How to manage your boss
If you want to achieve results, innovate and get on, you have to
learn how to manage your boss. The word ‘manage’ is defined in
the Oxford English Dictionaryas:
■ to conduct affairs;
■ to control; cause to submit to one’s rule;
■ to bring (a person) to consent to one’s wishes by artifice, flat-
tery, or judicious suggestion of motives;
■ to operate upon, manipulate for a purpose;
■ to bring to pass by contrivance; to succeed in accomplishing;
■ to deal with or treat carefully.
Although such concepts as artifice, flattery and manipulation
would not normally play any part, all these definitions provide
clues as to the various aspects of managing one’s boss.
If you really believe that something needs to be done and you
cannot do it without the consent of your boss, you have to work
out how you are going to manage him or her. And it is worth
careful and continuous thought. It is too easy to neglect this
essential part of the art of management.
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