How to manage your manager: the main concepts

"My manager sucks. How do I get them to manage me better?" People ask me this question all the time. The words differ for each person but the concept is the same. Probably every client I've coached, no matter what issue they started with, also wanted to work on improving their situation with their manager. Having coached enough on it, I'm putting the main concepts here. If I see demand I'll make a book of it. When the book "How to manage your manager" debuts as a best-seller, you can tell people you saw the first post on the topic.…

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How to discipline a friend, an example

How do you discipline a friend? Even when you feel they deserve it, it's not so easy. Too harsh and you lose a friend. Too soft and they'll do it again. I generally advise against giving advice to someone who hasn't asked for it, but sometimes you know someone well enough. To me friendship means you're responsible to help a friend. Below is an example of balancing things effectively. Not that I have special skills in this area, but I hope it helps if you need to balance things sometime. Context: Recently a friend was late to meet for lunch.…

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More value of low-level instruction for leadership: Margaret Thatcher

The more I teach and coach leadership, the more value I see in low-level instruction. Possibly because people think of leaders having high-level positions in organizations, I find the expect high-level instruction for leadership. I find beginning with the opposite---low-level instruction---more effective. Like piano lessons begin with scales, dance begins footwork, and many sports begin with basic cardiovascular and strength training. Sadly, most of what I learned about leadership in school was high-level and abstract, including Columbia Business School's leadership classes. For someone with little leadership awareness, the classes were invaluable, but looking back, I could have used more basic…

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How to increase empathy, part 2: a model and strategy

Yesterday's post discussed how the world complicates understanding empathy with vague definitions and associating it with neediness and unwanted emotions. Today I'll describe a simple model to understand empathy simply. A simple model for empathy The model you have for something determines how you understand it and how you use it. I'll talk about emotions in general and then empathy in particular A simple model for emotions in general Many people contrast emotions with reason and conclude that emotions are irrational or random. I also used to think so, and that mental model undermined my ability to understand others' emotions…

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How to increase empathy, part 1: why it seems so hard to

You want to improve your empathy because you've heard it's fundamental to leadership, influence, and motivation, but find it hard to define, measure, or see in use, making it hard to improve or learn from others. In other words, empathy is important for working with people, but hard to learn, all the more so for those who lack it most. While I don't pretend to be the most empathetic person, having started with little, I've improved a lot. I can teach you to improve yours. Today let's see how others make it hard. The world makes learning empathy hard when…

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How not to lose your composure: Rational Emotion

Context: Losing your composure hurts you When you lose your composure you don't get promoted. People don't follow you if you lose your composure. You lose your ability to motivate or influence them. If you debate or argue with someone and you lose your composure and they don't---that is, if your emotions become more intense than theirs---you generally lose the argument. People feel emotional reward when someone else's emotions get intense. When you get the other person to lose their composure, you feel a certain reward. If you show intense emotions, you motivate the other person to do again what…

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How to engage people you lead

The insight below prompted spontaneous applause during a keynote talk I saw at a recent conference. The speaker, whose work brings him sometimes to the White House, was talking about principles of teaching, but you'll see it applies to managing and leading too. He said he was talking to a teacher about creating assignments and test questions. Teachers perennially face challenges of creating problems that the students haven't seen before and can't game. They often resort to abstract problems. Abstract problems address those challenges, but at the cost of relevancy to the students' lives, which leads students to disengage, to…

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What to say when an organization is considering hiring you

The context: an organization is considering hiring you, maybe as an employee, maybe as a consultant or freelancer, maybe just to collaborate. The challenge: if you read my blog, you don't just want a job where you punch a clock. You want to contribute meaningfully, meaning your vision extends beyond the immediate task they're thinking about. The conflict: if you don't talk about your vision, you don't know how well you fit at the organization. You don't want to join based on a misunderstanding and then find you want to leave soon. But if you do share your vision, they…

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Want to influence someone? Understand them and make them feel understood

Want to influence someone? Yes, you do. Your spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, manager, people you manage, kids, ... anyone you communicate with. I don't care if you think they're perfect. You want to influence them. Why else do you communicate with someone except to influence them? (A question worth thinking about!) If you want to know your potential to influence them, ask yourself how well you understand them. If you don't understand someone, you can't influence them well. You can guide them and create incentives for them with various carrots and sticks to get them to do what you want, but…

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Personal development: take your training wheels off after you learn to ride

I coach and work with a lot of people with MBAs. A lot of people without too. They keep doing what school taught them for social and business interactions. It kills me. School teaches you the bare fundamentals. It gives you training wheels to practice new behaviors, if it even does that, since it mostly just teaches abstract skills. Training wheels are great for getting you on a bicycle but if you want to ride, you have to take them off. When you ride a bike without training wheels you have to tilt it to be stable even though that…

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When and how polarizing helps

When you hear about polarization in leadership, what do you think? You think polarization is a problem, right? Do you think about how polarized politics silence moderate voices? ... about how leaders treating everything as black and white miss the nuances of your thoughts? ... about how you've learned to see things with nuance, which you consider more mature? ... about polarizing leaders whose divisiveness you don't like? Maybe not everyone thinks that way, but I just searched on polarization and leadership and every post (that wasn't about sunglasses) described polarization in leadership as a problem to overcome. I tend…

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How to make relationships last

What makes relationships last? What makes one person loyal to another? These questions apply to personal relationships as well as business. They happened to come up with a client on business and as we talked about it, the conversation covered more personal relationships, the way you like business conversations to become. In my experience, relationships may start with things like common interests, shared histories, common friends, and other things that attract someone to another, but what makes a relationship start doesn't necessarily make it endure. The same holds in business, where relationships may start based with the ability to make…

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How to make your next performance review shine

Do you have performance reviews at work? Do you want your next one to look great? A great way to make that happen is to get your manager or whoever rates you on your side, motivating them to evaluate you more positively. How do you do that? First, recognize they benefit from you doing well. The better their reports do, the better they do. Even if you think your manager is out to get you, they still feel this motivation. It already exists. I've seen reports on people who tell me their bosses hated them, yet the reports still showed…

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Bored at work? Looking for a new job means you’re probably looking in the wrong place

I saw this ad in the subway and confess it made me smile, but if you want to like your job more, I suggest it gives counterproductive advice and focuses your attention in the wrong place. The door was opening and I didn't have time to get all the text, but it reads If the best part of your day is taking a 20-minute break to throw birds at pigs, it might be time to find a new job. Clever and timely, but it focuses on your job as the source for your job satisfaction. A web site that benefits…

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How to Choose

Most of your identity is the culmination of the choices you've made. You choose all day every day. Many people have trouble making big choices, for some choosing is even debilitating. If you do, you're holding yourself back from living your life more fully. I used to dwell on decisions too. In my second year of business school I saw many of my classmates dwelling on choices between different job offers, unable to choose between Goldman and McKinsey. While most of the world would imagine it simple to choose among six-figure offers from prestigious firms, people choose for their reasons,…

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Instead of connecting to a higher purpose, try a more personal purpose

You've heard the advice that to inspire and motivate people, it helps to connect their task to a higher purpose, right? It seems to make sense. Martin Luther King motivated people to painful and degrading but effective tasks with calls to justice based on concepts of freedom and religion. Patton motivated people to risk their lives with appeals to saving the country. What if you have a team without such lofty goals? You probably aren't leading people to free people from oppression or save your country from Nazis. How do higher purposes help when you want the five people who…

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Overcoming Objections and Blocks — The Series

Do you know you want to improve something about your life but never seem able to? Do you find yourself always trying to understand your problems but never overcoming them? Or just saying you're just this way and can't do anything about it, even though you know other people who were like you learned to get past it? You probably have internal objections and blocks stopping you. External hurdles are much easier to overcome. Some people never learn to overcome internal ones. Read my series on some common objections and blocks, "Overcoming Objections and Blocks -- The Series," and how…

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My boss sucks. How do I manage my manager?

How to up-lead After my leadership seminars, someone always says "This material is great. I can see how it will improve my life. I'm starting to implement it. But you know who could really use it? My boss!" Most of my clients who have problems at work wish they could change their bosses, a process I call up-leading or up-managing. Come to think of it, our success developing up-leading skills seems a major reason people work with me. It seems a big and common need. A few changes in beliefs and learning a few new skills overcomes most of the…

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Context, Action, Result (CAR): answering interview questions and describing experience effectively

[This post is part of a series on Communication Skills Exercises for Business and Life. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Has an interviewer ever begun a question with "Can you tell me a time when ..." or asked you about your experience? Such questions arise in job interviews, with people considering promoting you, when seeking funding, even dating, to mention a few places. I'll take a lot of the guesswork out of how to answer. Your answer has…

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“You don’t understand me so I’m leaving you” happens in business relationships too

When you try to lead someone who doesn't feel understood you ruin your your chances of leading them. I want to emphasize in this post the difference between understanding someone and them feeling understood. You understanding someone happens in your head. Them feeling understood happens in their head. People don't act on what's in your head. They act on what's in their heads. Here's what trying to lead someone without them feeling understood is like. Imagine you walked into a store and before you told anyone what you wanted, a salesperson walked up to you and said "I know what…

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How to make someone feel understood: the Confirmation/Clarification Cycle

[This post is part of a series on Communication Skills Exercises for Business and Life. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Making someone feel understood is a powerful leadership tool that makes the difference between motivating with external incentives, which merely guide, and internal emotions, which motivate from within. With practice you'll be able to evoke passions and inspire. They'll often feel gratitude toward you for the inspiration, even as they contribute more than usual. You'll be surprised at…

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Talk to a misbehaving boss like you talk to a misbehaving child

One of my clients has a boss who hoards information and responsibility and doesn't give him the support he needs to do his job. Naturally, he wants to influence his boss to lead him better---that is, he wants to lead his boss. You have to see people as people first and positions on organization charts second, take responsibility, and lead them if you want to influence them. The first step I advise in leading anyone is awareness---in this case, understanding the motivations of the person you want to lead. If you don't understand their motivations, you'll have a hard time…

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The understanding handshake: skipping it undermines your ability to lead

Has anyone ever told you they understood you and then did something that someone who understood you never would? You feel they not only don't understand you, they think they did, which they don't, and told you they did, which was wrong. You write off that person as not understanding you and therefore not worth listening to or following. You might not even consider them worth your time to help them understand you. What's the point if they think they do when they don't? You could easily waste a lot of time with someone like that and get nowhere. Now…

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How to set your angel free

I wrote on my model for personal development and coaching of setting your angel free based on Michelangelo's answer on how he carved David out of a block of marble: "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." My model says that since we feel most natural and people are most attracted to us when we behave free of the constraints and motivations others impose on us, our most effective goal in personal growth isn't to put more stuff on us but to free ourselves from society's impediments. (EDIT: I just referred to this…

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