IT'S OKAY TO MANAGE YOUR BOSS book
If you are like most employees, you answer to multiple bosses -- some directly, and others indirectly. You are often pulled in different directions by these competing authority figures with competing interests and agendas. All of them have the ability to improve or worsen your daily work conditions, your chances of getting rewards, and your long term career prospects. And all of them are different. Some are great. Some are good. Some are mediocre. Some are pretty bad. Some are downright horrible. Some are true jerks. They each have their own style, strengths, and weaknesses.
Under these circumstances, you are the only one you can control. You can control your role and conduct in each of these relationships. You can control how you manage and how you get what you need from these relationships. You have no choice: If you want to survive, succeed, and prosper, you have to get really good at managing your bosses.
Why? The boss - at every level - is the most important person in the workplace today. On this there is widespread consensus: Study after study show that the relationship employees have with their bosses is the number one factor in the ability of employees to produce high quality work consistently, to feel good about work, to earn credit and flexible work conditions and greater rewards.
If you are looking for guidance on how to manage your boss, there are zillions of so-called experts out there who will be happy to provide it. The problem is that so much of the advice about "managing up" or "managing your boss" out there doesn't tell the whole story. This book is written for people who want to be high-performers. In order to be a high performer in today's workplace, you need to create high-engaged relationships with every boss - whether that boss is great, awful, or somewhere in between.
No matter who your boss may be on any given day, no matter what her style and preferences may be, there are four basics that you absolutely must take responsibility for getting from that boss:
1. Clearly spelled out and reasonable expectations, including specific guidelines and a concrete timetable.
2. The skills, tools, and resources necessary to meet those expectations or else an acknowledgement that you are being asked to meet those expectations without them.
3. Accurate and honest feedback about your performance as well as course-correcting direction when necessary.
4. The fair quid pro quo - recognition and rewards - in exchange for your performance.
208 pp / Hardcover / Jossey-Bass, September 14, 2010 / $23.95
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