Make It Or Break It Leadership

One of the most common issues leaders are tackling with today is motivation - how do you maintain it or increase it. As a boss, it’s not easy to know when to push someone vs. when the employee is supposed to take the lead.

Robert Sutton, author of the New York Times bestseller The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't sites in his latest blog a research study conducted at Columbia University by Daniel Ames and Frank Flynn which “suggests striking the right balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough is immensely important to being (and being perceived as) a great boss.”

Ames and Flynn thought initially in their research that bosses who are too assertive are just too domineering and bossy and this ruins relationships with others. Yet leaders who are not assertive enough don’t achieve much of anything with their teams that they can beam with pride.

In their research they asked 213 MBA students to evaluate their more recent bosses. There was high overlap between those bosses their rated as moderately assertive and those most effective overall. The MBA’s rated those moderately assertive bosses as most likely to succeed in the future and those they would be happy to work with again.

Those bosses found not to be effective are ones that were either too assertive or not assertive enough and was cited as a cornerstone of those weak leaders more than deficits.

Ames and Flynn further state that being a successful boss requires modulating between pushing people strongly at key times and taking a step back at other times. “Being flexible and socially sensitive — knowing when it's the right time for either approach — enables bosses to be seen as motivating and engaged, but not as bullying or micro-managing,” Sutton says.

There’s a reason why being a boss is a critical role. A boss is a mentor, coach, manager and potentially leader. However not all bosses are true leaders. It takes a strong degree of emotional intelligence to carefully, strategically and compassionately motivate your team. Being a bull in a ring or hanging out in the background may move your team somewhere however over the long haul the results you desire will be non-existent.

How do you build yourself to be a better boss?
Perfect your skills in managing, coaching and leading with a keen eye to examining your own strengths. Get feedback from those who will be honest and those you respect. And get a mentor, this is one of the greatest tools you can have to shoring up your leadership. Be a lifetime learner and never live in the past. Look forward, be focused, be a realist and have profound compassion for those around you. Be “people centric” and devoted to your team’s growth. Get feedback on how you are doing and consistently improve. And after you begin to make habits out of your new found best practices, do them again and again and again. There’s a reason why on the back of those shampoo bottles they say “rinse and repeat.”