What To Do When You Have a Poor Leader

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to the Leaders Kit Bag, your go to podcast for practical leadership insights. In just six minutes in each episode, we tackle real challenges faced by leaders and managers, offering actionable tools and strategies you can take away and immediately apply. And because leadership doesn't happen in a studio, there's these episodes are mostly recorded outside on the move. They're raw, unscripted and straight to the point. So wherever you are, let's dive in and sharpen your leadership skills six minutes at a time. If your boss is a poor leader, it is undoubtedly harder for you to lead your team well, but it is still absolutely possible. There is always stuff that we can control and stuff that we can influence so we can be the most effective leader possible for our team. The best leaders and managers are therefore highly skilled at managing both upwards and down. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. Managing up isn't just about office politics or our own personal ambition. It is a key part of being an effective leader. And in this episode, I've got three tips to help you when you are working for a leader who, let's say, isn't the best. Number one is to clarify the bigger picture. When you are being given tasks to complete or objectives to hit and deliver, make sure you are in a respectful way asking your boss lots of clarifying questions and frame them in a way so you are demonstrating your support to them in a way that benefits them. You could do that, for example, by saying to ensure that the team stay focused and deliver what it is you ultimately want. Can you help me understand where this objective fits into the bigger picture? Or it could be what is the ultimate outcome you are looking to achieve here and why? By asking these sorts of questions, it helps your leader to clarify their thinking and nudges them towards effective prioritization. Number two is to seek out feedback. One of the things that poor leaders often don't do is to share effective feedback with their teams. So if you find yourself working in a feedback vacuum, which is really tough feature for you and your team, you can be proactive by asking for feedback and once again, frame this in a way that helps your boss. You could do that by asking things like simple things such as, okay, can I just check this is what we're doing so far? Are we on track with this? Similarly, you could say, when you are delivering an objective or debriefing your boss, can you share just one thing with me that me and the team could do better next time round and you could potentially add on the back of that to make your life easier. So that is the second tip to actively seek out feedback and the third one is to share the wins and successes that that are happening within your team. And again, you're starting to understand how if you frame this right, this is going to help make your boss look good. And if our boss is happy and looking good, then our life is going to be easier. So you might want to share the wins and successes around targets that you have hit, feedback the team has received, even training and development you have done with the team. And a bonus tip here to ensure this gets down to the team. You could even make the request when they're in a good mood for them to swing by the team and share some praise. Or if it's easier, just ask them to send a thank you or well done email to the team. And if it's unlikely that your boss is going to do this, you could take a tip from people seeking product reviews and you could even ask, you could even sorry, write the review yourself and ask them to just tweak it in their own language and then send it. So there you go. Three tips for effectively managing your own boss. If you found this episode of the Leader's Kit Bag useful, then you can subscribe to my Leaders Kit Bag newsletter by heading over to my website at www.Ben-morton.com. that's it for this episode of Leaders Kit Bag. As always, look after yourself and those you've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. Until next time, lead on.