Interested in more careers-related content? Check out our new weekly Work Life newsletter. Sent every Monday afternoon. Sabina Nawaz was a great manager until she became a lousy one. Early in her career at Microsoft, people called her the best boss they ever had. She coached them, supported their ambitions and cared about them as human beings, while still being tough enough to be labelled “brass knuckles in a velvet glove” by her own boss. Then she was promoted – shoved, with one day’s notice while on parental leave to a senior role, when her boss left – and failed to adjust to the pace and demands of the new role. “Without realizing it, I slid from being a caring and supportive boss to one who was snippy and belligerent. Under crushing deadlines, I had no time to explain anything in detail. I didn’t have the patience to nurture people in their career development; I figured, they’re adults, they will figure it out. Ditto for worrying about how my actions as a boss were impacting my team and their well-being. This was business, not personal. At least that’s what I told myself,” she writes in You’re the Boss. In her rush for efficiency, she lost connection. Now an executive coach, she took away a simple lesson she shares with her clients: As our job description expands, we must mindfully navigate the combined forces of greater power and pressure – or else that pressure will corrupt our actions and the power will blind us to the impact of those actions. “There are rarely bad bosses, only good people with the best of intentions who unwittingly cross the fine line between good intentions and bad behaviours. And they are everywhere (including in the mirror),” she writes. Promotions can catapult you overnight from being one of many voices in the room to The Voice of Authority. As a manager of teams, your success now derives from their success. “The goal is not to burnish your brilliance but to empower them to feel brilliant,” she says. Before becoming the boss, you may have had to create the slide deck for a client presentation. Now your role is to give your team clear guidance on the objective and parameters for that slide deck so they can do the hands-on work to meet that goal. All while people are watching your every move, convinced your mundane actions they don’t like are targeted at them. Your missteps come in part because of four myths that hang over you: “Good” and “bad” bosses are distinct: In fact, power and pressure can turn intelligent (and unaware) people into bosses from hell. Being a good boss is not a science or forever. It is an art that is in constant revision, as you adjust to the moment. Business isn’t personal: To the contrary, it’s always personal she insists. “Yes, work demands a certain level of professionalism and you can (and should) separate the two, but we show up to work as human beings and events and interactions impact us. This is why empathy has become such a hot topic in the management world over the past decade,” she says. You can excuse your failings with a “yeah, but” explanation: For example, “Yeah, but I have too much going on to worry about what people think of me.” Or: “Yeah, but they just don’t get it.” The reality is you can’t be oblivious to the bad marks your team is giving you in feedback reviews (or worse, wear it as a badge of pride). “If I had to point to one characteristic all my clients have in common, it’s a reluctance to jettison their damaging behaviours because they believe they’ve triumphed because of those very actions. While they believed these traits helped them rise, power and pressure at this new level have subverted those traits into behaviours that undermine their business results,” she writes. Maintaining authenticity is a reason not to change your bad behaviours: There is in fact no absolute authenticity. You were authentic in different ways at various times in your life. So you can’t deflect problems as a boss by saying you are just being yourself. You need to find another, authentic part of you, still consistent with your values, that works better in your new role, rather than remain mired in the authenticity trap. Setting yourself free from those four myths and the specific behaviours that are hindering your leadership won’t happen overnight, even when you realize the necessity for a turnaround. She stresses with her clients the importance of micro-habits: Breaking down the changes they want into ridiculously easy small steps, performed daily. One client, for example, who received feedback he was tuning out in meetings decided to improve his listening and would attend one meeting a day without devices. Another client, to temper her rescuer urges, set a goal of once daily asking someone else for their ideas of how to solve a problem rather than jumping in with her superhero cape flying. Someone who chronically said yes to all requests and was overburdened with work decided to respond once per day with, “Let me think about that and get back to you.” She advises you to think of a goal – professional or personal – you want to achieve. Then think of one step you can take to make progress on it. “STOP RIGHT THERE!” she declares. “Now halve the size of that step, then slash it again and then a little more.” Keep going until it almost takes more effort to write out the micro-habit than it will take to do it. “You might laugh at the size of this new habit. If you consider it too puny to share with anyone, you’re there,” she says. Now try doing it every day without fail. Quick hits Mastercard’s outgoing chief people officer Michael Fraccaro says when recruiting look at IQ, EQ and DQ – the latter shorthand for their Decency Quotient. You might ask, “Tell me how you think about your community” or “Tell me something about you that’s not on your LinkedIn profile.” Then listen for stories of helping others. The Forgetting Curve, based on research by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, points out after about one month people only remember about 20 per cent of what they learned. That applies to the messages you send your staff. Consultant Stephen Lynch tells his clients, “Successful strategy execution is 20 per cent getting clear about what needs to be done and 80 per cent following up to make sure it actually gets done. Change consultant Greg Satell says ‘the dumbest thing anybody ever said about change is that you want to start by creating a sense of urgency. If the change is truly urgent then everyone already knows it. The reason why so many change leaders cling to this ‘burning platform’ mentality is because it ennobles the change leader, not the change itself.” Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.