Building a Better Boss

By Maura C. Ciccarelli 在这个竞争异常激烈的时代，如何练就好的管理技能来鼓励员工，以提高他们的工作积极性呢？阅读本文后相信您会有很大的收获。

Call it a rookie mistake at best or, at worst, the sign of a bad manager. Either way, it's not good for business. Jack (not his real name), a manager for Luxembourg-based Intelsat, the global-satellite-communications company, met with his two direct reports, Sarah and Jos , saying he wanted to hear their ideas about a new project. Carrolyn Bostick, Intelsat's vice president of talent management and human resources, says Jack then made a common managerial mistake. He asks, 'What do you think we should do?' and then he proceeds to tell them what they're going to do and oh, by the way, that he'd already cleared it with top management. Talk about taking the wind out of a team's sails! It's no wonder Jack made such a blunder. About 58 percent of managers in a recent CareerBuilder survey reported that they received no training on how to be a manager. For companies such as Intelsat, that's changing through manager-focused training, as well as new resources managers can call on to improve their own skills, including recent books published on the art and science of being a boss. To paraphrase the opening lines of the Six Million Dollar Man television show: We can rebuild bosses. We have the knowledge. We have the capability. For Intelsat, that capability resides in its leadership excellence course for managers and supervisors. Nearly 30 percent of the company's 1,200 employees worldwide have supervisory or managerial responsibilities and all managers -- whether newly hired or promoted from within -- are required to take the course. Jack, Sarah and Jos are really actors who bring to life common manager/team dilemmas for Intelsat's management students -- and they are so well-versed in their roles that they can answer questions from the audience while staying in character. We use interactive theater to hold a mirror up to what works and what doesn't, Bostick says. It creates conversations about managing our resources. Addressing how to build a better boss has become a hot topic in recent years. The challenge for companies lies in creating better bosses who drive continuous improvement, inspire loyalty, and spark employee engagement -- all with a leaner workforce and a more competitive economic environment. While some companies, such as Intelsat and Purchase, N.Y.-based PepsiCo, have focused on improved managerial training, books on being a boss have also proliferated. Four recent books -- Good Boss, Bad Boss; Being the Boss; From Bud to Boss and You Can't Fire Everyone -- take different tacks on how to become a better boss. All examine the challenges of being an effective, competent supervisor in today's more collaborative era. Most people yearn to work for good bosses, these authors contend, yet too many bosses are terrible managers who don't listen to their employees, fail to grasp important concepts such as sharing credit and putting the needs of their direct reports first, and are ineffective communicators. And yet, the authors maintain, a lot of it can be fixed if bosses are given the opportunity to actually learn the art and science of being a manager. On the Same Page To address issues such as these, and ensure that its corporate values are understood and reflected by managers, Intelsat has been cascading the leadership program from top management down to first-line supervisors throughout its global locations. The effort began about

18 months ago, and was created internally with the assistance of outside consulting firms such as the Philadelphia-based Hay Group. The program includes leadership-skill development, presentation training, executive coaching and classes on building business acumen. The goal, says Bostick, was to create a program to ensure we're all on the same page about how we lead in our company. To help managers better drive results, Intelsat stresses project management as part of the program. People need to treat their work as a project; that it has a beginning, middle and an end, so we're teaching them project-management skills, she says. That means understanding who the key stakeholders are, what you're trying to deliver and establishing clear milestones. Many bosses, both new ones and veterans alike, don't know how to manage people, according to Linda Hill and Kent Linebeck, authors of Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader. They vacillate between I'm the boss! and I'm your friend! rather than understanding that the best approach is to establish trust among your direct reports and give them clear directions and regular feedback. Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Linebeck, a writer and 30-year manager/executive, teamed up to distill their years of research and experience about how managers can learn to be more effective. If you're in a leadership role, you're expected to worry not just about today, but also to worry about tomorrow, says Hill, so managers have to learn the three imperatives covered in the book: how to manage themselves, their networks and their teams. Success comes from continually assessing progress on all three fronts. The way you set priorities for the future comes not just from whether or not you are a strategic thinker but whether you have the right set of relationships, Hill says. If you haven't built the right strategic network, you are not going to have access to the insights and information of what's going on inside your company, or in the broader world. People who are good at defining the future are people who actually know how to build networks with people who are diverse, who expose them to different perspectives and who bridge them to worlds they're not normally connected with, she says. Because only with that information can you begin to read the weak signals and the trends that you need to be responding to. In their book, Hill and Linebeck suggest that HR should help managers by guiding them through the political culture and its players. They also counsel managers to recognize that there are two kinds of conflict: one based on ego and the other based on differing points of view. Managing the second kind well, they write, is what ultimately drives constructive change. The Power of Self-Awareness Beyond strategic effectiveness, many people skills are required to be a successful boss. That's a topic well-researched by Robert I. Sutton, best known for his book The No-Asshole Rule, in his latest book, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best and Learn from the Worst. Inspiration came directly from the overwhelming response to The No-Asshole Rule, says Sutton, professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Time and again, the asshole people wrote him about was usually a boss. Others inquired how they could become a better boss and learn to treat people with respect and become a better human being in general. Sutton's goal in writing the new book was to show how great bosses differ from the mediocre, the inept or, at worst, the destructive. It's very hard, in general, for we human beings to recognize our weaknesses, says Sutton. In general, the more incompetent we are, the less aware we are. The good news, he says, is that bosses can become better bosses when they're aware of their shortcomings and train themselves to adopt what he calls the mind-set of a great boss. In his book, it's a list of characteristics that start with a balancing act he calls Lasorda's law, which maintains that managing a team (athletic or otherwise) is like holding a dove in your hand. Hold it too tightly and you kill it. Hold it too loosely and you lose it. People who aren