1. Lecture 21

2. Building Good Relations With Managers

3. Skill Building Approach
This lecture presents a variety of strategies and tactics aimed at building constructive relationships with your manager.
Political skills
Combination of awareness about others
Having good communication skills

4. Skill building approach
Developing effective relationships with work associates is regarded by many as having good political skills,
An interpersonal style that combines awareness of others with the ability to communicate well.

5. Developing Good Relations with Your Manager
Getting along well with your manager is the most
basic strategy for advancement.
Advancement of Career
Encouragement
Achieving personal objectives

6. The Approaches are Grouped Into Two Categories
Creating a favorable impression on your manager or team leader
Coping with an intolerable manager

7. Impressing Your Manager
Achieve Good Job Performance
Display a Strong Work Ethic
Demonstrate Good Emotional Intelligence
Be Dependable and Honest
Be A Good Organizational Citizen
Create a Strong Presence
Find Out What Your Manager Expects of You
Minimize Complaints
Avoid Bypassing Your Manager
Use Discretion in Socializing With Your Manager
Engage in Favorable Interaction with Your Manager

8. Impressing your Manager
Achieve Good Job Performance:
Good job performance remains the most effective strategy for impressing your manager or team leader.
An advanced way of displaying good job performance is to assist your manager with a difficult problem he or she faces.

9. Impressing your Manager
Display a Strong Work Ethic:
A major factor contributing to good job performance is a strong work ethic, a firm belief in the dignity and value of work.
Having a strong work ethic is also important for favorably impressing a manager.
Six suggestions for demonstrating a strong work ethic are:
Work hard and enjoy the task.
Demonstrate competence even on minor tasks.
Assume personal responsibility for problems.
Assume responsibility for free-floating problems.
Get your projects completed promptly.
Accept undesirable assignments willingly.

10. Impressing your Manager
Demonstrate Good Emotional Intelligence:
A worker who deals effectively with the emotional responses of coworkers and customers is impressive because feelings and emotions are a big challenge on the job.
Demonstrating good emotional intelligence is also impressive because it contributes to performing well in the difficult area of dealing with feelings.

11. Impressing your Manager
Be Dependable and Honest:
Dependability is a critical employee virtue. If an employee can be counted on to deliver as promised and to be at work regularly, that employee has gone a long way toward impressing the boss.

12. Impressing your Manager
Be A Good Organizational Citizen:
An especially meritorious approach to impressing key people is to demonstrate organizational citizenship behavior.
The willingness to work for the good of the organization even without the promise of a specific reward.
The good organizational citizen goes “above and beyond the call of duty.”
An effective way of being a good organization citizen is to step outside your job description.
If people only do work included in their job description, a mentality of “It’s not my job” pervades.

13. Impressing the Manager
An impressive way of stepping outside your job description is to anticipate problems even when the manager had not planned to work on them. Anticipating problems reflects an entrepreneurial, take-charge attitude.

14. Impressing the Manager
Create a Strong Presence:
A comprehensive approach to impressing your manager or team leader and other key people is to create a strong presence,
Keep yourself in the forefront.
Get involved in high visibility projects such as launching a new product.
Joining a team is effective as is getting involved in community activities of interest to top management.
Also, take on tasks your manager dislikes.

15. Impressing the Manager
Find Out What Your Manager Expects of You:
You have little chance of doing a good job and impressing your manager unless you know what you are trying to accomplish.
Work goals and performance standards represent the most direct way of learning your manager’s expectations.
A performance standard is a statement of what constitutes acceptable performance.
These standards can sometimes be inferred from a job description.

16. Impressing the Manager
Minimize Complaints:
It is unwise to continually complain about various aspects of the work environment.
Aside from being perceived as a pest, listening to complaints takes up considerable management time.
A better tactic than frequent complaining is to make constructive suggestions to improve substandard situations.

17. Impressing the Manager
Avoid Bypassing Your Manager:
A good way to embarrass and sometimes infuriate your manager is to repeatedly go to his or her superior with your problems, conflict and complaints.
The bypass suggests that you don’t think your boss has enough power to take care of the problem and that you distrust his or her judgment.
By passing your manager is looked upon so negatively that most experienced managers will not listen to your problem unless you have already discussed it with your immediate superior.

18. Impressing the Manager
Use Discretion in Socializing With Your Manager:
Advocates of socializing with the boss contend that off-the-job friendships lead to more natural work relationships.
However, socializing with the boss can lead to role confusion, or being uncertain about what role you are carrying out.

19. Impressing your Manager
Engage in Favorable Interaction with Your Manager:
A study of interactions between bank employees and their supervisors showed that trying to create a positive impression on the superior led to better performance ratings.

20. Animate this slide

21. Coping with A Problem Manager
A challenge to ambitious people is to cope with a difficult manager, yet remain well regarded by that person. Suggestions follow:
Reevaluate Your Manager
Confront Your Manager About the Problem
Learn from Your Manager’s Mistakes

22. Coping with A Problem Manager
Reevaluate Your Manager:
Some problem bosses are not really a problem. Instead, they have been misperceived by one or more group members.
You and your boss may simply have a difference in roles, goals or values.

23. Coping with A Problem Manager
Confront Your Manager About the Problem:
A general-purpose way of dealing with a problem manager is to apply confrontation and problem solving in techniques.
Use considerable tact and sensitivity because your manager or team leader has more formal authority than you.
Gently ask for an explanation of the problem.
Confrontation can also be helpful in dealing with the problem of micromanagement, the close monitoring of most aspects of group member activities by the manager.

24. Coping with A Problem Manager
Learn from Your Manager’s Mistakes:
Even a bad boss contributes to our development—he or she serves as a model of what not to do as a boss.
Also, should your manager be fired, analyze that situation to avoid the mistakes he or she made.