My quick answer is yes. Managing your boss is a very important skill! As a boss, it serves you to let them learn how to do it! There are so many benefits to this. Let me count the ways where your organization, you and your staff can grow if they learn to work with you better.
- As a Manager, it benefits you to take full advantage of the gray matter of your team. No one is stronger than everyone in the team. If the leader adds the collective strength of the team with his or her own, the team becomes exponentially stronger.
- We all have blind spots. We overlook details, we misinterpret things, we make bad decisions, or simply we can get disorganized sometimes. When we allow our team members to stop us from making mistakes, we prevent ourselves from making those expensive mistakes. We get better at leading and managing.
- The funny thing about giving away power is that it makes us even more powerful. By sharing authority, responsibility, and accountability, we multiply ourselves through others
- When your team members realize that engaging you, making an effort to influence you, helping you succeed in your role, they in effect exercise their leadership muscles, and grow their potential for bigger leadership responsibilities. The organization benefits in the long term due to the deepening leadership bench.
- Finally, when you allow your team members to manage you, it strengthens the culture of collaboration and psychological safety in your team. This improves overall morale and engagement.
Now, why did I write this blog and addressed this to you, the boss? It’s because much as your team members would want to learn how to manage you better, they may not have the courage to ask you to send to them to training. So, if you agree with me, I recommend that you send them to training. Incidentally, I’m running one on June 11! Check the details here.
PS, for your staff to be successful in managing up, you should be willing to be managed. It takes siting down and agreeing on rules of engagement. Try it! It works!
