Are you worried that you may be jeopardizing your relationship with your boss? Here are some of the most common reasons why your relationship with your boss may not be as good as you’d like. Next week we’ll go over some tips for overcoming these barriers.
When you have a positive relationship with your boss, many wonderful and career-enhancing things are possible. Opportunities, praise, promotions, pay increases are just a few. Your life as an employee is easier, you have more impact, and you’re in a stronger position to drive your career forward. When I think of the benefits of having a positive relationship with your boss, I come up with an acronym that spells the word “help.”
As my tenure as a coach grows, and as I meet an increasing number of client prospects, I have noticed recurring themes among individuals who don’t think about working with a coach, or who don’t want a coach.
Every once in a while, you will hear CEOs of organizations declare “At Acme Products, we are like a family!” I am not exactly sure what a CEO means when she describes her company as a family.
Perhaps there was a time when organizations were familial. Your grandparents may reminisce about the “good old days” when employees were treated like family. In the not-too-distant past, family-like environments naturally flourished since tenures were longer and relationships were deeper. Doing your job well nearly guaranteed of lifetime employment. However, organizations today are not like a family, regardless of what your well-intentioned CEO tells you.
As you’ve seen, there are so many reasons to get involved with an organization in your industry. Once you convince your boss of the importance, and get her buy in, the benefits are many for both you and the company. Often times your boss will even see the benefit, so much so that she is willing to pay the membership fee, if there is one. Once a member, you need to decide what role you’d like to play – some requiring more of a commitment than others.
An important mindset for you, your boss, and your organization is that your association membership is work-related. This is not an extracurricular activity. The benefits to you and your organization are compelling and numerous (see previous posts).
As last we mentioned, you need to make sure that you have your boss’s buy in for your spending time attending industry events. Here are a few more things you can do to help ensure you have her full support:
You need to make sure that you have your boss’s buy in on your spending time attending industry events, otherwise her lack of support can be a significant hurdle. There are several things you can do to help make sure that her mindset is only a hurdle, rather than a total roadblock.
Balancing work and industry events in your busy organization is not easy. Engaging with industry associations can become harder if your boss doesn’t support the concept. Your boss may feel that industry association meetings are just social or networking events “dressed-up” to look like a work-related event. Your boss may believe that engaging with your industry is not a productive use of time, or she may think that any industry-related activities should be done “off-the-clock.”
Not all who are unresponsive can blame the overwhelming amount of incoming emails and phone calls as the cause of their behavior. Many of us tend to assume that other people’s low responsiveness is due to workload when, in reality, they may not possess a natural predilection to getting back to others in a timely fashion, if at all. Consider these various places you could find yourself when you attempt to balance a desire to be responsive with your actual responsiveness: