Let’s face it; personal new year’s resolutions are easily professed … and just as easily abandoned. Our ambitions to lose weight or save more money are well intentioned, but a real plan to get there is either nonexistent or poorly executed.
If you’re in a leadership role in your company, why not consider a different type of personal resolution: becoming a better boss.
Contemporary performance improvement philosophy has taught us that a defining characteristic of great organizations is that they are always working to get better. The same is true of great bosses. They are always looking for ways to better support the employees who work for them.
The start of a new year is an ideal time to redouble efforts to be a better boss. It takes real resolve to make meaningful changes in your people-centric leadership skills and practices. After all, will people really notice if you don’t commit to becoming a better boss? Probably not. But your team will absolutely feel the difference in their personal engagement and commitment when their boss makes real, sustained efforts to develop and engage them.
During this time of major changes and challenges in the labor market and how employees think about work, here are three suggestions to make a resolution to be a better boss more achievable.
Take an honest look at your best and worst traits and behaviors as a boss.
Assessment is the foundational step in any improvement project. Great bosses need to better understand where they excel and where they fall short of meeting the needs of their team. To be most useful, the focus of your assessment should be on collecting meaningful data rather than just self-reflection. Dig into your scores and comments from your last employee engagement survey. Find non-intimidating ways to ask your best employees to open up about what they appreciate most about you – and what they wish you would change. Tell your boss that one of your priorities this year is to become a better boss to your employees and get their thoughts and input. I promise that seeking their ideas and feedback will be viewed positively and as a sign of real leadership maturity.
Commit to improving at least one significant leadership practice that will better connect you to your team.
Your self-assessment should point you in the direction of at least one or two changes that your team will find meaningful. Smart leaders focus more on the how and why than the what in identifying areas for improved skills and practices. For example, you determine that visibility via rounding is an area of opportunity for you (the “what’). Frontline staff tell us that candid, meaningful conversations are far more important than regimented schedules with detailed checklists and standard questions during leadership rounding (the “how”). Interactions should be a dialogue, not an interrogation (the “why”).
Embrace continuous self-assessment and professional development as core leadership priorities.
Strong bosses who are most in touch with their teams find ways to continuously assess and improve their leadership skills and practices. They actually expect occasional setbacks and missteps, using these as learning opportunities. They recognize that sometimes even well-intentioned, best practices backfire. A few years ago, we were working with a team whose in-touch leader committed to being more visible and supportive. The problem was that she took these efforts too far and started hovering over her team, becoming a “helicopter” boss. Employees lost any sense of autonomy and control over their own work. Their boss’s efforts created more frustration than support.
Being a great boss to today’s workforce isn’t easy. Resolving to become a better boss is even tougher. But smart, dedicated leaders recognize that there has never been a time when a boss’s connection with their team has been any more important or essential to achieving operational goals and nurture a culture that attracts and retains the very best talent.