Supervisory Skill: Leader vs Boss (Part 1)

Hi guys, rather than continue my previous last post, I decided to make a new one because everyone know I am a person who easily get bored, haha. So several weeks ago I got this training from my company where I work and it is about the supervisory skill, which is about leadership, coaching, and also how to handle a new team. I want to share the knowledge I got from this training in this post, so let’s check it out!

Leader vs Boss

Maybe some of us here have already been promoted to the higher level of job right know and must collaborate with some subordinates as a team. And that is the right time to choose whether we want to be a boss or a leader. So what is exactly the difference between boss and leader?

1. A boss is all about giving orders but a leader is about influencing others by unleashing or empowering their power and potential to achieve a certain goal.
2. A boss gives the burden but leader shares the burden.  It’s often that a boss only give the subordinates something to do but if there’s something wrong, this boss will never or be hard to help them. A leader is different, he/she will help the subordinates to solve the problem, no too much so that they know the right track to solve the problem and eventually will solve it by themselves.

So which side are you, a leader or a boss? 

The things that should be remembered if we want to become a leader.

There’re the things that should be remembered if we want to be a leader.

1. Being a leader doesn’t mean we are always being so kind and full of smile every time. If it’s needed for to become strict, just be strict.
2. Don’t keep the distance from our team too far but not too close too. We need to be someone who is trusted and can be relied on but we also need to keep our authority so that the team will never slack off and underestimate us.
3. Being a leader means that we need to be skillful to direct a team. However, the one that has the biggest role is actually the character of a leader. Why? Because we are working with the team which consists of people, not things. That means we need to consider their feeling and this feeling only can be touch by the character of a leader. We can say that the character is the bottom side of an iceberg. The team can see it but they can feel it and actually has a biggest impact for the team.

Building the trust of the team.

To become a good leader, we must build the trust in our team. So, this is the simple formula for building a trust.

T= Trust

C= Capacity

R= Realibility

I= Intimacy

S.I= Self-interest

If we want to make the trust of the team higher, we absolutely should increase the value of our capacity, realibility and intimacy in our team and also decrease our self-interest, or in other words our ”hidden agenda”.  I’ll explain this variable on by one.

1. Capacity means our skill and knowledge about something which is becoming the concern of the team. We should have enough capacity to lead the team so that the team can do their activity and decide something with high accuracy. How to increase it? Learn and learn and learn until you die.
2. Reliability means we are trusted to lead the team.
3. Intimacy is about touching the feeling of our team. We can increase it by spend some days to have a lunch with our team.
4. We need to decrease our personal interest in the team because what we want to achieve is more in ‘our’, we and our team, goal, not ‘my’ goal.