you say they are, by the way? — you fall asleep dreaming that your workplace has been relocated to the pit of hell …

… and you wake up, and the first thing that comes to mind is your job.  You’ve been working there for a year.  It’s a job you were excited about when you saw it advertised.    It seemed a perfect fit.  You hoped against hope they’d offer it to you, and when they did – whoa! ecstatic.  Couldn’t wait to tell everybody.

And the incredible thing is – it’s even better than you’d imagined.  You never knew it was possible to actually love going to work every day.  I mean, sure, it’s got its little frustrations, but for the most part you can’t imagine enjoying a job more.  Heading in to work, you think about how lucky you are, and you daydream about all the pieces of your job that are working to keep you so motivated … and you think, “Man, I should call or write into The Boss Show.  I know what motivation is, because I’m one of the rare ones who has all the puzzle pieces I need to thrive in this job … ”

What are those puzzle pieces?  Whether you woke up on the Good Witch side of Groundhog Day, or the Bad Witch side, we’re really curious what you see as the puzzle pieces that lead to happily motivated employees…

Making It Real – Thinking Like a Leader

To make it real, be like Patricia (see blog post below).  Think like a leader.  If you’re a boss, be in the business of asking questions and finding collaborative solutions.

Ask questions like the ones Patricia asked, and request total honesty, guaranteed recrimination-free, in the process.  Questions like:

1. On your best days, what makes you proud of the work you do?  What makes it fun?
2. On your worst days, what makes you want to throw your hands up in frustration – or worse yet, quit?
3. What would make you more effective at your job?
4. What would make your job fit you better?
5. How would you describe your relationships with your customers and your suppliers?  And how would you make them better?
6. If we were to look at the impact of what we do and how we do it on ALL our stakeholders – our employees, customers, suppliers, investors, our town – even the planet, because no organization can get away anymore with putting anything toxic into the environment in the name of profit – if we were to explore our impact, what would we find?

These are the kinds of questions the most evolved leaders ask. And when they ask, they listen.  And when they listen, they find the time to act.

Thinking Like a Leader

A Tale of Two Bosses

Guess which one thinks like a leader:

Tad has just been named to an executive position at Acme Widgets.  It’s the opportunity he’s been waiting for!  In his first day, he sits down with his new team and delivers what he sees as an inspiring speech.  “It’s time to kick ass,” he says. “We’re going to move this division forward like we’ve never done before.  I’m committed to Acme becoming the #1 widget-maker in Springfield.  With your help, your commitment, and your drive, I know we can do it.  And I know you think so, too.

“I’ll be meeting with each of you in the coming week, for two reasons:

1. to have you describe to me the nuts and bolts of your part of the operation, including roles and responsibilities, processes and procedures, cycles and deadlines.  I want to know everything about what you do and how you do it.  I want to know what you know, so that I can offer some suggestions to make it better – and because I want to be able to have your back whenever you need me to.
2. Secondly, I want to see a thorough list of your goals and objectives for the rest of this fiscal year, including metrics, accountability strategies, and potential challenges.  I want these to be stretch goals for you.  I want you to challenge yourself to play in a higher league.  I want every one of us to strive to be the absolute best at what we do.  That’s what makes it worth coming to work every day, and that’s what makes for success.

“Okay, enough chatting.  Let’s go do it!”

That was Tad.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Patricia has just been named to an executive position at Acme’s cross-town rival, XYZ Widgets.  It’s the opportunity she’s been waiting for.  In her first day, she sits down with her team.  She starts by asking them to check in, one at a time.  First she asks for a little background –job responsibilities, history with the company, as well as whatever they want to say (in a minute or two) about their personal life – partner?  kids?  hobbies?  She listens intently, occasionally asking questions.

Then Patricia says something most have not heard before.  “I’m gonna encourage you to be as absolutely honest with me as you can, whenever you can.  I promise there will never be recriminations for honesty if offered in a spirit of service.  For now, here are some things I’d like to know:

1. What concerns do you have about the transition from my predecessor to me?
2. How would you describe your management style?
3. In its best days, what makes your division a great place to work?
4. What, about the way your division operates, makes people most likely to throw their hands up in frustration – or worse yet, quit?

Patricia pauses.  “These are the kinds of questions we should be addressing consistently — and not just by you to me in a reporting relationship.  But in conversations involving every employee who cares at all about this company – which should be every employee.  Now, we’re not going to paralyze operations by have coffee klatches all day long around these questions.  And yes, the buck will stop here, and stop here whenever necessary. But we will set up appropriate ways to get honest feedback and to encourage creativity at all levels.”

“The bottom line for me,” Patricia says, “ is that our work is only worth doing if it meets 3 criteria:

1. XYZ Widgets is considered a great place to work
2. we’re producing a product that creates value in people’s lives
3. the process of producing and distributing that product is ethical from beginning to end – focused on all our stakeholders.

“And, of course,” she finishes, “I know we’ve got to make a profit in order to do all this.  Don’t think I’ve forgotten that.  But at the same time, contrary to popular opinion, profit is not our reason for existence.  Profit only makes our reason for existence sustainable.”

Okay, so you probably guessed which one – Tad or Patricia – thinks like a leader, IMHO.  Tad thinks more like a manager.  Now I hope, when you first heard Tad’s scenario, you thought, “Okay, he’s doing some things right.”  Because he is.  It’s not a matter of right or wrong.  It’s about the long-term, strategic, collaborative, relational perspective of the evolved leader.