Your Boss is a team member too!

Your Boss is a team member too!

In many Team building programs I have to remind people at the end of the program….

That your boss is also a team member and all that we learn about Human Behavior in training programs applies to him/her too! And the beauty is that if this post is read by your reporting bosses, it would be true for them too. Get the point?  Whether you think they deserve to be treated as such or you don’t  Your Boss is a team member too!

Look, when we talk about teams and team members, we seem to be programmed to think of only our equals…. peers etc. but never the bosses or the super bosses.  In fact these bosses are such an integral part of your team, that without their inclusion all this knowledge and insights will be of no use to you because none of it will be applied where it matters the most! 

So what you learn about Human Behavior applies equally to the boss and super bosses. 

Let us understand this… let me repeat it once more… if your bosses were to be doing a leadership or team building course, they would find it as relevant as you do.  That’s the beauty.  Even if many of these ‘bosses’ behave like bosses and not like a team member.  So we seem to have some prejudices against ‘bosses’ which we will try and clear in my subsequent post .

We will have to learn to question this assumption that we seem to be having about an ‘ideal’ team behaviour which seems to be an unsaid prerequisite for anyone to be called a ‘team member’.  Such a ‘significant’ unquestioned belief is surely causing frequent failures in our relationships!

Bossiness and Bossy (Bully) Behaviour should be treated as one and hence be dealt with as such.  There are many people in a team, even peers or subordinates, who will demonstrate different kinds of behaviour in a team environment.

With the same openness that we have for our peers or subordinates we need to develop an orientation to accept this ‘bossy’ behaviour from your bosses and include them as different personality profiles in the team. 

(Excerpts from a Team Building Seminar )