- Banging Pots
- The Problem with Time Management
- Managing Your Managers
- Needs Explicit and Needs Implicit
- Management Value Added
- Bridging an Unbridgeable Gap
- Knowing versus DoingTraction versus Slippage
- The Good Business ReasonDesigning Your Project Portfolio
- Making Teams WorkControlling the Cave People
- The Rest of the Cast of Characters: The Committed and the Compliant
- Using Technology to Assure Accountability and Create Traction
- Maintaining Traction
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Managing Your Managers
In order to take back your time, your life, and your career, you need to make a new kind of change in your approach to self-management. You must step into the realm of managing your managers and thereby altering their expectations related to your time. The goal is to achieve complete alignment between what your bosses want (and perhaps need) you to do and what you believe you really should do.
In the same way that you coordinate the schedule in your PDA and your laptop with the one in your desktop computer, you need to continually coordinate with your bosses to ensure that you are clear, on track, and working from the same plan.
All of this starts with having a happy and supportive boss. And that means a successful boss. Your boss has to be successful. For if he is not, his failure may cast a negative light on everyone on his team. Many potentially great careers have been stalled, not because of the effort of the individual, but because of a boss who failed to make an impact, who failed to demonstrate his own value and the value of those on his team.
The first step in managing your manager is to move beyond your own needs to examine your bosses’ needs. Sounds reasonable—but understanding those needs and figuring out what to do to meet them isn’t usually straightforward. In fact, it’s a challenge in itself, requiring a whole new set of skills most people have never thought about.