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Managing People - Is your Boss Effective? I’ve been clearing out my filing cabinet lately in an attempt to create some space and I came across some notes from a conference I attended a while ago. One of the main speakers quoted a survey in which 65% of respondents claimed the most stressful thing about their job was their boss, and 58% of people looking for another job were doing so because they didn’t like their boss. Those figures really made me think. Do you think they are accurate? Do they reflect your own feelings about your boss? And if you are in charge of people, do you think that might be how they feel about you? Does it bother you? Managing people is one of the trickiest things in the world to do well and in my experience it means listening to feedback from your staff, even if you don’t like what you hear, and then acting on that feedback to make real changes. It is rare these days to find a manager who doesn’t claim to want honest feedback, but paying lip service to the idea and actually going through with it are very different things. Often managers only want to hear how well they are doing, and any suggestion that things could be improved are met with inaction or even hostility. Anyone who has summoned the courage to offer their real opinions will feel doubly betrayed. We all have blind spots about our behaviour and it can be painful to have them pointed out by colleagues, but it is an essential part of being an effective manager. Next time we’ll be exploring this idea further, and in the meantime I’d like to hear your thoughts and experiences of being both manager and managed. Today is a day we don’t often experience. We hope your February 29 will be truly extraordinary! Back to Newsletter Archive page |
