Challenge that Unfair Boss…and Yourself
Open your mind, accept your failures or be left behind
Out of nowhere…
- your boss tightens your deadline with no justifiable reason,
- your boss unfairly gives you more or less work than others,
- your boss assigns you an unreasonable project.
Leaving you in confusion, lost, frustrated, and annoyed, your boss continues back to business as usual.
Accepting your failures is acceptable but failing to open your mind limits your growth opportunity
In order to understand, learn, grow from and overcome issues with your boss’ behaviour, we will explore the concept of mindfulness (open-mindedness).
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is a ‘state of being’ where people are actively aware of themselves and their surroundings, are open to new information, and are willing and able to process their experience from multiple perspectives.
In other words, open-minded can be taken as the ability to positively handle negative criticism and feedback by having an open-mindset.
Your Boss is Human Too
Have you ever had that time when your boss unexpectedly gave you and unreasonable task out of the blue? Or you get pressured by your boss to meet a deadline? It is frustrating, annoying, and devastating!
Ever wondered why? Think again. Open your mind. Try to understand where your boss is coming from. Following the concept of mindfulness and having an open mindset, step back and look at the issue from a different perspective. Why is your boss being unreasonable? Maybe he or she has had a bad day?
There is always an underlying reason behind someone’s actions, whether it is shaped by their upbringing environment or other hidden commitments.
Impact on Your Team
As a manager or boss yourself, sometimes a team member might raise a question, concern, or idea. What do you do? You might advise them to return and fix the issue, or disregard their proposal altogether. This can frustrate your team causing them to lose focus, drain their energy and could potentially cause them to lose all motivation.
To further improve yourself in this area, be open-minded. Have open discussions with your team rather than thinking that you have to always be in control of the team. Change your mindset to one where you question ‘where is he/she coming from with this question?’ Doing so will allow you to not only maintain a good relationship with your team, you will also reap the benefits of developing better and creative solutions.
No team member wants to give you a bad proposal, or a bad idea, or a hard time at work. They want to be able to do their own work effectively and efficiently as well. So in order to help your team, mindfulness requires you to take a step back, treat them as equals, and start listening to what they have to say.
How Do I Get There?
Open and Growth Mindset
Be open, question things, and don’t limit yourself.
Starting now, question everything around you. Find answers, understand and grow. To reach the state of an open mindset, you must be willing to accept negativity and turn it into an opportunity.
For example, if someone accidentally bumps into you on the street, instead of getting angry (since getting angry does not do you any good), step back, think of why. Perhaps this pedestrian was handicapped, had a traumatic experience, or is battling issues at home. Judging people before we take the opportunity to understand them will only narrow your mindfulness.
By having an open-mindset, you can take it a step further with a growth-mindset. As the name suggests, this means you are more opportunity-driven, furthering your questioning from just being open-minded.
Let’s say, at work, your boss blames you for the failure of a manufacturing product line. Instead of sulking and complaining, with an open-mindset approach, you could start thinking to yourself why the product line failed and how. There are multiple ways to approach this including the technique ‘The 5 Whys’ (link below). Now, after stepping back and understanding why or how the product line could have failed, one would normally either try to fix the issue at hand, or return to business as usual doing nothing about it. With a growth mindset, what you would do is further question yourself; whether you have the capability to fix it, whether you really understand how the system works, or whether there is any technical debt that you need to learn to prevent it from happening again. By asking yourself these questions, you can take the opportunity to develop yourself and increase your skill-set in the long-run.
For some people, it does not take long to get into the habit of having an open or growth mindset however, it can take some time for others. So make sure to practice it everyday!
Another concept that we are going to look at is called Active Experimentation. This involves constantly experimenting with new ideas and solutions to further improve your work and your team’s efforts.
Active Experimentation
Test things, experiment different ways of doing things, learn from them, and grow. This concept is very simple. The aim is to try out different approaches, measure your learnings, and repeat. If the experiment is successful, keep it and continue with the new plan otherwise try something different.
People only remember your successes, not your failures
Now how, what and where do we even start with this active experimentation? From literally anything. By being aware of this concept, we are able to apply it in real-world scenarios.
For example, at my workplace I talk to team members individually and realised that they have each been coming up with interesting ideas. So I initiated a meeting called a ‘Dev Ideas Brainstorming’ session where we gather and note down our ideas on how we could improve the product. The results were really positive and the team really enjoyed it as they were able to give their opinions and have the opportunity to make an impact. However two weeks later, due to the fact that most of the ideas formed were not based on statistical data and there was no proof that it could translate into further profit for the organisation, the ideas were abandoned. That was a failed experiment. However, the learnings were that in order to push an idea forward, we need to first ensure there is enough supporting evidence that it will contribute to revenue growth.
Another experiment that I ran stems from the fact that our weekly meetings were starting to become dull. People in the team were sitting around being bored with over an hour of task delegation and discussion. To change this, I introduced the concept of Team Shoutouts and Team Stories. These were to motivate the team, intrinsically tell them that they are doing their work well, and getting the team to unify by sharing funny stories of the week. As a result, everyone loved it and the morale of the team soared. People started working harder as they realised that their efforts are being recognised and started to look forward to attending the weekly meetings.
So all in all, how can I start this active experimentation at my workplace?
Easy! It comes down to following the steps below.
- First, you can start by identifying something that bores you, something your colleagues find boring, frustrating or even annoyed about.
- Next, come up with a solution by either discussing with the team, imitating other successful teams or organisations, or even try something different.
- After that, start testing your experiment by noting down three main things that you want to improve by running this experiment. For example, from the Team Shoutouts, the three key factors were to improve the team’s morale, recognising those who work hard but were not properly rewarded, and acknowledging the team member in front of their peers.
- Then set a review timeline (this is usually done roughly every two weeks up to every month). You would review whether the experiment has been a success. If it has, great! Keep running with it. If not, try and understand what went wrong and resolve that issue with an adapted experiment.
Remember, active experimentation is all about trying different things. Even if you fail the first couple of times, keep trying and ask for feedback from your peers. No one is going to try and actively sabotage your efforts as you are trying to make work life more engaging and fun for the whole team.
Thank you for reading and hope you enjoyed and learned something from this article. Please do not hesitate to ask any questions regarding this article in the comments section below.
I would like to thank Laura, Jane, Anna and Jas for their support on this article.
Share this article and remember to be mindful!
