9 Powerful Practices of Really Great Bosses

9 POWERFUL PRACTICES OF REALLY GREAT BOSSES

9 POWERFUL PRACTICES OF REALLY GREAT BOSSES

STEPHEN E. KOHN

AND

VINCENT D. O’CONNELL

Copyright © 2013 by Stephen E. Kohn and Vincent D. O’Connell

All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

9 POWERFUL PRACTICES OF REALLY GREAT BOSSES COVER DESIGN BY ROB JOHNSON

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Previously published as 6 Habits of Highly Effective Bosses

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Print ISBN-13: 978-1-60163-272-2

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For our families and close friends who strengthen our understanding of interpersonal skills every day.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Chapter 1

Introducing the 9 Powerful Practices of Really Great Bosses

Chapter 2

Powerful Practice #1: Expanding Self-Awareness

Chapter 3

Powerful Practice #2: Practicing Empathy

Chapter 4

Powerful Practice #3: Following Golden Rule Principles

Chapter 5

Powerful Practice #4: Safeguarding Credibility

Chapter 6

Powerful Practice #5: Maintaining Proper Boundaries

Chapter 7

Powerful Practice #6: Criticizing Artfully

Chapter 8

Powerful Practice #7: Adopting a Coaching Style

Chapter 9

Powerful Practice #8: Flexing to Different People Styles

Chapter 10

Powerful Practice #9: Transforming Conflict Into Opportunity

Epilogue

Glossary

Notes

Index

About the Authors

FOREWORD

The value of people skills in organizational management is widely accepted, but sometimes overlooked when companies consider, How do we get managers better at performing their supervisory roles? It might be that organizations view other, technical aspects of a manager’s job as more trainable. Consequently, companies gear their training toward filling gaps in knowledge about current best practices, introducing new, productivity-enhancing technology, reviewing company policy updates, and the like. Perhaps, there is an unspoken belief that managers either have interpersonal skills or they don’t—so the strategy is not to spend resources on people skill training but rather on hiring the right person with natural aptitudes in human relations, on placing individuals into leadership positions who can build the type of solid, productivity-enhancing relationships that benefit the organization.

Certainly, my organization and countless others like ours declare, in job postings and position descriptions, that our interest is in hiring and promoting individuals to management positions who have the sensitivity and social orientation to perform the people management aspects of the boss role effectively. And best efforts are made to select those whom we believe will succeed in this aspect of the supervisory role. But by labeling these somewhat ephemeral competencies as "people skills," isn’t there a tacit understanding that these are actual competencies, which can be developed? A paradigm shift might be indicated. If organizations and individuals want to improve performance in overall management practice, perhaps they should be on the lookout for guidance and direction in people skill development.

Actually, some intriguing questions arise when one considers the prospect of dedicating time and resources to learning more about the human relations aspects of management.

- What are these people skills, really?

- How do individuals get better at the people part of management, especially if it doesn’t come really easy for them, because their competencies are more of a technical nature or based more on industry knowledge?

- And in working on becoming a better manager of people, how do individuals best focus their time and efforts? Where do they begin, and what should they be doing from some foundation-level, beginning point forward?

What I admire most about The 9 Powerful Practices of Really Great Bosses is that it provides real, concrete, and quite specific answers to these questions. Instead of offering nebulous platitudes or broad parables, this book gives the reader clear direction and a sensible set of suggestions about how to actually build and practice people skills.

Stephen E. Kohn and Vincent O’Connell have again boiled down their guidance to leaders nicely—there are nine powerful practices of effective people management which they insist matter most. Their message fits well with organizational thinking about how to perform skill or work processes more effectively: The trick is to identify the most relevant competencies, and then to gain mastery over them. The book tells us the aptitudes that truly matter most, and how to develop them with greater proficiency.

Moreover, the book is easy to read. I like the way in which the case examples that Kohn and O’Connell use ring so very true. This book is simply a great way to get grounded about the habits that help insure success in people management.

Finally, if you have picked up this book and are reading this, you are no doubt attracted to this subject matter. So, you are already on your way to building self-awareness—the first of the nine powerful practices that Kohn and O’Connell espouse. That is, you know people skills matter, and that mastery over them is a lifelong learning project. So, I encourage you to feed this curiosity about yourself. It will make you not just a more effective manager, but a more effective person in building important relationships in your life outside work, as well. Best wishes, and good luck!

—Raymond G. Steitz, senior V.P., human resources, Olam Americas

PREFACE

As consultants and trainers dedicated to building emotionally intelligent human relations competencies of managers, we spend a lot of time talking to individuals in different types of organizations and in different roles within these enterprises about the issue of what it really takes to be an effective boss. It’s a topic that elicits many viewpoints, which trend rather equally between two distinct yet overlapping perspectives. One involves opinions about what causes seemingly qualified leaders to fail, thereby implying that one can learn much about being an effective boss by understanding the behaviors that prevent managers from being as successful as they should be. The other involves focusing on the more positive assessment of attributes shown by bosses that staff admires most.

We are always struck by the frequency with which we hear about instances where strategically brilliant individuals or technical experts with truly superior knowledge and skills in the organization’s core business fall short as leaders because of shortcomings in what is typically described as their inability to manage people. Behaviors cited to describe this rather wide spectrum of poor people management skills typically include poor approaches to interpersonal communication, impolite reactions or rudeness, micromanagement of tasks that staff are hired to be able to handle themselves, poor listening and one-sided dialogues with staff, and a fear of approaching the boss with issues because of their prior off-putting emotional reactions. Of course, there are many, many others, but in the end they all relate quite directly to diminished emotional intelligence, or EQ.

Often, we hear a sense of resignation that those lacking people management skills and EQ are doomed to always be this way, implying that these are not truly skills but personality traits engrained in one’s DNA that cannot be altered. Pessimism abounds about a leader’s ability to change who they are when it comes to exhibiting beneficial human relations skills.

We do not share this viewpoint; on the contrary, we see time and again that awareness about a set of indispensable people management approaches and skills contributes to far healthier reactions to the same workplace stimuli later in one’s career. These healthier responses involve approaches to staff that fall within the realm of people management. And, the managers themselves see the very positive effects that ensue from applying new strategies to the same essential circumstances.

Managers we have coached have participated in 360 degree multi-rated feedback surveys before our training and coaching and then at a reasonable interval after the training and coaching have wound down or ended. In many instances they receive statistically significant improvements in ratings from subordinates, peers, and their bosses on measures of human relations and emotional intelligence competencies. The conclusion we have made, and one that is proper given the empirical evidence, is that these are skills that can be learned, integrated, and refined within the practice of managers who displayed interpersonal difficulties with staff in the past. Lacking people skills is not predestination, but a skill gap that can be filled with proper learning, practice and reinforcement of effective techniques.

Nearly a decade ago, we began to assemble the most salient practices of bosses that direct reports admire. Our expressed intention was to focus on those areas of being an effective boss that mattered most and which, if developed and implemented routinely, created the best opportunity for impactful change and better leadership results. Each of these nine practices continue to apply, within a framework that assumes there are foundation-level skills and traits to develop and apply in any managerial circumstance. Upon this solid foundation of interpersonal attributes, we have identified a set of proven strategies to avoid common pitfalls of managing people in a way that diminishes their loyalty, respect, and willingness to be active followers. Finally, we suggested skills of a more advanced nature that build upon the layers below them.

The representation of this framework of effective people management was a pyramid with six building blocks: three at the base, two in the middle, and one reflecting a capstone competency. Since we originally presented our 6 Habits of Highly Effective Bosses, we have continued to observe the model in action. We still believe in its core framework and six original building blocks, but we believe that each layer had a critical strategy missing. Consequently, our six-part model has morphed into one with nine parts, still assembled in a pyramid shape that conveys the view that a strong base is essential, a middle row applies these base skills, and more advance capstone competencies rest on top of both lower rows.

Why did we select the additional building blocks that now comprise our nine-part model? The answer is as simple as this: growing experience. The six-part framework of people management certainly continues to apply, but we have been struck by some important missing pieces. We believe that we have retained the essential simplicity of learning and applying our model, while enhancing the ultimate value of our guidance for improving people management skills.

Our book’s mission, presented in the 6 Habits of Highly Effective Bosses, still applies:

This book shares our approach to developing leaders’ human relations skills, so that managers who implement our model become more productive in their positions, create advancement opportunities for themselves in their careers, and, as importantly, apply these skills effectively to a broad range of interpersonal situations in their own lives.

Indeed, an outcome we wish to produce from this enhanced model remains engendering a paradigm shift from perceiving the strategies we discuss as soft skills, which can potentially be misconstrued as competencies that are less substantive than others of a more technical nature. We continue to use the acronym SOLID—Skills for Organizational Leadership and Individual Development—to make the case that these seemingly soft skills are actually the firm and quite real factors in a manager’s success. These are in fact hard skills in both senses of the word: solid and concrete aspects of a manager’s practice, and also a bit difficult to actualize in the day-to-day challenges that leading others poses.

We encourage you to review these essential people management strategies and build them into your management practice so they become rather instinctual, like good habits one has internalized. If you do so, the part about this SOLID model being hard—as in difficult to implement—will erode rather quickly. By way of contrast, the part about this SOLID model being hard—as in ageless, enduring, and genuine—remain a core descriptor of the approaches we suggest.

It continues to be very exciting for us to share our ideas with others, focusing on helping people develop their full potential, and to have these people then help develop the potential of others, in turn. We remain hopeful that you enjoy the process of reading the material and using the exercises we share as much as we enjoyed the process of putting it together for you.

1

INTRODUCING THE 9 POWERFUL PRACTICES OF REALLY GREAT BOSSES

These days, it is very popular for organizations to formulate a people strategy. Typically, it is an employee relations theme promoted within the organization, summarizing an enterprise-wide effort to leverage human capital in pursuit of the corporate mission. Companies actually incorporate these strategies into their logos, with labels such as putting people first¹ or people before strategy.²

Putting people first is certainly a worthy goal. A company that focuses on the assets inherent in its human resources will foster an internal business environment that is attentive to the talent that lies within the organization and to ways in which this talent’s full potential can be deployed and leveraged. However, organizations have finite resources, and they face the daily pressures of satisfying highly demanding customers. As such, decisions must be made about which people-oriented priorities are most important and how these priorities will be promulgated, implemented, and then supported. What, then, are the key determinants of an optimal corporate people strategy?

Some organizations may construct new compensation models, thereby placing great emphasis on rewarding excellent work performance through monetary incentives. Other organizations may augment benefit packages. These strategies are important, but research has shown that these types of extrinsic rewards often fail to motivate excellent job performance as effectively as the more intrinsic rewards of work.³

Indeed, work offers many types of intrinsic rewards: learning, developing new skills, socialization opportunities within the process of teamwork, and even the more altruistic rewards stemming from the joy of helping customers grow their businesses and seeing them prosper as a result. Our experience is that when people