This is a great question, and the answer is multi-faceted. So I’m going to break it up into several posts. In this first one, I want to tell you about the three super-duper important qualities that you should be consistently working on and aspiring to in order to become the best boss possible.
1. Self Awareness
The first thing is to continue to cultivate, grow, and encourage your self-awareness. I cannot tell you how important that is. This is the number one thing that needs to happen for you to become the best boss possible. Becoming a best boss possible is an inside-out job so in our training program, the Best Boss Bootcamp, we start off with this deep inner work. How do we tick? What makes us function? What are our saboteurs? How do we get in our own way?
Really think about what can you do right now to increase your own self-awareness. Is it by working with an executive or leadership coach like me? Is it about working with a therapist? Is it taking a course you need to invest in? What is something that will really continue to push you, to move you forward in your self-awareness and appreciation of yourself? To know thyself is the number one quality of being a best boss.
2. Leading by Invitation
When you are leading and managing, it’s important to move away from leadership by fiat, meaning leadership by telling others what to do. Instead, I encourage you to think about leading by invitation. What can I do and say, what are the behaviors, and what is the language I can use to pull my people forward as opposed to pushing them? Pushing them is leadership by fiat.
Leadership by invitation is about pulling, encouraging, finding out what makes your direct reports most motivated, finding out what their why is, and really working with that. Continue to work on doing leadership by invitation.
3. Building Trust
You are on another constant journey, and that is the trust-building journey. You are continuously building trust with the folks you supervise. The best way of building trust is DWYSWD: Do What You Say You Will Do. Make sure you are following through on your commitments, and if you’re not able to follow through on your commitments, you are giving an absolute ironclad why those things are not happening. Whether you realize it or not, people are watching so make sure you are doing what you will say you will do. It is a journey that never ends. We are consistently working to build trust, but trust that is easily earned is also easily lost so continue to build and nurture the trust you have with your folks.