Open HR Resources: Managing Up - Understanding Your Boss's Communication Style

Friday, October 29, 2010

Managing Up - Understanding Your Boss's Communication Style

Managing Up – Understand your boss’s communication style and help with his/her goals.

*Strategies:

Communicate Well
Recognize your own strengths and weaknesses
Use your boss’s strengths/weaknesses
Request feedback
Remember to keep your business relationship about business
Respect the chain of command; don’t go over his/her head!
Never go to your boss with a problem unless you have a solution

*Based on Wayne Turk’s article in AT & L, Mar-Apr 2007 – The Art of Managing Up.

Understanding Power And The Different Types To Extend and Manage Your Own Influence

Understand Power And The Different Types to Extend And Manage Your Own Influence, As Well As To Understand That Of Your Supervisor And Those In Leadership Roles Around You -

Expert Power: The capacity to influence because of your skill or knowledge, or presumed to have.

Referent Power: Derived from being liked, admired and identified with.

Associate Power: Based upon who one knows.

Types of Leadership Style -

Authoritarian: believes employees need constant attention.

Lassez Fare: allows employees freedom in handling their responsibilities.

Companionable: creates and maintains a friendship type relationship with employees.

Synergistic: fosters team development by taking advantage of differences to create strengths and collaborative efforts to the benefit of the whole.

Great leaders take advantage of all four styles to address the situation at hand.