What Your Boss Really Wants From You: 15 Insights to Improve Your Relationship sounds like a bit of a “magic formula” book from the title. On the other hand, who doesn’t want a better relationship with their boss?
I’ve read a small number of the Win at Work Bundle books now–this one is my fourth–as well as Tools of Titans. I’ve also listened to a number of speeches/seminars from Tony Robbins, the late Jim Rohn, Les Brown, and some others. And one common theme in a lot of this self-help material is that “self-help” starts with “self”. The idea is that you don’t control a lot of your circumstances, but neither are you a victim of them–you can control your response to them.
What Your Boss Really Wants From You is no different. One of its central points is “Look, don’t expect your boss to change. Instead, change your style to maximize your relationship with him or her.” (The book, to its credit, takes a unique path in making the “boss” male in the first part, female in the second part, and alternating genders in the third part)
In terms of the actual content, the book asks you to ask yourself fifteen questions regarding your boss, and try to figure out the answers. Part one deals with the first set of questions, which revolve around your boss themselves–how do they manage? What are they worried about? Where’s their sphere of influence? These are just some of the questions the book asks you to figure out the answers to. And if you’ve never thought about them before, they’re a solid starting point–to have a good relationship with your boss, it helps to consider them within the context of the company as a whole. The second part involves thinking about how your boss views you–your strengths and weaknesses, and their history with you. The third part gets back to the previous paragraph, and can basically be summed up as “Change your attitude to change your relationship with your boss”.
The good news is that the book provides example to show that taking responsibility for the relationship really can work. Almost every chapter includes a story or two that Arneson relates to whatever is being discussed, and the end of each chapter comes with a recap and insights to take away from it.
The other good news about the book is that it’s short. This sounds more like a slam than I intend it to be–the content isn’t bad by any means, although it may not be for you if your goal is to change your boss without having to do any work to change yourself. But the book is under 100 pages in PDF form–you can read it on a night off, or certainly within a weekend. It’s good that the book doesn’t wear out its welcome or endlessly repeat two or three key points for hundreds of pages.
The downside to this is that, while the content is good, and I don’t mind the occasional short book among the twenty I bought in the humble Win at Work Bundle, I’m not sure it’s worth $10 on its own. The content-per-dollar-spent ratio just isn’t very high, especially as compared with something like Tools of Titans.
-EE
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