💃 How to Blow Your Boss's Mind🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Your relationship with your boss is basically an arranged marriage. You are kinda randomly paired up and you just have to make it work. Your boss may be amazing, or they may be Bill Murray in Scrooged before he's visited by the Christmas spirits. Either way, and for better or worse, it is in your benefit to blow your boss's mind. They have a lot of influence on your raises and bonuses, for starters. So, how do we blow our boss's mind?

Agenda for today includes

• How to Blow Your Boss's Mind

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

How to Blow Your Boss's Mind

Let's discuss this from a Salesforce Admin perspective. The principles apply across all professions, however.

Whether you want your boss to be the best man at your wedding, or to be just a name in Slack that sends you directives, these 3 things will help you to build a positive relationship with them -

1. Understand your Boss.

2. Earn Your Boss's Trust.

3. Be Consistent.

Understand Your Boss

You do not need to know your boss at a personal level. You don't need to know their birthday, their kids' names, or what kind of car they drive. You do need to know these 3 things -

1. Their Professional Background - As a Salesforce Admin, your boss could be an IT professional, a VP of Marketing, a Director of Sales, or any number of titles. Their knowledge of technology, software, CRMs, and Salesforce will vary widely depending on their background. An IT leader will know SDLC is very important. A Sales or Marketing leader may never have heard of SDLC, leaving those processes for their admin to manage, unsupported.

2. Their Role and Responsibilities - VP of Sales will have different responsibilities than an IT leader. Sales may be measured on lead conversions, and opportunity-wons. IT may be measured on uptime (yay SaaS!) and Helpdesk ticket volume and resolutions. What they are measured on will directly impact what they tell you to focus on (for better or worse...). As a Salesforce Admin, your performance is your boss's responsibility. Your performance will be measured differently between Sales/Marketing or IT leaders.

3. Their Company Objectives - If you know what your boss's boss is telling your boss to do, then you will be in good position to align what you do with your boss's goals. Alignment does not go unnoticed, your boss will appreciate this (it's a small minority that is well-aligned with their boss). If they seem not to, it could be a good move to communicate your intentions and ask for feedback.

Earn Your Boss's Trust

The simplest way to earn trust is to do what you say you are going to do. If you say you will deliver X and Y, by Z time, then do it.

If you fail on something, then develop a corrective action plan, own your mistake, and present how you will fix it and prevent it from occurring in the future.

Earning trust is hard. Losing it easy. One tip for managing this is to under-promise, over-deliver. Another tip is thinking about if you had a junior admin that reported to you, what would they need to do to earn your trust?

Be Consistent

This seemingly rolls up to trust, and it does, but it presents a large enough challenge that it is broken out into it's own attribute. You don't have to be great; few are. But if you are ok AND consistent, you may become great. And while you are being ok and consistent, you are making your boss's life easier. They know what to expect from you. They know what you will take care of, and where you may need to be supported. They can plan for that, they can scale that, they can be successful with that.

And not just your performance, but your emotions, too. If you come in humming Taylor Swift one day, and screaming belligerently into your phone the next day, and these highs and lows are constant, then you are making your boss's job harder. You don't have to be a constant ray of sunshine, but you can't be doom and gloom all the time either. As with all things, balance is key.

Daily Principle

Consistency Quotes

and now....Your Daily Memes