On Being a Boss vs. Leader

Ever get confused by what your boss is asking of you? Not really understand the motivations? Feel hurt or confused about why it is that they thought you could do this?

One simple answer might be to determine where their motivations are coming from and how they view you as a resource in the company. To better illustrate this lets do a mock interview and see how a boss and leader might approach things differently. I will let you decide what you think the best approach to this might be.

Question: a customer is upset about a problem with the product you are selling, how do you respond?

Boss: tell the customer the reason for the failure was due to a product failure. Work with that team to fix the issue. Make sure this doesn't happen again.

Leader: let's take some accountability and determine how this happened and fix the right way. Things we need to learn: 1) how did this come up? 2) was there adequate testing? 3) how can we prevent this in the future? 4) what can we do to address the customers needs right now? Let me know if you need me to spearhead this effort or if you have the bandwidth to take this on.

Question: your team is faced with multiple priorities, how do you determine which one is the most important and communicate that?

Boss: each day I call my employees and let them know what are the most important things I need done that day.

Leader: priorities come from the underlying data which tell us which would be the most customer and internally impacting projects. Each week we meet to map out and agree on what would be the most beneficial to the company and team. I realize there are always interrupts, I always bring these up with the team and acknowledge the hard work they have been doing on a project, explain why the new tasks have now taken priority, and make sure they have what they need to work on the new tasks.

Question: your company is rolling out new software, how to you make sure your team is ready to use this software?

Boss: I email out instructions on how to use the new software, in the team meeting I ask if anyone has any questions.

Leader: I take a different approach here, usually new software is a result of old software not being adequate. I listen to my team for the issues they are having with the current software. When deciding on new software for everyone to use, I incorporate their feedback and ask if they have anything else which they would like to see. For some of the motivated team members I send them some of the new options and solicit their opinions on how that software works. I find this kind of buy-in leads to much better acceptance of changes in software we use each day.

Question: one of your employees is having productivity issues, how do you address this?

Boss: I write them up and put them on a 30 day performance improvement plan to make sure they are more effective and it can be tracked.

Leader: through my experience I have found productivity issues to be a result of several factors: 1) they are emotionally distraught about something going on at work or at home, 2) they don't have the right experience / education to be doing the tasks they have assigned, or 3) worst case scenario they are just plain disinterested and are in the wrong job. The hardest part is learning which of these it might be. Usually this requires a few one on ones to discover. At this point I try and have an honest conversation with the employee about how we might want to solution the issue to see how we can correct the situation.

At the end of the day it comes down to how would you yourself prefer to be treated? Make sure you do onto others as you would yourself.