The Biggest Thing You Need to Know About Your Boss

There’s no shortage of good advice on how you can build stronger relationships with your boss. Developing trust is key. Showing initiatives and asking smart questions also matter.

But there’s a step even more important than those, and your success depends on it: assessing whether you are working for a reader or a listener.

If you get this right, there’s a good chance everything else will fall into place. Get it wrong and trust won’t grow no matter how savvy your questions are.

Management pioneer Peter Drucker introduced the concept of reader vs. listener in his seminal essay “Managing Oneself”. It’s an idea that’s not complicated and yet is almost entirely overlooked. “Far too few people even know there are readers and listeners and that people are rarely both,” Drucker writes. “Even fewer know which of the two they themselves are.”

To read the rest of this post, please visit Prime Chief of Staff, a chief of staff advisory firm that recently published this full column. Though I wrote this column specifically for chiefs of staff, anyone with a boss will benefit from reading — in other words, most of us!