Managing our manager is key to succeeding at work
Michael’s video about managing our manager.
Our bosses not only influence pay and conditions, they also influence our reputations and give us access to developmental opportunities. They have their own agendas, motivations, pressures and challenges. We may not be aware of most of these, but they still impact on us.
Five Rules of Managing Managers
- Understand their communication style. You’ll find a number of the ideas under the NLP Techniques section. The section on Meta-programmes will teach you what to look out for. Find a colleague who already relates well with your manager and use some of the modelling approaches to work out how they do it.
- Understand their performance expectations. Find out what what’s expected of your manager and what they expect of you. Ask if they’ll share their own objectives so you can help them achieve them.
- Actively seek feedforward and feedback. These are included on the NLP modelling page of this site.
- Be aware of how much management time you take. Respect their time. However, if in doubt, I’ve found it better to over communicate than under communicate.
- Don’t hide problems. If anything, involve them in solving them.
These rules are also a good starting point for managing our stakeholders and growing and maintaining our network.
In part two we consider managing our stakeholders.
NLP Career Section Index
NLP Career 1: Managing our manager
NLP Career 2: Managing our stakeholders
NLP Career 3: Developing our network
NLP Career 4: Getting better at what we do
NLP Career 5: Summary
