If you only do one thing this week … tell your bosses what you think of them
February 15, 2010 by admin
Filed under Career News and Advice
Whether it’s a failure to communicate useful information or a tendency for slip-ups that make you and your colleagues look bad, the chances are you could tell your boss a thing or two about the way he or she works. Recently it was even claimed that doing so would make you less stressed.
The trouble is finding the right way to approach the matter. Bottle things up and you may end up exploding and saying things you regret, but speak out on the spur of the moment and you may come across as antagonistic. So what is the most constructive way to go about telling your boss what you think of him or her?
In an ideal working world, you would be able to be open and honest with your employers, but, as Chris Smith, principal consultant at the Bath Consultancy Group, acknowledges: “Whether you can do that depends on your situation, not everyone has that sort of relationship with their boss.”
Which is why a more formal set-up can be useful. Smith is an advocate of 360-degree feedback, where employees rate managers, managers rate employees and colleagues rate each other. “It typically works with people providing some anonymous feedback based on a questionnaire, which has usually been put together by someone with an HR function or an external organisation. It might be linked to the company’s values, or be based on a set of competencies,” says Smith.
In theory, 360-degree feedback should provide a helpful insight for all concerned. “It can be very interesting – you might think you are a good listener or communicator but the feedback says the opposite,” he says.
But if the process is not implemented properly, instead of being interesting, it can be downright disastrous, as one firm found out recently. “There had been a problem, and some [more junior] people had come in for a lot of criticism,,” says Melanie (not her real name)…
Read the original article at Guardian