March Read/3

Title: It’s Okay to Manage Your Boss: The Step-by-Step Program for Making the Best of Your Most Important Relationship at Work

Author: Tulgan, Bruce

Call Number: 650.13 T917I 2010

Subjects: Managing Your Boss

Number of Pages: 202

ISBN: 9780470605301

Book Description (from inside of book cover):

            Wherever you work, you rely on your immediate boss for meeting your needs at work-no other relationship is as important to your career success. Yet few of us know how to get the best out of the most important person in our work lives.

            In the much anticipated follow-up to It’s Okay to Be the Boss, Bruce Tulgan challenges you to take responsibility for your role in every management relationship. Based on ongoing research started in 1993, Tulgan reveals the four essential things you should get from your boss to succeed at work:

          1-Clearly spell-out and reasonable expectations

    2-The skills, tools, and resources you need to accomplish those expectations

          3-Honest feedback about your performance and course-correcting direction when necessary

          4-Proper recognition and rewards in exchange for your performance

          This back-to-basics and unconventional approach to managing up will help you build highly engaged working relationships with your boss, and deal with complex authority relationships at every level and in any workplace.

Go ahead-it’s okay to manage your boss…you just have to be very good at it. Learn how in this step-by-step book.

My Reading:           

            This book is meant for those people who want to be high performers, people who set higher expectations and higher standards for themselves and people who are goal-oriented and highly competitive.

            The primary concept the book tries to deliver is for the high performers to maintain an ongoing one-on-one management conversation with the manager or the bosses, one boss at a time, one day at a time if possible, if not every day then as frequent as once a week. After finishing the book, one would realize that the main thing of the book is about managing oneself to get the higher performance one could possibly exercise at work and by “managing” the boss one could get helpful guidelines, direction, resources, and positive feedback from the bosses/managers.

            “If there’s a problem, the boss is the solution.” (page 4) Somehow I find this statement interesting and ironic. What if the boss is the problem? Then the statement stays true that if there is a problem the boss is the solution, indeed. Chapter nine starts with the title: What If Your Boss Really Is a Jerk?” Unless you feel there is no way you could work around with your boss the book gives the following advice: Stay professional. Never blink. Never raise your voice. Get your marching orders and go about your business. And keep detailed notes: dates, times, and concrete examples of what the boss did and said. (page 169) The book also asks: Has the boss’s behavior been so jerky that it’s obvious to both of you? A pattern of behavior? If so, try to get your boss to discuss what happened, to acknowledge it, and to give you clear instructions for what you should do if it happens again. (page 169) At reading this I wonder if anyone would take such advice and confront the boss. For the book also says that it is the boss’s psychological problem, not yours. (page 168) If the problem is not ours then how could we possibly fix a problem of someone’s mindset and attitude?

            The most helpful tips, to me personally, come from page 40 in the book. “Before you can do your best every day at your job, you need to be at your best.” (page 40) In order to do so, the author gives us the “best-self reality check” list:

• Are you taking good care of your mind?

What are the main sources of input for your mind right now?

How can you expose your mind to a greater variety of input?

• Are you taking good care of your body?

When do you sleep?

What do you put into your body?

How do you exercise?

• Are you taking good care of your spirit?

Do you know what you believe?

What is your purpose?

What is your attitude?

How can you improve your attitude?

            Someone I respect at work told me today that everyone is “one-of-a-kind.” The questions remain, to me:

What kind of person do you think you are?

What kind of person do you want to be?

And what kind of person are you to the rest of the world?

Do you ever ask such probing questions to yourself? It’s a beginning point and a start to become a better person if you do. One-of-a-kind? Yes, but what kind?