Jennifer Selby Long
speaker
698 appearances
14 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Jennifer Selby Long’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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But there is ample evidence that a great deal of attention on what's working and doing more of that is correlated with getting to that organizational outcome. In the classic sense, we're going to define those outcomes as, for example, a positive change in the stock price. But that's a really hard one for, say, an individual employee to connect to their progress through the change, isn't it?
That's so big, right? One person out of hundreds or thousands saying the stock price moved after we were able to implement this large scale system, but it's hard to see the individual connection. So I think that also speaks to something that is so extraordinarily important, which is connecting your vision to their big whys, not yours, not the company's.
right they're being wise what it goes back to that personal vision what does that success mean to you individually not just the company right but for you as an individual what's the alignment there people will move mountains for you if they really understand how this large-scale change is connected to something more than a bump up in the stock price
or a decrease in operational overhead, but to them, their personal big whys.
I'm so glad you asked about this because I've had this conversation with so many people over the years and I was having this conversation with someone whose boss was a micromanager and it was driving him nuts. And I sat down and said, this would be a great blog post. And this was when people were blogging on LinkedIn, that LinkedIn post. garnered 45,000 views and counting.
It was shared out on the main thread through that weekend. I have never, I'm a coach. I'm not a famous person. I have never had so many views on a LinkedIn post or a blog in my life. And I recognize this is a really big deal. Everyone faces this, right? Everyone faces this.
at some time and you know what happens when we exit a situation because our boss is ineffective we're running from something versus running to something but of course making a change because you're running away from something usually doesn't pan out as well as when you're running towards something.
So I think there are three mistakes that I really see that these talented professionals making when they find themselves working for an ineffective boss. The first one is playing psychologists. Oh, passive aggressive. bad childhood, won't make a decision, commitment phobic, right? These may or may not be real issues that your boss is facing. Who knows?
But when you, again, this is the judge in action. When you're playing psychologist with the ineffective boss, you're inadvertently disempowering yourself because you're hypothesizing about a psychological issue that even if it turns out you're right, you can't personally treat it. You're not the psychologist, right?
So if you find yourself starting to go down that path of that judging, that negative emotion, just let it go. Second one, losing perspective by getting attached to one and only one solution, right? And I've seen this many times in which the individual is saying, I have to persevere.
I have to turn this product line around no matter how much my funding gets cut or how often my boss and her boss change direction or I must get a big win so that boss can see how wrong he is or whatever. a common one. I'm going to HR and I'm not giving up until they fight for what's right.
Now, there's just rarely one clear-cut superior solution to the myriad problems that are caused by an ineffective boss, but there are probably better solutions and there are certainly more options. Shirzad Shamim calls it Turning on your explore neural network where you open up to exploring more solutions to the problem before you jump ship, right?
A third one is creating an emotional sinkhole by making it personal or taking sides in political battles. We get this little dynamic, right? Your ineffective boss leads to lower performance on the team, which leads to stress, which leads to making it personal and taking sides in what we might call a backside covering political battle.
So when you find yourself thinking about your boss in these kind of sweeping terms, and again, you feel your judge coming on...
you're recognized that you're only feeding the intensely negative energy that's there and it does nothing to help you and does nothing to help your teammates the people around you so instead there are really five things that i think you can try to view the situation from a different perspective
and then handle it in a way that's going to work well for you, whether that's staying in it or making that leap toward another job or toward starting your own business. The first one, step back from that situation and first size up the degree to which his or her incompetence is truly affecting you.
It's disappointing when your boss routinely lets you down, but maybe slowing down your professional growth for a few months because they're new to the role and they're not good at it yet. That's one thing. But that's not in the same league as your entire bonus being on the line or even worse, your personal reputation being put in jeopardy with people you respect because the boss is ineffective.
So size it up. It's a reflective exercise. It's subjective. It looks different for you from someone else.
and even for you in different situations at different times in your life but it helps you calibrate that situation a little bit quiet down those nasty saboteurs so that you're calibrating it to your unique needs right is it short term and you just want to let it stop bothering you before you make a big change
or is this something that's really added up and you need to go and you just need to do that secondly assess if you're in a politically messy situation oh i hate this tip but if you do think you're in a politically messy situation you do have to begin some basic defensive action right employees have lost their jobs due to ineffective managers who failed to protect them
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