How to Read Your Boss

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Opening Questions

What position do you occupy in the organisation's hierarchy?

Are you a 'boss' as well as a 'follower'?

What terminology is adopted in your own workplace to describe job roles and how they relate to each other? Why do you think this has been adopted?

Linguistic Profiling Key Components

Face: the public self image that we have of ourselves and of one another, so our own sense of self worth.

Indentities: Ranges from aspects of our personalities to our professional identity construction

Rapport Management: How harmony is maintained in the workplace

Culture: is defined in a micro sense in terms of individual workplace cultures and also in a more macro sense, thinking about broader cultural definitions, such as national cultures.

Face

Face helps explain our underlying motivations when we communicate at work. It refers to our desire to be positively evaluated and respected by those we work with, and wishing to have a good reputation.

From the boss's perspective, part of face is their desire to have their status, as a superior, upheld and be positively evaluated by those around them.

You perform your Face to the linguistic strategies that you choose to use. And your language choices intersect with a range of other features to make up your identity construction, including how you dress, your body language, and gestures.

Good bosses are those whose public self image is judged as being authentic and trustworthy, inspirational, genuine and consistent, with a strong sense of stewardship and a dedication to developing a strong sense of workplace community.

consider the following questions:

Whose public self-image do you most admire, either in your own workplace or in the world of businesses and organisations at large? Why?

Is ‘personal face’ or ‘social identity face’ more appropriate for your workplace? What public self-image do you think you have at work, either individually or collectively?

How do you think your boss views your public self-image?

What would you like to change about your public self-image at work, if anything?

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