GOOD BOSS vs BAD BOSS
Want to learn how the Tradies Success Academy can help you optimise your trade or construction business for profit, growth, and time freedom?
In this week’s podcast Greg talks about the differences between a good boss and a bad boss. We all want to be a good boss but there are a few things that can have a really positive impact on the way you lead.
Such as:
Communication
Understanding your own capacity
Self awareness
Personal performance
Understanding your team's capacity
Empowering your team to find solutions themselves
Transcript
Greg Allan
Here's why you're being a bad boss and you don't even know it.
But by the end of this episode, I hope you have an awareness of how you can fix it.
If it's anything like me, I've always had great intentions.
I've always wanted to be the best boss I can be, but it doesn't mean that I was always the best boss.
And I wanna share today some tips that I've learnt around how to be a bit good boss and what you need to do to protect that good boss status.
So let's start off with capacity. We all know that when you're busy and stressed because you're a business owner and you're wearing every hat of the business, you're not really communicating, well, we're not communicating with our partners, we're not communicating with our team.
And if it's anything like me, just shut off trying to focus to get the fix to the problem we've got. And those are mostly the times where the team picks up on that energy and they're like, “what have I done wrong?” And it's never about the team.
Actually, it's about my own personal capacity and the way I'm feeling inside myself. And so having an awareness around how much load you're wearing. Like if you're doing massive hours or you're just wearing a lot of stress, even if you're doing small hours, but compressing all of the workload into a short amount of time because you've got other commitments in your life that's gonna create the same stress environment that doesn't allow you to show up as your best self.
Now, the next thing is making sure you put yourself first so that you can have the awareness around your capacity. So capacity is only created by hiring other people and delegating the re responsibilities within the business to other people. But when you try and hold on to all of that, then you wear all of the stress and responsibility and if it doesn't get done, it's your fault and if it does get done, you know, it's just gonna keep coming.
So it's really important that you have that awareness. So a really important thing I learnt to do was journal and create the awareness and make sure that I understood where I was at. “Am I showing up as my best self? Or do I need to make sure I care for myself through the five personal performance disciplines that we teach in the academy, which is sleep, exercise, nutrition, mindset, and relationships.”
When you put those things first, you're going to show up as your best self and allow you to be an empathetic boss and actually listen to your team, you know, understand where they're at and create solutions for the business.
But when you don't listen, because you're stressed and you just want to get the work done that comes across as closed door mentality and it doesn't create a great environment for your team.
Another thing is making sure you've got a great awareness around your team's capacity. So you might have managed your own capacity now and you've got, you've been able to delegate to a few people in your team. But now that you're moving into a leadership position, you need to have an awareness around your team's capacity.
So always being able to have a system in place that ensures that you check in with them and that you understand, if they, they need to hire people within their team or you need to maybe potentially automate some processes or just give the lower the expectation and, and help the person relieve some pressure when we can do that, that allows that person to have capacity again and perform at their best.
But if we all know if we can't achieve that capacity and it might be a short-term.
But there's acute capacity problems and there's chronic capacity problems, acute is short-term, chronic is long-term.
So there's always gonna be acute capacity problems and it's about understanding when to hire and or just to work through or support through a short term acute capacity issue.
And the final thing I wanna say around this in terms of you being, having more awareness around being a good boss and empowering your team, which is actually gonna free you up as a boss as well.
Is not going and fixing it when they make mistakes yourself or say if they give you a call and they, they want an answer to a question you're just giving them the answer like a hero or hey, I can't get this job done. Alright. “Wait, I'll jump in the car and fix it for you.” Bust out to the job.
“Look at this, look how good I am.” Smash it out in front of them because that's sending a subliminal message that “I'm not good enough and I'm always gonna call the boss to come and fix it when I can't do it.”
So that doesn't empower the team member to step up and smash out the work themselves and the way that we do that is allowing them to make mistakes, allowing them the space and the support to be able to make those mistakes and grow within your company.
And a lot of the time people don't have the structure in place like position descriptions, training programs and o and other things that we teach a lot in the academy to up-skill and empower your staff so that you as a boss, don't need to do that anymore.
