How To Be Your Bosses “Get Back” Coach
Sometimes you need to make your life difficult in the short term by making your boss's life easier in the long term.
I’ve heard it said that the main purpose of managing up is to make your boss's life easier. Sometimes, making their life easier means making your own life more difficult, at least temporarily. One of those times is when you need to say “no” to your boss.
You’re probably thinking “I can see where saying ‘no’ to my boss will make my life harder, but how will it make my boss’s life easier?”
It’s usually because you’re protecting them from something bad that will happen in the future. Such as spending a lot of time working on features that may appear good from a corporate politics perspective, but will distract your team from working on things that truly make a difference for your customer and your business.
Think of it like this, if you’ve ever watched football or basketball and the head coach of a team gets really pissed about some call and jumps on to the field/court there’s usually an assistant who grabs the coach and pulls them back to the sideline/bench.
Those people are often referred to as the “get back” coach.
They’ll probably draw the head coach's anger in the moment, but the head coach will thank them later for helping them avoid getting thrown out of the game.
When you tell your boss no, you may be acting as that get back coach for them.
Of course, you have to make sure that you do it in such a way that your boss knows why you’re doing it and they aren’t completely surprised when you do.
Here are some suggestions I put together to help you be a trusted get back coach and not get told to get out.
As with everything, those suggestions are based on my experience. I’d like to upgrade that list of suggestions with other’s experience. If you’ve found some successful ways to say no to the leaders and stakeholders in your organization, hit reply and share your story.
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Talk to you next week,
Kent J. McDonald
Founder | KBP.Media