Lead your boss!

One of my favourite questions that I ask during a leadership mentoring is

How do you lead your boss?

My mentees show in general two possible reactions:
A surprised “that is not my role, I cannot lead my supervisor” or a reflected “let me explain…”

Let’s stick a bit with the first version.
For persons with this view, leadership seems to have one direction: top down. And leading people seems to be understood as a job description: “my job does not allow leading someone/my boss”.

This is one of the moments to build a broader understanding of leadership.
With the foundational understanding that leadership is influence on decisions and on behaviour – regardless of the hierarchy level or the job profile – it loses the limitation. If you acknowledge that leading happens 360 degrees around you, leading up becomes less extraordinary.

Less extraordinary does not mean easy and it requires a “healthy” understanding of leadership responsibility. Leading up does not mean to tell your manager what she or he should do or has to think. It means to take influence without manipulating, to help make the best decisions possible.

Without aiming to create a checklist, I have the following thoughts on leading up:

• See your manager as your customer.
• Make your manager successful. Help avoid failure.
• Find out what your manager needs, in regards of quantity and quality of information or topics in which your expertise is needed. When you deliver what your manager needs, you get what you need.
• Pick her or him up from where she/he is – not where you want her/him to be (in general a good leadership principle!).
• Know what you want to achieve. A decision? An opinion? A feedback?
• Learn to read “weather signs”, identify the good timing to bring up certain topics, avoid low pressure areas.
• Time with you should be quality time. Bring value adding input and advice, ask questions, prepare alternative scenarios for possible decisions.
• Observe and learn the language as well as the rules of the game.
• Be patient, “try and reflect”.

If you are already in a leadership role, 360 degree leadership means to lead your manager and to lead the colleagues on your level – take it as leading from the inside.
If you want to become a leader, leading from below is essential for your development and a continuous case study for your leadership claim. It allows you to answer the question above with “Let me give you a few examples…”

PS – my view on this question:

Good leaders allow others to lead them, bad leaders need others to lead them.