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Summary
In this video, I walk you through the Good Boss Bad Boss Contrast Exercise. I have facilitated this exercise with hundreds of workshop participants, the results are very consistent. It seems that we all know what good leadership looks like. If it's common sense, why isn't it common practice?
Full Transcript
Good Boss Bad Boss: It’s Your Choice
Hi, I'm Robin Levesque, and I work with organizations that want to co-create a culture of positive leadership at every level to reduce the cost of stress, absenteeism and turnover and increase employee engagement, effectiveness, and client satisfaction. Happy boss, happy employee, happy client. Now that's a winning formula. Grumpy boss, grumpy employee, grumpy client. Not so much.
So how do I do that? Well, one of the things that I like to talk about in most of my workshops is a contrast between the Good Boss and the Bad Boss. We've all had them. So, I want you to think about the very best boss you've ever worked with. Write down that person's name and write down what he or she said to make you feel like that was the very best boss you've ever worked with.
Write down the behaviors. What did he or she say or do to make you feel that way? And once you've done that, if you want to pause this video to take a moment to write that down, that's fine. Once you've done that, I want you to write down your level of engagement in that work environment. How excited were you to show up in the morning in that work environment? How engaged were you? How was your performance? So write down a number from zero to a hundred percent. Now, if you're like most people you will have likely written to down things like that person was positive, supportive, gave me some great advice. Had an open door policy, was honest, was inspiring and so on. And if you're like most people, your level of engagement in this work environment, would've been around 85 to 95%. So 80, 85, 90%, somewhere around there, quite high. So high level of engagement.
Now this is called a contrast exercise because now we're going think about the opposite. So opposite of the Good Boss is the Bad Boss. Think of the very worst boss you've ever worked for. Now, write down that person's name and write down what he or she said to make you feel that way. What were the behaviors? What did he or she say or do to make you feel that way? And again, it's okay to pause this video. If you want to take a moment to write that down, and once you've done that, write down your level of engagement in that work environment. How excited were you to show up in the morning? How did it make you feel during the work day? What was your level of performance? And again, if you're like most people, you probably will have said that the person is negative. That he or she talked
down at you, was overly critical, was backstabbing, was micromanaging, was second guessing decisions, not giving you the autonomy to do your own job. And if you're like most people, you probably will have rated yourself around the 20, 25% mark engagement on this particular exercise.
Even if you're a super high performer, maybe 40, 45% at the most. That's what I've discovered over doing this dozens of times with workshop participants is that even the high performers don't perform as well in the Bad Boss environment.
So, the question is, which boss do you want to be? If it's the Good Boss, great, you've come to the right place. Now, how do you become more of the Good Boss? Well, that'll be the subject of future videos, but for now I want to offer you this piece of advice. Make a choice; whether you're a Good Boss or a Bad Boss is a choice that you make. If you choose to believe that people are good and want to do a good job, then that's the behavior that you will reinforce as a leader.
Now going back to our exercise, the question is why do we still have so many Bad Bosses in the work environment? Well, it's my belief that sometimes we pick the wrong people to take on leadership positions. We give them promotions and raises to be good technicians. And we put them in a people leadership role that may not be where they belong. The other reason is that this is how we're training bosses in some of our work environments. They learn from other Bad Bosses that have gone before them. And they think this is the way that you should work with people. That you should manage them, that you should get to perform in using negative behavior. That's just not the case. And now we have positive psychology to show us that that's just not the case. That happy boss is contagious … will rub off on its employees. Therefore, we have happy employees and happy clients. And again, that's a winning formula. So, see you next time where I'm going to talk to you about the DREAM Master Key, which is one of the tools that I've developed over the last few years to create more Good Boss behavior in all of us.
Take care and see you next time.