Becoming Boss by Lindsey Pollak

Author:Lindsey Pollak
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780062323316
Publisher: Business
Published: 2014-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Okay. . . . I guess that’s it . . .

(Kidding!)

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about a variety of communication skills because how you communicate is one of the most impor-tant contributors to your success as a leader. Next, we’ll dive into another crucial element of your leadership journey: managing people.

CHAPTER 5

Manage

Driving the Truck, Giving Out Trophies, and Closing Your Door Almost All the Way

As you’ll recall from the introduction, my first official management stint lasted three short weeks. But even that limited tenure was enough time for me to learn one of a new boss’s most important lessons: succeeding as an individual contributor is not, not, not the same as succeeding as a manager.

Being a great salesperson does not automatically make you a great sales manager. Being a great actor does not make you a great director. Being a great councilmember does not make you a great mayor. And for me, being great at developing marketing partnerships with women’s professional associations did not make me remotely competent at managing my first-ever direct report, Alex, to do the same. While I did a fairly good job of teaching him the importance of these relationships to our company and how they would ultimately benefit our customers—the professional women accessing career advice on WorkingWoman.com—I continued to do all of the work I’d been doing previously, such as negotiating agreements and reaching out to new potential partners, myself. I assigned Alex a few administrative tasks, but I kept all of the important stuff for myself and wondered why he didn’t seem all that busy while I was more slammed than ever trying to manage him and do all of my work, too.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

I couldn’t resist stealing the title of this section from a book by executive leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith: what got you here won’t get you there. It’s the perfect way to instill the outrageously impor-tant message that I myself failed to grasp and legions of new managers have struggled with as well: while being a great employee got you promoted, being a manager is a totally different position requiring a totally different skillset and a totally different mind-set.

Don’t just take my word for it (or Marshall Goldsmith’s). Google it.

In 2009, Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, launched an empirical study to figure out the differences between the best and the worst bosses at Google (which, by the way, consistently ranks as young professionals’ most desired employer). The company had always believed that because they hired really smart people, all a boss at Google had to do was leave people alone and provide technical wisdom when requested. Well, they couldn’t have been more wrong.

Bock and his team’s study, dubbed Project Oxygen (and comprising, in true Google style, more than ten thousand observations about managers), found that technical expertise ranked last among the predictors of a boss’s effectiveness. Instead, employees most wanted “even-keeled” bosses who made time for one-on-one meetings, helped them solve problems, and took an interest in their lives and careers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.