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Grasp leadership's art that pairs honesty with empathetic understanding to build high-performing teams.
Key points
1
Being a boss requires doing more than everyone else while managing and helping them
The general idea of being a “boss” is running a big company, doling out instructions, and collecting results, but this is far from the truth. The job comes with many genuine, emotional, and interpersonal interactions.
The staff members at your firm aren’t just cogs in your money–making machine; their well–being — mental, physical, and emotional — should also be of concern. Being a boss is about managing a company and its constituent members.
To be a good boss, you must first accept that your role comes with the call to lead and be good at it. But what does it mean — to lead? Kim Scott outlines three primary functions of a manager in which they can show good leadership: guidance, team–building, and results.
Guidance refers to the interaction between the boss and the employee post–performance or, simply put, feedback. A leader can provide feedback in two forms — praise and criticism. This part of leadership is delicate because there might be adverse responses to the feedback. The trick is to balance both types of feedback to achieve positive reactions and boost workers’ performance.
The staff members at your firm aren’t just cogs in your money–making machine; their well–being — mental, physical, and emotional — should also be of concern. Being a boss is about managing a company and its constituent members.
To be a good boss, you must first accept that your role comes with the call to lead and be good at it. But what does it mean — to lead? Kim Scott outlines three primary functions of a manager in which they can show good leadership: guidance, team–building, and results.
Guidance refers to the interaction between the boss and the employee post–performance or, simply put, feedback. A leader can provide feedback in two forms — praise and criticism. This part of leadership is delicate because there might be adverse responses to the feedback. The trick is to balance both types of feedback to achieve positive reactions and boost workers’ performance.
Your relationships and your responsibilities reinforce each other positively or negatively, and this dynamic is what drives you forward as a manager — or leaves you dead in the water. ~ Kim Scott
The key is establishing a good relationship with your staff, but how? Relationships make or break you as a manager; the quality of your relationship with those who directly report to you determines your success rate. Since trust is an expensive commodity in the management business, you must strive to establish it among the people you entrust with the running of your business.
Managing people is a challenging task because people are different, and one trick won’t work for all; this is where being a good boss comes in handy.
Kim Scott, a boss herself, takes you through the core responsibilities and values of a true leader. She teaches how to think and elaborates on the emotional background a boss should have to keep their workers happy and motivated. This summary will help you realize what mistakes you might have made or making now while communicating with people and how you can improve your relationships with employees.
2
Open communication is a vital part of being a boss, and it requires knowledge of how to express yourself in a way that gets the best results
Kim Scott believes that radical candor is a quadrant in a graph of the various forms of guidance, including ruinous empathy, obnoxious aggression, and manipulative insincerity. Radical candor is simply the act of offering both criticism and praise in such a balanced way that it makes the person feel neither worthless nor complacent. It stirs people to work harder, make improvements, and perform better.
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3
As a boss, you are not working for just yourself; you are helping the people under you take a step toward their dreams
4
It is not enough to simply tell people what to do; you must learn to put yourself in the equation and work with them
5
Workplace relationships need to be healthy for a business to run smoothly, and so you must put effort into building healthy ones
6
Not all motivation is cheers and compliments, so you must find the right inspiration for each worker
7
Conclusion
You’ll learn
How to balance praise and criticism effectively
The secret to motivating every employee
About practical tools for result-driven meetings
How to foster healthy workplace relationships
The ways to inspire your team towards their dreams
