When you treat everyone like they work for you
Reframe your approach to getting things done
Getting into a boss mindset can do wonders for your attitude in dealing with difficult situations. It doesn't mean you suddenly start giving orders or being bossy. If you treat each person you meet as if they are working for you, then you have reframed your approach to getting things done.
What changes when you treat everyone like they work for you? A few things happen right away:
You notice some of the people working for you have performance problems
You remember to thank your employees more
You realize that you didn’t communicate clearly on the team's goals
Let's work through this changed mindset.
Handling Performance Problems
When a someone on the team isn't doing their job, then their manager needs to resolve the performance problem. If you treat the whole team as if they work for you, then you need to fix the performance problem.
A Performance Problem
Suppose you are leading a platform software product and your coworker, Jake, is responsible for the multi-tenant use of your product. Lately Jake has reported engineering team doing the end customer portal has been assigned to other features because partners that use the portal don't need anything more for their customers. Additionally, there isn't much growth in the monthly revenue from partners. You notice that Jake is complaining more than trying to grow the partner revenue stream.
Handling Like a Boss
If you treat Jake like he works for you, then you would be forced to break the downward spiral of Jake's behavior and the impact on the rest of the team. Instead of shrugging off Jake's complaining, you begin asking questions of customers, the engineering team and of Jake. You find out customers need new features on the portal to add more end customers. You learn that Jake never asked engineering to make changes that ease the onboarding of new end customers. Jake requests a small change and customers order more licenses for new end customers.
Giving More Gratitude
You always say thank you to your team and you appreciate your team. What else can a boss do to give more gratitude? When you treat your team as if they work for you, then you would publicly and privately compliment them. And you would call out how their action made an improvement.
Looking for Ways to Say Thanks
For example your group is growing and Sonya, a new hire, is shadowing you to take over the development of a cloud appliance of your software product. Sonya proposes a roadmap to quickly deliver a cloud appliance. The engineering team jumps on her proposal and begins work. You had been trying for months without success to get the cloud appliance committed and Sonya got it done shortly after being hired.
Handling Like a Boss
While it is bittersweet that your product finally has a cloud appliance, if you treat Sonya like she works for you, then you would celebrate her success. You would look for ways to recognize the progress with your management and with the product team. You would thank her for cracking into the cloud market for you product. You would help find ways to be ready to launch the new cloud appliance.
Clear Communications on Goals
You are friendly to all your team and you always go out of your way to share your knowledge with your team. You expect the whole team sees solutions to problems the same as you. Your management has set goals for each person on the product team. Why do you need to talk about goals with your team?
Does Everyone Know the Goals?
Suppose your software appliance is being used by many customers for cloud usage analytics. The software is not able keep up with data coming from a few heavy users and your DevOps team has had to restart the appliance several times in the past month. Each restart means customers lose a few days of analytics data. A major customer is threatening to leave your service if more analytics data is lost. The whole product team is focused on finding a way to avoid losing analytics data. In reviewing the customer usage of your product just before the restart, you notice the customers are using an older version of the software agent that hits the APIs on your software appliance.
Handling Like a Boss
You contact Pete, the head of the engineering team, to discuss the investigation so far. You ask if they have investigated differences in versions between the agent and the cloud based appliance. Pete didn't realize that some customers prevent the agent from upgrading. Pete gets the team to test with mismatched versions and finds an issue. By going to the person charged with resolving the problem instead of going to a peer in engineering, the goals were clear and the team quickly found the issue.
Conclusion
Treating everyone like they work for you is a good way to change your frame of mind on difficult situations. It gives you new ways handle performance problems, prompts you to recognize greatness in others and enables you to communicate objectives clearly.