Positioning

If you want to improve your organization's effectiveness and experience more influence with your boss, this post is for you.

So often, we evaluate ourselves and our performance based on the direct impact we believe we have on our organization, its people, and the bottom line.

My goal is to shift your thinking to put more weight on how effective you are in positioning your boss to have the greatest impact on your organization. Make this shift in thought and action. You will see an improved bottom line (however you measure that), and your boss's advocacy for your ideas and career will skyrocket.

Guiding Principles:

1. Know what's important to your boss and make it important to you. I'm in no way suggesting you abandon what's important to you. What I am suggesting is that you add what's important to your boss to what's important to you. You must accept that your boss is in their role for a reason, and part of submitting to their leadership is prioritizing what's important to them.

2. Complement, don't compete. You must become a student of your boss, their strengths, weaknesses, and insecurities. Your role is to complement the list above and in no way create a perception that you are competing with them. This takes humility, but being the seasoned leader you are, I am sure you are willing to avoid competing with your boss so you can focus on filling in their gaps.

3. Consistently communicate success and failure - I love it when someone on my team leads 1v1's with "This thing that we're doing, it's not working, we need to be better, and here's how we're working on that." It shows me they can strategically problem solve & tells me they are looking at their work with a critical eye to drive continuous improvement. Then, follow up with a chart or graph showing a positive inflection point in the data and the correlated action that drove the change/inflection point.

4. Be low maintenance and hard to disappoint - I've had some strange looks in the past when I've taught on this point. If you want your boss to win, you can't be a drag on them. You have to give them extra grace & understanding when they have disappointed you. Your understanding/empathy that they can see things that you cannot and that they deal with a unique set of complex pressures will help you be hard to disappoint.

3 D's of how to manage 1V1's with your boss:

1. Disclose: I'm letting you know what I'm doing, my decisions, and what key things I'm working on (don't over-inform).

2. Discuss: Take temperature/send up a test balloon/give them time to process an upcoming decision. Seek their counsel and wisdom. Ask them what you can do to best support them in this season.

3. Decide: Discern & discuss who's making each type of decision. Never present a problem and put a period at the end of it.

A. Articulate the problem

B. Offer 2-3 options/solutions

C. Recommend a solutions

*Pro Tip: Be prepared with the 3 D's to lead 1V1's with your boss. Keep a file open on your devices to quickly add items for your next 1v1. Taking the initiative to lead 1v1s with your boss and showing up prepared will take a load off of them. This will also reinforce your capability and capacity to lead.