The ultimate guide to becoming a better boss in 30 days
Day 0: Don't take on a leadership role until you've had some management or mentoring experience
Becoming a boss might seem like the natural way to progress in your career. But if you have no interest in managing a team and sitting through meetings every day, you might want to think twice.
If you're not sure yet, that's OK too.
According to Bharath Jayaraman, who has worked in human resources at companies including Facebook and Amazon (he's currently the HR director at JUUL Labs), "Never make anyone a people manager without making them a mentor for a new hire on your team first."
Another option Jayaraman proposed is to organize groups of people who have expressed some desire to be managers and have them go through more formal training.
"When people go through that and then say, 'Hey, this is not what I thought I would do as a manager; I'm not sure that's for me,' that is a great outcome," Jayaraman said.
Read more.Day 1: Get to know each person on your team — including who's a 'rockstar' and who's a 'superstar'
There's no one, universal management style that works for everyone. And that's why it's so important to learn about each person on your team.
Sally Boyle, international head of human capital management at Goldman Sachs, has said "the best way to be inclusive is to really know your people." In other words, "to know every single person that works for you and know what makes them tick, what opportunities they might want, what they need to get better at, what feedback they need to have."
That includes knowing who's a "rockstar" and who's a "superstar," terms coined by Kim Scott. Scott is a former Google and Apple executive, a CEO coach, and the founder of Radical Candor. She said most great employees can be divided into two categories: rock stars and superstars.
Rockstars are all about stability (hence the "rock" in their name) — so they're the ones who wouldn't especially benefit from a promotion. Superstars are all about upward growth, and promotions may be exactly what they're looking for.
Read more here and here.Day 2: Learn which traits and behaviors make leaders at your organization excel
The best way for a new boss to earn the team's (and the company's) respect is to learn what makes leaders there excel — and start replicating those traits and behaviors.
A 2008 study by Cameron Anderson at the University of California, Berkeley, found that employees' personality traits predict their influence in an organization, even beyond factors like job performance.
As Adam Galinsky, a professor of business at the Columbia Business School, put it, you can "speed up" the process of earning respect "if you can match the cues that you're emanating with the [traits] that are valued in that group."
Read more.Day 3: Communicate your vision for the team's future to your employees
Even some of the best leaders are missing one key quality: vision.
That's according to Suzanne Bates, the CEO of Bates Communications. Vision, her model of effective leadership says, involves "generating an inspiring, enterprise-wide picture of what could be; recognizing emerging trends, and engaging all in strategy."
Leaders who demonstrate vision, Bates said, have the ability to look ahead. Perhaps most importantly, they're able to make employees feel that they're "part of something greater than themselves."
Read more.Day 4: Have a (loose) agenda for how you want to spend the next few months
As a manager, you'll necessarily have to deal with unexpected fires that pop up — but you still want to have a rough plan for hitting your goals over the next few months.
According to a Harvard Business School study, one of the defining characteristics of the most effective CEOs when it comes to time management is that they're agenda-driven.
"A CEO needs to have their own personal agenda that they determine is where they want to spend their personal time" for the next three to six months, said HBS professor Michael Porter. "They can't just react to all the requests" that come in.
Interestingly, however, the authors write in HBR that the CEOs in their study spent, on average, about 36% of their time "in a reactive mode, handling unfolding issues, both internal and external."
Read more.Day 5: Dedicate 10% of your work hours to learning new things
Sure, you're busy. In fact, you could probably spend 24 hours a day working and still not get everything done.
But it's important to leave some room in your day for intellectual exploration. Beth Comstock, former vice chair of General Electric, said in an interview with LinkedIn that it's important to "make room for discovery."
She added, "Think about how you manage your own time. Can I spend 10% of my time a week reading, going to sites like Singularity, TED, talking to people, going to industry events, asking people: What trends are you seeing? What are you nervous about? What are you excited about?"
Read more.Day 6: Stop trying to prove how smart you are and delegate tasks instead
The biggest challenge managers face is not trying to prove how smart and capable they are — even if that's what got them to the leadership role in the first place. Being a boss is about letting other people shine.
As Dennis Perkins, CEO of leadership consultancy The Syncretics Group, said that leaders "need to be able to step back, to delegate, to let others make mistakes, and to coach and mentor without necessarily solving the problems themselves."
Read more.Day 7: Set a good example for your team by cultivating a narrow 'say-do' gap
The "say-do" gap is "the space between your words and your actions."
And according to Angie Morgan, a former Marine and an author of "Spark," a narrow (or nonexistent) say-do gap is a hallmark of effective leadership.
It's about setting a good example for everyone you work with, the authors write. Even if your coworkers don't always keep their promises, you should.
Read more.Day 8: Warn your employees that you’ll probably mess up — and encourage them to call you out
You're not a perfect person, and you're hardly a perfect leader. That's OK!
Just don't pretend that you're flawless. According to Gusto COO (and former Google exec) Lexi Reese, the best thing a boss can do is communicate to their reports the type of leader they aspire to be and then say, "But I also am human and I'll probably f—k it up."
Most importantly, the boss should encourage their reports to let them know when they're falling short.
Read more.Day 9: Admit when you don't know something
Back to that imperfection idea.
A Gartner study suggests that bosses who admit they don't know everything are more successful, as long as they connect their employees with someone who does know the answer.
In fact, according to the study, employees coached by these "connectors" were three times as likely as employees coached by other types of managers to be high performers.
Read more.Day 10: Encourage your employees to solve problems independently...
You shouldn't be solving your employees' problems. They should be solving their problems, with your guidance.
One of the most popular HBR articles ever published has to do with getting rid of the "monkey on your back," i.e. the burden of finding solutions to employees' issues.
The HBR article encourages managers to tell their frustrated employees something along the lines of: "You may ask my help at any appointed time, and we will make a joint determination of what the next move will be and which of us will make it. In those rare instances where the next move turns out to be mine, you and I will determine it together. I will not make any move alone."
Read more.Day 11: ... but have their back if they make the wrong decision
To be sure, once you leave employees to solve their own problems, they'll almost assuredly mess something up. Don't get angry with them — instead, lend them your support.
Leadership expert Simon Sinek said the best boss he ever had forced him to answer his own questions. Sinek said, "What he taught me to do was trust myself, and if I made the wrong decision, he always had my back."
Read more.Day 12: Stay positive so you can inspire your team to do their best work
Happy people tend to make better bosses.
According to a University of Central Florida study, being positive is a key component of effective leadership. As much as 11% of the difference in leadership effectiveness was due to positivity. On the other hand, the less happy someone was, the less likely they were to be a successful leader.
Read more.Day 13: Practice 'radical candor'
"Radical candor" is a leadership model that involves caring personally and challenging directly.
According to Scott (the CEO coach), radical candor is too rare in today's workplace.
Scott said you can start displaying radical candor by getting feedback from your team — and then giving it. In her book "Radical Candor," she writes: "Be humble, helpful, offer guidance in person and immediately, praise in public, criticize in private, and don't personalize" and "make it clear that the problem is not due to some unfixable personality flaw. Share stories when you've been criticized for something similar."
Read more.Day 14: Be 'boring,' or predictable, consistent, and reliable
Steve Jobs was an exception to the rule: Leaders who are volatile and unpredictable tend not to fare very well with their teams. Being "boring" — i.e. reliable and trustworthy — is better.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology, says the term psychologists use is "emotional maturity," which means being emotionally stable, agreeable, and conscientious. He cites a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology which found that effective leaders tend to be extroverted (sociable) and conscientious (hardworking).
Read more.Day 15: When you give feedback, share your personal reaction to a specific behavior — not a global assessment
In most workplaces today, the feedback process is broken.
Leadership experts Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall say that's because managers try to be objective when they give feedback, sharing an overall assessment of someone's performance. Instead, they should be sharing their personal reaction to a specific behavior.
Buckingham and Goodall write in HBR: "Use phrases such as 'This is how that came across for me,' or 'This is what that made me think,' or even just 'Did you see what you did there?' Those are your reactions — they are your truth — and when you relay them in specific detail, you aren't judging or rating or fixing her; you're simply reflecting to her the unique 'dent' she just made in the world, as seen through your eyes."
Read more.Day 16: Instead of praising your team for being perfect, encourage them to do even better
At least one former CEO says he rarely lavishes praise on his employees. Instead, he focuses on what they can do even better.
"As long as the feedback you provide is actionable, people will find it to be valuable," Austin McChord, then CEO of Datto, told LinkedIn. Comments such as, "Hey, here's how we could do this a little bit better next time" tend to be appreciated.
On the other hand, McChord said, telling someone, "Great job, everything was perfect" is "not actionable" and is "almost unhelpful."
Read more.Day 17: Ask your team and your close coworkers to give you some 'feedforward'...
In addition to sharing feedback on your employees' performance, you'll also want to solicit feedback on yours. Or, more specifically, "feedforward."
Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith has written that feedforward — i.e. what you can do better going forward — is a simple process that can be as or more effective as feedback.
Here are the steps Goldsmith outlines in his book "What Got You Here Won't Get You There," co-written with Mark Reider:
- Pick one behavior you'd like to change.
- Describe your goal in a one-on-one conversation with anyone — it could be your partner, a friend, a coworker, or even a stranger.
- Ask the person for two suggestions for the future that could help you achieve your goal.
- Listen without judgment. The only thing you can say in response is "thank you."
Day 18: ... and make it all but impossible for them not to answer
So you've approached your team and asked them for feedback or feedforward, only to be met with blank stares. After all, it can be scary to criticize your boss.
Scott (the CEO coach) has a solution: The next time one of your employees gives the standard "Everything's fine" response? Silently count to six before saying anything else.
The goal isn't to give your employee a heart attack — it's to get them to say what's really on their mind. "Almost nobody can endure that much silence," Scott said. "And they'll tell you something."
Read more.Day 19: Ask your employees if they think they’ve mastered their current role
It can be tempting to dwell on your team's successes, at the expense of talking about what went wrong.
Sarah Wagener says this can be dangerous. Wagener, who is the chief people officer at DoorDash, a former vice president of human resources at Pandora, and a former recruiting leader at Facebook, said she likes to ask ambitious employees a simple question: "Do you believe you've mastered your current role?"
Typically, the answer is no, and people say they've never been asked this question before. So she encourages managers to make space for discussing failure or weakness, so that they can be on the lookout for potential stumbling blocks.
Read more.Day 20: Find a ‘leadership buddy’ and compare notes on becoming a better manager
As a manager at any level, it's important to stay down to earth — not to get caught up in the trappings of money or power.
Sinek (the leadership expert) recommends that every boss find a leadership buddy. "I always tell people, if you want to go on a leadership journey, you have to go with someone," Sinek said. "You commit to helping somebody become a great leader, and they commit to helping you."
Your leadership buddy can be a colleague, but doesn't necessarily have to be. A friend or a mentor who aspires to leadership works just as well, as long as it's someone you believe in and you're willing to sacrifice your own interests to help.
Read more.Day 21: Show humility by listening to other people’s ideas
Yes, you're the one in charge. But an effective leader is open to others' input when making big decisions.
In his book "The Power Paradox," University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Dacher Keltner writes that listening is a key way to practice empathy — and that empathy is the surprising route to power and influence. Keltner cites research suggesting that teams led by empathetic managers are more productive, innovative, and satisfied with their work.
Meanwhile, a 2015 paper from Brigham Young University and the University of Colorado found that a leader's humility facilitates better team performance, and that this happens partly because the leader's humility trickles down to the rest of the team.
Read more here and here.Day 22: Admit when you’re wrong and need to change your point of view
Admitting when you're wrong goes hand-in-hand with asking for input.
In fact, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said on an episode of The JJ Redick Podcast that, as a leader, "You will get some things right and you will get some things wrong. You've got to be willing to learn, change your view, be open, and you've got to figure out how to listen."
He added, "How you adapt and adjust to the things you get wrong is really important, how you respond to adversity is really important, and so there's no right way. And I'm still learning."
Read more.Day 23: Stop making excuses for why you can’t take creative risks
Too many managers stick to the status quo, never attempting to shake things up or try something new.
Comstock (the former GE exec) said the most common mistake she saw among GE mangers was "the feeling that people have to get permission to make things happen."
"We look for alibis: 'My boss won't let me.' 'I don't have enough budget.' 'There's not enough time.' 'That's somebody else's job,'" Comstock said. "Many times those are true, but you've got to ask yourself, 'Is that holding me back?'"
Read more.Day 24: Allow — and even encourage — your employees to fail...
Millennials want to do a faceplant.
An article in Quartz by millennial Jake Poses, former vice president of product at Thumbtack, posits that managing millennials comes down to letting them fail. At some point, he realized many of his millennial reports were "frustrated that they weren't being pushed," and that telling them they can't take on more than they can handle was demotivating.
Now, as CEO of another startup, Jumprope, Poses said, "I often give millennials on my team something that's a real stretch. I put them in charge of a project with a big and ambiguous scope, ask them to build something with a new technology, or even give them the responsibility of managing their first person.
He added, "These are usually stretch opportunities where failure is OK. I save the mission-critical for people who are proven."
Read more.Day 25: ... by setting stretch goals
Those stretch opportunities Poses mentioned? They're common at Google.
When he was still senior vice president of people operations at Google, Laszlo Bock told BetterWorks CEO Kris Duggan, "We spend probably an equal amount of time actually talking about failure" and planning for future success.
Bock cited Jeff Huber, former SVP of Google X: "He spends 50% of his staff meeting on what failed last week and what did we learn from it? So by making conversation about misses normal, you end up actually driving lots of improvement in the organization."
Read more.Day 26: Be patient with your employees when they make mistakes
If Jack Welch hadn't been forgiven for a mistake he made early in his career, he'd never have become, well, Jack Welch.
As a chemical engineer for GE, Welch nearly blew up a factory. On the Freakomomics podcast, Welch remembered being summoned to meet with his boss' boss' boss. He expected he would get fired.
To Welch's surprise, the senior manager "took me through the Socratic method. You know, 'Why it happened? What would you do differently? Why did you do that? Why didn't you do this?' And he was coaching me, and it was — couldn't be nicer."
The meeting taught Welch an important leadership lesson: "Never kick anybody when they're down. Kick them when they start to swell instead of grow, and whack 'em when that happens."
Read more.Day 27: Learn strategies to avoid hiring and promoting people because they remind you of yourself
We're all victims of unconscious bias — but if you're a manager in charge of staffing decisions, it's especially important to be aware of those biases.
In their book, "The Class Ceiling," the sociologists Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman highlight the importance of sponsorship, i.e. having someone senior advocate for you, when trying to get ahead at work. But the authors observe that sponsorship generally isn't based on work performance
Instead, it comes down to "cultural affinity," such as a similar background or shared interests and hobbies. In fact, several of the executives they spoke with explicitly admitted to supporting people who reminded them of themselves.
It doesn't make you a bad person if you're inclined to hire or promote someone like you — but it is important to evaluate those thoughts carefully to see if they're worth acting on.
Read more.Day 28: Say 'thank you' to people directly
Leadership is about concrete strategy and execution, the thinking goes — not fluffy stuff like gratitude.
Au contraire. In her book "The Gratitude Diaries," Janice Kaplan links a leader's gratitude to successful company performance. She cites the example of Doug Conant, former CEO of the Campbell Soup Company.
Throughout his tenure at the company, Conant sent more than 30,000 handwritten thank-you notes to staffers and clients.
And while gratitude certainly wasn't the only reason for Campbell's turnaround, it's worth mentioning that when Conant took the reins at Campbell Soup, the stock price was falling and it was the worst performer of all the major food companies in the world, according to Fast Company. By 2009, the company was ahead of the S&P Food Group and the S&P 500, Fast Company reported.
Read more.Day 29: If an employee won’t fit on your dream team six months from now, consider letting them go
You could call it the "six-month exercise."
It's a strategy from Patty McCord, former chief talent officer at Netflix, and here's how it works:
1. "Write down what the team will be accomplishing six months from now that it's not accomplishing now." It could be a product they're building or money they're making.
2. "Think about how things are being done differently from the way they are currently done." Imagine yourself walking around the office; maybe there's more collaboration or fewer meetings.
3. Think, "In order for those things to be happening, what would people need to know how to do?" It could be technical knowledge or negotiating skill.Now here comes the hard part. Does your current team have the right skills, knowledge, and experience?
If not, you may need to bring in people who do, potentially even replacing some of your current team members.
Read more.Day 30: Always do the right thing for the organization, and stop worrying about whether your employees like you
Being respected is more important than being liked as a leader.
As Art Markman, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, said, too many new managers are preoccupied with the decision to be liked or feared.
But "when you actually get into a leadership role," he said, "it really does become much more about what you're trying to accomplish with respect to the organization."
Venture capitalist Mark Suster alluded to something similar in a 2010 post on his blog. "Over time if you make the tough calls with no fudges, if you're fair and don't play favoritism, if you explain your rationale publicly and clearly, if you help soften the blow to the side that doesn't get their way … people will respect you. And it is far better to be respected as a leader than loved."
Read more.
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