Being the Boss

Photo courtesy of Professor Linda A. Hill

Spring 2011

Professor Linda A. Hill

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Customer Care News

Being the Boss

I

n the following excerpt, taken from the arti-

cle “Being the Boss” in HBS Working Knowledge, senior editor Carmen Nobel incorporates an inter-

view with Harvard Business School Professor Linda A.

Hill, who coauthored Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader with Kent Lineback.

Carmen Nobel: Your book discusses three imperatives for

Q: You include a chapter called “Don’t Forget Your Boss.”

network, and managing your team. What are some of the

with their bosses. What do they need to keep in mind?

becoming a great leader: managing yourself, managing your issues inherent in each of them?

Linda Hill: It starts with using yourself as an instrument to get things done. And because you’re the instrument, you’ve got to know that instrument very well and use it appropriately, so that your imprint matches your impact. We talk a

lot about what it really means to be the boss. For instance,

Managers often fail to realize their role in their relationships

A: It’s common to let the person up the chain be most responsible for whether you have a healthy relationship, but

you’re equally responsible. If you don’t manage that relationship right, your team is not going to be able to do what it needs to do.

Powerlessness corrupts as much as power. You shouldn’t

although you do have formal authority, you don’t want to

feel powerless with your boss. That’s not the deal. You have

Managing your network is in the middle of the book,

the boss. You also have to see the boss as human and fallible

have to rely on that too much to get things done.

before the section on managing your team. That kind of throws some people because when you think about being the boss, you mostly think about the people who report to

you. But unless you manage the context in which your team resides, there’s no way that your team can be successful. So

you have to understand the political dynamics, you have to

understand how to build a network with peers and bosses, and you have to set the right expectations for your team and the right resources. We really think that’s at the heart.

The last piece is your team. That’s about all the com-

plexities of what it means to build a team—a team is different

to figure out the sources of power you have to influence in all the ways that you’re human and fallible, and figure out

how to deal with the reality of who that person is—rather than the ideal of what you’d like that person to be like. There

are really bad bosses, and you can’t be naive or cynical about this. It’s hard to be successful with a bad boss, and some-

times success means figuring out how to get out of that situation. But before you decide that’s the deal, you need to

take responsibility for the relationship, because it’s definitely two-way.…

To

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entire

article,

visit:

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6573.html CCN

the future—that managing isn’t all about today, it’s also about

This excerpt from “Being the Boss” was reprinted with

performance of individuals. We also talk about preparing for managing your team for tomorrow.

www.customercarenews.com

Spring 2011

from just a group—and how you think about managing the

permission from HBS Working Knowledge.

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