OK I really do want to be the boss, the leader, be the one that makes the decisions! The other side of that coin says that I also need to take ownership, responsibility and ‘carry the can’ for the results. Now that the time is here, I wonder if I have really thought this through?
Unless you are a one man band, working for yourself you are either an employee with a boss or you are one of the bosses. Even when working for yourself, you need to change your ‘business’ hat for the ‘employee’ hat on occasion.
So how do we learn to be the boss?
I have done a first degree (in Personnel Management), an MBA and I have realised that while education and training give you the theory, models and case studies it does not really prepare you for the experience of being the boss.
If education doesn’t give me the answer then where do I learn the skills that I will need to become the boss? That leads me to the question of how do we as human beings learn?
All of our first learning experiences are through observation, experience and practice. As babies, we don’t take a class to learn how to walk, talk and feed ourselves. We observe those within our environment, practice walking, talking and feeding ourselves over and over again, falling over, not being understood and missing our mouth, keep practicing until we ‘get it’. We no longer fall over, we start to go faster and learn to run. The experiences we have through the practice teaches us what works and what doesn’t.
We observe how others in our immediate environment do things, how they interact and talk to each other, how they treat each other, respect others opinions, discuss subjects, make decisions. Perhaps our environment is safe and open, or full of conflict and uncertainty – all of these experiences will become what I refer to as ‘personal baggage’. Not all of our personal baggage is good or bad, it will be a mix of both and it will depend on how we deal with the baggage. Some of us will find it easier to rationalise the observations and experiences making sense of them, translating them into our ‘view of the world’.
So much of our early lives will influence how we will be as bosses although that is only the beginning. As our world grows and we go to school, university and then join the world of work all the time we are adding to our memory banks. We will again observe, practice and experience the effects of a variety of ‘bosses’ including parents, teachers, lecturers and ultimately our first real boss in the world of work.
So why do some people become a boss that everyone wants to work for, the teacher that everyone wants or the parent that seems to have ‘cracked it’? What is the differentiator?
Besides our personal baggage we each have our personal ‘filters’. This is how we make sense of the observations, practice and experiences, how we explain to ourselves the outcomes. It is why you can find two people that have gone through the same experiences or have very similar personal baggage but they have very different outcomes. I explain this by giving the example of: is your ‘cup half full’ or ‘cup half empty’? These are a reaction of our personal filters.
I normally see things as ‘cup half full’, I see possibilities, positive outcomes, how things can be achieved – the danger with this filter is that I do not always see or take into account the risks that may be ready to derail. My husband on the other hand sees most things through ‘cup half empty’ where the danger is that he sees everything that can go wrong, why something won’t work and can be seen as a negative influence. Too much of either of these filters without the counter balance will have its own de-railers.
All of us have seen the combination of baggage and filters, how these have an influence on listening and understanding. If you put several people in to observe a discussion it is likely they will all come out with a slightly or possible quite different understanding of what has taken place. Their personal filters and baggage have influenced what they heard and observed. I see this outcome as communication blocks.
So before we can be good bosses we really do need to understand our own baggage and filters and how they influence the way we ‘see the world’ within which we find ourselves.
Next time I want to discuss how we explore ourselves and how this can influence our ability to be ‘the boss’.
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