LESSON 3 of 5

Build a Partnership
The most valuable working relationships between bosses and their direct reports are
partnerships. Find out how to build—and sustain—a strong partnership with your manager.
From working relationship to partnership

It’s great to have a decent working relationship with your boss. But if you can build that relationship into
a true partnership, you and your boss will prove even more effective as a team.

Keys to building a strong partnership with your boss include:

 Understanding and managing your attitudes toward authority

 Clarifying business priorities for you and your team

 Discussing your professional development

Assess your attitudes toward authority

*
Hill, Linda A. and Kent Lineback. “Managing Your Boss.” In
HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across. Boston: Harvard
Business Review Press, 2013.

Think about how you respond to authority in general—and specifically to those who have
authority over you now?
Reflect on your history with bosses and other authority figures in your life. Identify the
feelings authority has created in you. Those feelings may lead you to see your current boss
not as who he or she really is but as an amalgam of past authority figures.
If you’re not aware of these feelings, you could be at their mercy. As a result, you might
react to your boss in one of two extreme ways: * Harvard Business Review

 Resistance. You’ll feel antagonistic toward your boss and resist his or her efforts to
manage you. Seeing your boss as an adversary, you might rebel against his or her
 decisions. You may escalate conflicts beyond what’s appropriate. And you could view
your boss as an obstacle to be circumvented.

 Overdependence. You’ll respond to your boss’s authority with overdependence—

seeing your boss as a wise “parent” who should know best and provide for you. As a
result, you may show extreme deference to your boss. You might comply with his or
her demands without question. And you may never disagree with your boss—even
when doing so is in your or your team’s best interest.
Being either overly resistant or overly dependent can hurt your partnership with your boss.
Think about whether you may be exhibiting resistance to or overdependence on your
current manager. If the answer is yes, identify and implement behavioral changes needed to
interact more effectively with your boss.
Maha realizes that she often seems to be arguing with her boss just for the sake of arguing. No matter
what her boss says, Maha disagrees. The heated exchanges that erupt between them never lead to
anything productive. Moreover, Maha’s boss has passed her over for several promotions.

Maha makes a commitment to be aware whenever she feels the urge to argue with her boss and to
practice active listening instead of automatically opposing whatever her boss says. She commits to
asking questions to learn more about her boss’s perspective.

She also works on recognizing when disagreement with her boss is reasonable and justifiable. If she is
going to disagree with her boss, it will be for good reasons—not simply an automatic reaction because
of her antagonism toward authority.

Clarify business priorities

Hill, Linda A. and Kent Lineback. Breakthrough Leadership. Module 3: Manage Your Network, “Clarify
Goals.” Harvard Business Publishing, 2012.

To build a strong partnership with your boss, you need to work with him or her to identify business
priorities such as:

 The challenges and opportunities facing you and your team

 The strategic direction your team should take

 The goals you and your team should achieve

tool
Worksheet for Clarifying Team Goals

Download Tool

Challenges and opportunities

You should describe to your boss the challenges and opportunities your group is facing. Talk about what
you think could be done to surmount those challenges and exploit the opportunities.

Shawn works for the HR department for a fast-growing organization. He tells his boss that he’s been
having difficulty recruiting new hires through traditional channels, such as career fairs and online jobs
boards. Shawn also sees that job seekers are making greater use of social media to learn about open
positions and to apply for jobs.

Shawn believes that if he doesn’t figure out a way to exploit social media for recruitment purposes, his
organization could lose out on hiring the talent it needs. He proposes to his boss that he use available
social media tools to start regularly posting job openings.

See if your boss agrees with your assessment of your group’s challenges and opportunities and with any
plans for change you’re proposing. If your boss disagrees on any of these points, find out why. You may
need to alter your plans to accommodate your boss’s suggestions. Or you may have to provide more
information to convince your boss that your plans are sound.

Strategic direction

Talk with your boss about what he or she sees happening with the organization’s strategy. Discuss
together how you and your team can help support the company’s strategic direction.

Tamara works in the finance department of a large organization. Tamara and her boss, Keith, are talking
about the company’s recent announcement of an effort to improve operational efficiency. Tamara and
Keith discuss how they can help support this effort, including introducing more efficient ways of
handling all key business processes in the department, such as monthly, quarterly, and year-end closing
processes. Tamara identifies bottlenecks in these processes and suggests making elimination of these
inefficiencies a priority for her team. She lays out some ideas for doing so.

If you and your boss disagree on the strategic direction you need to set for your team, not much else in
your partnership will work. So identify the causes behind any differences of opinion. Then do what’s
needed to arrive at agreement.

Goals

Hill, Linda A. and Kent Lineback. “Managing Your Boss.” In HBR Guide to Managing Up and Across.
Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.
Unless you and your group achieve your agreed-upon goals, you won’t likely build a strong partnership
with your manager. But it’s not just the goals you attain—it’s how you attain them.

Suppose you achieve a targeted increase in sales. But your boss hears complaints all day about how
you’ve overworked your employees in order to hit the target. As a result, morale is eroding in your
team. Your manager doesn’t feel quite so happy about the fact that you achieved the sales increase.

Resist any tendency to simply accept goals your boss defines without discussing them. If you believe that
these goals are unrealistic and you don’t say anything about it, you’ll have only yourself to blame if your
team fails to meet the goals.

Reach agreement with your boss on the goals you’re expected to achieve—what will happen by when.
Update these expectations periodically. Warn your boss of potential risks, and play out various scenarios
of how you might handle them.

The goals you need to deliver by the end of the next quarter include completion of two process
improvement initiatives. You suspect that pilot-testing changes to the two processes may take longer
than you and your boss initially predicted. You let your boss know your concerns. And you propose
solutions for accelerating the pilot-testing phase of the projects.

Discuss your professional development

Hill, Linda A. and Kent Lineback. Breakthrough Leadership. Module 3: Manage Your Network, “Clarify
Goals.” Harvard Business Publishing, 2012.

In a true partnership, your boss will take an interest in and help support your professional development.
So talk about your career aspirations with your boss. Explore how you could grow professionally to help
yourself, your boss, and your team become even more successful.

Get your boss’s thoughts about your current performance. Ask him or her which competencies you’ll
need to acquire or strengthen to advance your career.

Then discuss learning opportunities that could help you build those competencies. Learning
opportunities include:

 New job assignments

 Online or classroom courses and workshops

 Coaching or mentoring

 Conferences and trade shows

 Membership in trade associations or clubs

You and your boss have agreed that you could become even more effective in your role if you improved
your public-speaking skills. Knowing how to deliver complex ideas in a compelling, accessible way to
large audiences would help you project confidence and authority. These strengths, in turn, could help
you exert more influence over peer managers and other key stakeholders within and outside your
organization—individuals whose support you need to achieve your goals.

Your boss tells you about a public-speaking club that your organization is planning to establish. Club
members will meet once a week and practice giving short speeches and receiving constructive criticism
from one another to improve. Your boss suggests that you talk with the HR manager who is leading this
initiative so you can learn about how you can take part.