The first in a series of articles exploring how to manage your boss so everyone comes out ahead, you get to work the way you enjoy best and you look good too. We start with the art of Managing Upwards: a set of skills every subordinate needs to learn to be happy and successful. Forget about the dirty tricks. ‘Boss-ology’ is like horse-whispering: when you do it right, the boss-whisperer gets the boss to do things willingly and no one feels manipulated or tricked.

To be an effective leader, you need to support people to engage in reducing the negative effects of workplace conflict. Focusing on the ‘technical’ alone won’t do it — never has, never will. What’s required is ‘Knowing thyself’ — an in-depth understanding of ‘who I am’ and ‘how I am’, derived from consistent and conscious reflection on your experiences and the lessons learned (including the good, the bad and the ugly). Where the majority of employees are not self-aware, workplace conflict may well be insidious, toxic, all-pervasive and destructive.

Do we need to be jugglers rather than tightrope artists? ‘Juggling’ is an essential part of building a more balanced life, not an alternative. We all have to juggle demands; and balance is a dynamic process, not a static one that you ‘achieve’ once and for all. Manage yourself first, then turn to managing what proportion you can of the demands that fall on you.

In Part 2 of her series of tips on how to de-stress yourself and manage demands in all areas of your life, Kath Lockett looks at three more steps: taking time out, finding ways to laugh more and rediscovering romance. Use them to bring back a better sense of balance and enjoyment and deal with some of the stress hormones your body will have created at other times.

Do values count for anything, given the way marketers, spin doctors and leaders misunderstand and misuse them? Too many of today’s self-proclaimed leaders have shown themselves to be authoritarian, deceitful, dishonest and manipulative, despite all their talk of values. Values are not there as tools to be used to lead people by the nose. They are who you are. Behavior is driven by values. Whenever you do something “because it’s right” you’re acting on your values. Ethics are values. That’s why they matter.

A ‘lily dipper’ in a multi-person canoe is someone who looks from the outside like they are paddling like everyone else, though they’re just going through the motions of real work. It’s important that each paddler carry their own weight by digging into the water long and hard; otherwise, someone else on the team has to carry it for them. In this story of paddling through the Canadian wilderness, the writer discovers how lily dippers can become a high performance team.

The so-called free market is out of hand. By demanding total freedom for the strong to benefit, even if it means the weak will suffer, it offends against just about every tenet of civilized behavior. Worse, it seems bent on destroying the very basis of all commerce: trust. Total freedom requires total responsibility. In a truly free market, the only boundaries on acceptable behavior are the ones the players in that market impose on themselves. The business world needs to see that unbridled competition and hyper-elastic ethical standards will come to destroy the economic system itself. Freedom without responsibility is anarchy, whatever it calls itself.

One of the most frustrating and irritating experiences at work is the endless talk, conversation and sharing of thoughts that takes place and leads to nowhere. That’s all many meetings consist of: moving the existing ‘mental furniture’ around. There’s nothing new because the door stays closed. Nothing comes in. Nothing gets out. Only the arrangement of the furniture changes. So why doesn’t anyone open the door?

To build the kind of lifestyle that allows you truly to live, work/life balance needs to be more than a buzzword. It needs to be a way of life. In the first of a series of items on how to de-stress yourself and manage demands in all areas of your life, Kath Lockett looks at two critical steps: learning to take pride in your imperfections and saying ‘No’ more often.

You often need procrastination to slow you down, especially those of you who hold (or, in my case, held) leadership positions. When you rush into foolish actions, you destroy your credibility and undermine people’s trust in you. You also set a bad example to the people you’re leading. The truth is that we are not so much short of time as short of the ability and willingness to use it well. By cramming as much as possible into as little as we can, we imagine we’re being more productive. Yet all we are producing are more stress, more irritation and more confusion. Even if we are raising our outputs of goods, we are lowering our standards and our quality of life.