Tweet

Notes to Boss

Guest post by: Nan Russell

Article Overview: So in the interests of helping that boss "see what it looks like" to be a winning at working manager, I have a few notes for him, and others like him.

Notes to Boss

As a conference speaker, I arrived a day early to get an up close feel for the audience's issues and challenges before my presentation. Waiting outside the large auditorium for the morning's general session to begin, I watched as the catering manager arrived for what appeared to be a planned inspection.

Staff members stood behind the food tables as he walked the breakfast buffet set-up. No good morning, no hello, no how are you, to his staff. No thank you acknowledgement to the team for creating an inviting space for the several thousand soon-to-arrive guests. In fact, he attempted no personal connection at all.

Instead, his first words to staff were, "I hate it," pointing to a flower arrangement. "Move it." he said. After barking orders of items he wanted changed "immediately," he was gone. As soon as the boss was out of range, one young man muttered to another, "Jerk!"

You can imagine how enthusiastic and engaged that staff was by the time the first guests arrived. Now, I'm not suggesting insincere praise or faux friendliness, which is as transparent as bubble wrap. But what this boss failed to understand that morning was his personal impact on the group's performance and motivation that day. His approach did nothing to help people bring the best of who they are to their work, or to their guests, or build the business.

So in the interests of helping that boss "see what it looks like" to be a winning at working manager, I have a few notes for him, and others like him.

Dear Boss: Consider these your first week of coaching tweets:

* Ask yourself: how can I be of service to my staff? How can I best support their work and efforts?

* Manage to the 90% of trustworthy, hardworking, dedicated people, and you'll increase the probability of exceptional results.

* The law of reciprocity - you get what you give - is at work here. You get respect by giving respect.

* Don't hire hands or heads or voices to do what needs to be done, engage the whole person.

* Paint a word picture of what you want achieved. Help people "see it" and they can do it.

* Your words matter. Use them carefully. Don't forget, please, thank you, and good morning.

* Helping others thrive helps you survive. What are you doing today to help your team thrive?

According to a recent Harvard Business School report, employee "dissatisfaction is at a twenty-three year all time low," with unhappiness rates as high as 82%. Maybe that catering manager is among them. But one thing for sure, his employees are.

Yet, it doesn't have to be like that. Managers who are winning at working understand that people work for people, not for companies. If you manage others, your job is to help them do their best work.

Winning at working managers do just that. They create pockets of excellence where people can shine. And those pockets of excellence are where you'll find the remaining 18% of employees - the satisfied, committed, fully engaged ones!

(c) 2011 Nan S. Russell. All rights reserved.

Related Articles
  How to Work At Home
  Sue Your Boss
  15 Ways to Create High Visibility with FaceBook
  How to Speak & Present Without Notes
  Bad Bosses
  What is the first thing your mother taught you to say after Ma Ma and Da Da?
  Be Your Own Boss! ~FOR SERIOUS ENTREPRENEURS...SECRETS TO WEALTH
  How to avoid the platitudes and simple solutions
  Manage Up As Well As Down
  Effectively Dealing with Poor Management
  Extra Work Should Be a Welcome Opportunity
  Money (and a Nice Boss, Benefits and Career Development) … That’s What I Want
  Getting a Reluctant Boss to Agree
  Fear of The "Boss" - The Biggest Obstacle To Career Progression
  Can the Bully Become a Leader?
  How to Take Good Notes
  Remove Barriers to Happiness at Work
  Be the new kind of Boss!!
  How To Start Your Own Bookkeeping Business
  Take Note

Article Tags: boss, employees, reciprocity, satisfaction, thrive, win



Related Forum Posts
Re: Books You Wish Had Been Written - How did I miss this topic for so long!! haa haa I love it. Ok - procrastinate constructively - I'd probably buy that but then put off reading it...haa haa Hmm...I think someone should write a book about being a sometimes reluctant entrepreneur, or perhaps the reality of business ownership and PMS as a woman in business. kidding aside...I have an extensive library but I would love to see a book that really lays out the emotional side of business ownership. What to prepare for etc. I get the tools and information from reading a lot of biographies but somedays, I would love to go to my library and pull out a reference for 'one the days you dont feel like being the Boss etc..."or 'how to keep your game face on for your staff when stuff doesnt go right. I had a meeting today with a prospect and he was really candid, he said "i want my business to be doing better but I'm not sure if I have it in me today...." Instead of a sales meeting - we went for a heart to heart entrepreneurship coffee. Best 'meeting' I have had in forever!!
Are You a Businessgirl or a Businesswoman? - One thing that has irked me off and on for 30 years is the tendency of people - both men [i:2wryyhvf]and [/i:2wryyhvf]women, to refer to women, whatever their age, as 'girls' rather than women. College basketball announcers, coachers and players do it, as do the fans. These are 'girls' who are between the ages of 18 - 21, that's women in my book. Tennis players and announcers do it. John McEnroe called 'em girls and just when I was getting annoyed at him for being a bit of a male chauvanist, they interviewed player Lindsay Davenport - 30 years old, and she referred to 'em as girls as well. The Bond "girls" were girls up until the 90s, I admit, doing nothing more than providing someone for Bond to bed and rescue, but in the last few installments the "girl" has been more of a power player...nevertheless she's still a 'girl'. And of course there was the TV series The Golden Girls - which I liked by the way, but which featured mature women calling themselves girls And now here it is in the 2000s, and we get this: The Girl's Guide To Starting Your Own Business, by Caitlin Friedman and Kimberly Yorio. Their photos are on the cover - presumably the photo is of them and not models - and they are definitely women, not girls. And what "girly" chapter titles do they give us? "The Scary Stuff" (financial matters) and a chapter on ACTING Like an Adult. (Caps mine). So popular was this book, apparently, that they've now come out with a sequel: The Girl's Guide to Being a Boss (Without Being A Bitch): Valuable Lessons, Smart Suggestions, and true stories for succeeding as the CHICK-IN-CHARGE. (My caps) and once again I was tempted to take the book and throw it across the room. Let's indulge in [i:2wryyhvf]all [/i:2wryyhvf]the cliches, shall we? So I'd like to hear from other businesswomen out there. Do you find yourself referred to as a girl? Do you mind it? Do you like the culture that still propagates that mindset?
Meet Mary Sue Milliken - chef and restaurant owner - Mary Sue Milliken will be at our "Launching an Edible Life" event February 4 in Los Angeles ... come join us! Contact aswift@ladieswholaunch.com for registration details. If there's just one thing you need to open a restaurant, it would have to be a stove, right? Think again. When Mary Sue Milliken and her best friend/fellow chef/business partner Susan Feniger opened City Cafe in Los Angeles in 1981, they had no stove or oven, only a hot plate and a hibachi out back in the alley. Humble digs, especially for two professionally trained chefs-Milliken had attended Washburne Culinary Institute, while Feniger studied at the Culinary Institute of America. Their resumes included stints at three-star restaurants in France, Spago in Los Angeles, and Le Perroquet in Chicago, where they met in 1978-the first women working in that restaurant's all-male kitchen. Rich in experience and vision, but not in funds, they were happy to have a restaurant to call their own and quickly began perfecting a unique, multicultural fare, which incorporated recipes from Greek, Indian, and Thai cultures, as well as their own mothers' recipes. Once they expanded to City Restaurant in 1985, they became culinary icons, recognized for their fresh mix of refined culinary technique and exotic Third World flavors, all dished up with down-home charm and playful enthusiasm. Now overseeing 375 employees between the Border Grill restaurants in Santa Monica and Las Vegas and Ciudad in downtown Los Angeles, the partners have also found time to write five cookbooks, including the recent Mexican Cooking Essentials for Dummies; host the popular Food Network shows "Too Hot Tamales" and "Tamales World Tour"; and launch the Border Girls brand at Whole Foods Market. What we learned from Mary Sue: Not every venture will be successful, but every experience will be worthwhile. "You've got to bounce back and just keep going. They're all great lessons to learn." Words of Wisdom "I think we both subconsciously were willing to start in a really meager setting, just because it was an opportunity not to work for a man." Penniless But Passionate "We had come home [from France] with the intent to open a restaurant together, and we didn't have a penny to our names. I was 23 years old. I had not been to college. I had no idea how to launch a business. None. Susan had a degree in economics and had been to chef's school. She's five years older than me. But she also didn't have any idea how to launch a business." Cook What You Know "First of all, you just copy things. But then, it starts to be a very personal cuisine, which is what we basically used those three-and-half years at City Cafe for-to create our own personal style of food. And it was so well-received. It started out as country French food, and it kept expanding all the time." Eclecticism, Not Fusion "We did some really groundbreaking stuff. This was in 1984, and still, when our City Cuisine cookbook came out in '87, people said there's nowhere to put this book on the shelves of the cookbook aisles, because you guys are all over the map. And there just wasn't that kind of integration of different culinary ideas. We never called what we did "fusion." We always felt like we stayed very true to the Greek cuisine, or the Indian, or the Thai, or the Mexican, or the Scandinavian, or whatever it was." On-the-Job Training We slowly started learning about business, so when we launched City Restaurant, which was really the thing that put us on the map, it was a 125-seat restaurant with a full-on kitchen. It was on La Brea. We raised the $660,000, and had to do a whole prospectus. I'll never forget, my net worth was $12,000, and Susan's wasn't much more. But we were able to learn by the seat of our pants, and we've been learning ever since." How Much Is Enough? "We were just making educated guesses-or uneducated guesses. In the end, $660,000 was not enough money at all. We were completely short, and we had to get an angel to come in and sign a guarantee on a bank line of credit for us. Really, it was a stressful opening, because we only had like two-and-a-half days in the kitchen with food before we had to open the doors to the public because we were so broke." Hindsight Is 20/20 "If I knew then what I know now, I would have somehow found some financial bridge so that we could have had a little more practice before we opened. I mean, literally, the first couple weeks, there were nights that we didn't even go home, and we were really burning the candle down to zero." It's a Man's World "I think we were both ready to be on our own. And the prospect of working under men, and working our way up, and trying to fight through all of the barriers, looked less fulfilling than just starting out [on our own]. Even though we didn't even have a stove, we still opted to start out calling our own shots." Know When to Grow "The growth ... it's a really personal thing. It depends on how equipped you are for the challenge and stress of growth, and how your business is doing. I mean, we've grown where things worked out really well, and we've grown where it's created a big strain on the existing businesses, and the new businesses didn't work." On Losing Money "When I look back on it, I think, 'Well, I didn't go to college. That's about how much college might cost me. I'll just chalk it up to experience.' Now I have an even better understanding, and luckily, it didn't happen at a time when I really couldn't afford it. But I'll tell you, being an entrepreneur and being in business is a real roller coaster." A Thankless Job Has Its Rewards "When the Food Network came asking for us to come and promote our second book, and they noticed we were funny and how we finished each other's sentences, they said, 'You girls should have a TV show.' The reason we should have had a TV show was that we did all of this really thankless teaching before that, and I'm not even sure it brought bodies into the restaurant. A lot of people might have looked at it as a waste of time. But I think you never know what skill you're going to develop, [and our teaching gave us the skills we needed to do the Food Network show.]" Be a Great Boss "We learn a lot from our colleagues, and from other companies that we want to be like. We're always looking for innovative ways to really make our workplace so phenomenally attractive that we can't lose good people, and we can attract the best. Those are big goals for us all the time." My Most Rewarding Business Moments... "... are when one of our past employees mentions how working for us made a difference in their lives. It's the best feeling in the world!" Be Good at Everything "You have to be a great leader, as well as a great cook, as well as organized, because it's a business of so many details. I think there are a lot of restaurants that fall through the cracks because they're missing the boat on something, and customers just don't come back." All Work and No Play "You have to be willing to walk away when you have a pile of work on your desk and stuff that you really should get done. You've got to be willing to walk away and clear your mind and be in the moment with your children or your husband, or whoever. You have to convince yourself that it's equally, or more, important than your job." This Featured Lady was profiled by Sarah Tomlinson, a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

What is Discretionary Cash Flow

Qualities of Leadership Part 1

Ask All to Buy!

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.