Improve Your Professional Experiences by Pursuing Intentional Relationships
We all have experienced poor leadership at one point or another in our lives.
I know I have, and some of those experiences may not have turned out differently no matter how hard I might have tried. But maybe, just maybe… many of those relationships were soured more by mutual misunderstanding than they were by malicious intent. I’ve learned this anew recently from observing my relationship with my current boss, and it might just be a lesson you can put in my pocket for your own professional relationships.
One of the things I value most in my life right now is my working relationship with my boss, and the intentionality he puts into connecting with me on a consistent basis. He’s 60 years old, and I’m 30, and though I’m on his lead team, he’s responsible to oversee communication and interface with around 1,100 consistent customers from week to week, including oversight of a staff of around 20 and volunteer teams of dozens more… which means the time I get to spend with him is time I’m always grateful for. I’ve worked in enough large non-profit organizations like mine to know that the breakfast meetings we share together each week is unfortunately rare.
In my particular job, we’ve just come out of the Christmas season, the busiest 30 days in our calendar year, so consequently he and I haven’t had a private meeting in at least a month. We’ve had to cancel our weekly meetings for one reason or another all through December, and we’ve both been spinning many plates that entire time.
See, here’s what I’ve noticed about myself and the way my mind and emotions work (I can’t speak for him):
Perhaps a more mature person than I would be able to work around the feeling I’m going to describe — but I’ve noticed the more time that goes by without us intentionally meeting one on one, the more I become aware of myself subtly distrusting him. Not in any deep or even fully nameable, but in more slight, almost imperceptible terms. I find myself just unsure enough of his intentions, maybe second-guessing his tone if he snags me to give me some quick feedback or instruction with little context, or unclear of his overall feeling toward me and my performance as one of his key department leads. I’m a big boy — I don’t need…
