How To Balance Boss And Staff – 3 Tactics For Managers To Keep Both Happy
Don’t look after your boss and you are in trouble at work, whatever your position. Don’t look after your team as a manager and you could lose your job.
How to balance boss and staff – especially when the demands they place on you are in direct conflict. I share 3 tactics for managers to keep both happy, so you have a very happy boss and an equally happy team. It is surprising easy to find yourself stuck in the middle with one or both parties unhappy with you, which makes being at work unpleasant. Don’t improve the situation and chances are your management career will also take a nosedive in the near future.
How To Balance Boss And Staff – 3 Tactics For Managers To Keep Both Happy
- Understand the needs
- Skillfully and pragmatically manage expectations
- Master delegating and developing
There are a lot of skills involved and balancing the demands of both boss and team is not easy. Work hard at these three areas and you put yourself in the best position to have a team and boss that love you.
Think of the manager as a pilot. Your team is your plane. Your boss is air traffic control and your passengers wrapped into one. When your plane is well maintained it will fly you and your passengers to the planned destination trouble free. This keeps your boss very happy. As soon as you don’t maintain your plane, all hell breaks loose. It might crash. Engines might fail. You might run out of fuel. Bits might fall off. The plane is going to be very unhappy and so is your boss. Without your plane working well there is not much you can do as a pilot.
Your team performing well gives you the tools to help your boss meet their goals which will keep them happy.
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The first important tactic for how to balance boss and team is to understand the needs.
Find out exactly what your boss wants and needs. Understand their long term goals. Discuss team and function objectives with your boss and understand what your team is responsible for delivering. Understand your boss’s ambitions, their alliances and rivalries with other leaders. Find out what pressures your boss is under and what they need to deliver this week and this month.
At the same time, find out what each of your team members want. What are their strengths, their interests, their ambitions. Where do they want to be next year and in five years. What do the love doing and what do they hate doing. What are the gaps in their skills, which will prevent them taking the next step to meet their ambitions.
When you have a good understanding of all the needs of the people you work with and rely on, you can start planning and balancing these needs against the decisions you make and the actions you take. It is like driving at night with full beam headlights on, navigating a winding road. You are unlikely to go wrong.
If you don’t make the effort to really find out and understand the wants and needs of those you work with, it is like driving at night without any headlights on a winding road. Staying on the road is not going to happen.
Make the Effort to Understand
When you are working between two important parties you rely on, always make the effort to understand all the wants and needs around you. You can then plan a sensible route to navigate between all the different conflicts and challenges thrown in front of you. You can educate both parties about what each other want. With good alignment and communication, you are much more likely to keep both parties happy.
skillfully and pragmatically manage expectations – The second important tactic for how to balance boss and staff
Managing expectations really well is a blend of clear communication, sensible planning, and careful negotiation. A great measure of success in managing expectations is that there no surprises for your boss or for your team.
A great starting point to set expectations for both boss and team is to agree clear goals for the team with your boss. Don’t agree to goals that you don’t believe your team can achieve. Then you can either translate the team goals into individual goals relevant to their job. Or better still, work with your team members as a group and decide on the individual goals, activities and projects that the team is going to do to achieve team goals.
Then as a manager, over-communicate progress against all the goals to individuals, the team and your boss. Keep all parties aware of challenges, issues, lack of resources and anything else that slows or stops progress. Just as important, shout about all the wins, the successes and when individuals and the team are on track to beat goals early.
Practice Realism
Practice realism in terms of what you and your team can deliver. Plan carefully and allow sensible levels of contingency so you and your team can deliver what you agree to on time. As we all know, plans have to change due to unforeseen events. Always communicate changes at the earliest opportunity and re-negotiate what is going to be delivered when.
Finally, have the courage to say no and explain why you are saying no. Saying no is very powerful when leading a team. It gives you and your team space and focus to do a good job rather than a rushed job. This is important for building confidence, trust and a reputation for reliability.
The third tactic is to master delegating and developing your team
Learning to delegate work very effectively to your team gives you freedom as a manager. By delegating effectively, I mean you consistently get back exactly what you want, when you want it, with no surprises. The most important area to get good at is following up without annoying, upsetting or reducing the other person’s responsibility.
In my experience, most managers are okay at outlining what has to be done and how. Very few managers are good at staying close to the work without annoying the person they have delegated to.
You need to delegate to give you time to support your own boss properly and give you space to develop your own skills and capability.
Develop Capability
In parallel, developing the capability and skills of your team is essential as part of your work to keep your team happy, engaged and motivated. Spend time working directly with team members, helping them work more effectively. Give them your time to mentor them and share what you are learnt – the good practices and the pitfalls.
Think about how to use the work you delegate to create new experiences and to develop skills for your team members. Get team members involved in projects within your team and elsewhere in the business. Consider external courses to add to and improve skills and create better approaches to problems. Coach decision making, solution building and people management skills. There is so much you can do develop your team members with very little budget.
Developing their expertise enables you to delegate a wider range of work to team members. Both together create a virtuous circle for you personally.
In summary
Keeping your team happy, involved, engaged and motivated will make your job of supporting your boss and keeping them happy a lot easier and a lot more rewarding. All of this does take a bit of work. It is part of developing your own management skills and essential for progressing your management career.
As a reminder, the 3 tactics to really focus on for How To Balance Boss And Staff – For Managers To Keep Both Happy are
- Understand the needs
- Skillfully and pragmatically manage expectations
- Master delegating and developing
Do take a look at all the resources and courses available to help you build your management expertise and confidence years faster.
If you have any questions on “How To Balance Boss And Staff – 3 Tactics For Managers To Keep Both Happy”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
I have coached quite a few managers and seen plenty more get this balance between boss and team members wrong. Either they focus too much on looking after there boss and have an unhappy and underperforming team or they focus too much on their team and don’t support their boss enough.
When both are demanding, and when what they demand is in conflict, it is tough to be the manager in the middle.
Don’t forget, your team is the vehicle through which you can keep your boss happy. If your team is not working all bets are off. Your boss also needs your support and your career prospect, happiness and … well everything is supported by a good relationships with you boss.
Work to keep both parties happy.
