WORKING WITH A NEW BOSS

People spend more time thinking about how to work and be close with their bosses than any other business relationship (often times more than the customers or clients who are supposed to be ‘the king’); still they manage to get the relationship very wrong. Instead of making their careers, the relationship actually breaks it.

 Even if you have had a sour or not so-good relationship with your former boss, a new boss is an opportunity to get it right, and begin a rise to the top of your career. If you want a good relationship with your new boss, here are some useful tips:

1.  Be loyal: Disloyalty is an unforgiveable character flaw and you cannot and will not be trusted. People that cannot be trusted by their bosses cannot be recommended for promotions or even assigned any special duty or responsibility. This is because loyalty is more important than competence. Samuel Godwyn once said that he will take fifty percent efficiency to get one hundred percent loyalty. Loyalty shown publicly also results in leverage privately; when the decisions that will bring about your promotion in the office are made, they are usually in private when you are not there, and the truth is, people always want their own man on the top job.
2.   Keep the boss informed: No one has ever lost a job because they told the boss too much. Do so till he says stop. This quality is known as communication skills, and it is a major quality that everyone that must rise to the top of their career must possess. Your communication with your boss doesn’t have to be formal always, sometimes, it is better to make it tactfully natural; a good sense of humor but don’t tell unkind stories and silly jokes. Keep your mails and texts well-crafted too; this is a way of positively selling yourself.
3. Embrace changes instigated by your new boss: The ambition of every new boss is to bring change. Sometimes, they don’t even know what change or how to go about it; they want to make a change anyways but please dear reader, just make sure you are not resisting change that is instigated by your new boss, especially if it is not part of your job to do so. Helping the new boss in driving change to the organization, whether or not he is coming from the organization is very important for a career-building relationship with your boss. You can help by supplying useful information and resources. You can do this by mailing him useful materials you find online or linking him with people you know can help him achieve his goal for those few that have one and a strategy.
4.   Respect the boss’s time: If you need thirty minutes with him, don’t take sixty, better yet take twenty. The truth is, the more time you spend talking with your boss, the more you give him chance to weigh you and rate you, which is not very good for you because he might realize things he naturally does not like about your person. No need for irrelevant talk.
5.     Don’t tread his turf: ‘oga’ stay on your lane. He must give you permission if you must enter his lane. Treading the turf of a new boss especially when he has a superior or superiors he has to impress is ‘dan-ge-rous’. This is not to say that you should become a robot or you should not be proactive, what I am simply saying is that even if you are the next in line in authority, let him exercise his authority every time.
6.      Deliver in time: I always teach people that work with me in any organization my personal work strategy, “please deliver remarkable results in the shortest possible time”. Bosses don’t pull out a stop watch when they assign a task to you, but their internal clock is ticking. When you are competent, you will n0t have to do so much to win the love and trust of your new boss. Competence makes the office assistant closer to the new boss than even his assistant.
7.  Pray without ceasing: Funny isn’t it? I have learnt from experience and by studying very hard about relationships; I tell you the truth, when you pray, your mind is conditioned to function better and relate better with God and man. As much as many people will not like to consider this point very important, you must know that you have not done anything about any situation until you have prayed about it. This point is something I wish we could exhaust in this article, but E.M Bounds has written a very good book on this topic called ‘The possibilities of prayer’ and I recommend the book for you.                                                                                                                                                                                              If I was to write one more point, it will be the most important part of the article, and that is for you, my reader to be careful to observe to practice the seven points above. There is so much value in information, but the reward of applying knowledge is priceless.

This article is by Okuazun Gideon Jayeola. +234 (0) 706-8056-507, okuazungideon@gmail.com.