What does managing your boss mean — for both of you?

Successful leadership is a two-way process. As much as the supervisor thinks he or she is in charge of the team, those same team members affect their leader’s decisions and actions in a thousand ways. When the process works well, the result is beneficial for everyone. When it breaks down into resentment, distrust and a mess of hidden agendas and false communications, it produces misery as well as lowered performance.

Everyone who has a boss needs to know how to manage upwards. Managing the boss is a set of skills every subordinate needs to learn to be happy and successful. Poor leaders may believe that they are calling all the shots and need no nudges and assistance from below, but this merely proves their arrogance and blindness to reality. A major part of the definition of most truly disastrous bosses is that they try to control everything themselves and never listen to their subordinates. If you are unfortunate to work for one of these, the only sensible course of action is to get away as quickly as possible. That boss is hell-bent on self-destruction and will take you down as well, if you’re still around.

Unfortunately, there are as many different outlooks, attitudes and responses amongst bosses to being managed from below as there are bosses themselves. ‘Boss-ology’, the art of managing upwards, isn’t based on any simple set of one-size-fits-all rules or guidelines. To be effective, it needs careful study of the boss him or herself, the circumstances, the organization’s culture, and — not least — some insight into your own motives and purpose in wanting to influence your boss in a particular direction.

Let’s begin with a definition

Like the authors of term projects everywhere, I’ll begin by defining exactly what I’m writing about.

Managing the boss successfully — what I’m calling ‘Boss-ology’ — is the process of giving your boss what he or she wants and needs in a way that suits you best and makes your actions look as good as possible in the circumstances. What’s a ‘boss-whisperer’? It’s like a horse-whisperer for bosses: someone who can get them to do what he or she wants without any fuss, and manipulation, or any dirty tricks.

It is not messing with your boss’s head for the fun of of it, or to show off to others; it isn’t finding ways to avoid doing work you don’t like — or much of any work at all; it isn’t playing politics to harm your colleagues’ prospects or make them look bad in the boss’s eyes; and it isn’t undermining the boss so you can have a crack at getting the job instead.

All those things are done by subordinates at various times and all are almost wholly negative in their impact and outcomes. If you want to play games like those, please go elsewhere for your information. You’ll get no help from me. It’s also worth remembering that almost every boss is either a subordinate as well — he or she reports to someone above them — or has been one in the past, possibly for longer than you have. They know the game and most of the dirty tricks. If they catch you playing them, you can’t hope for mercy. You don’t deserve any either.

How do you start?

This is going to be a series of articles, so all I’m going to deal with right here are the basics of what you need to understand to get started. We’ll cover more specific areas in later posts.

I’m not going to be handing out ‘tips and tricks’ or sets of ‘rules for success’. Firstly, because I don’t think they exist — there are too many variables — but mostly because all successful work with animals (Yes, your boss is an animal, just as you are) must begin by understanding individual behavior patterns, attitudes and ways of thinking. You don’t need rules and set answers; you need the right questions to help you find what applies best in your specific circumstances. Those are what I hope to provide.

These are the main questions we’ll be exploring:

• Why do you want to manage your boss? What are your goals in doing so? Are they the right objectives to be seeking right now?
• Have you studied your boss sufficiently to understand what he or she needs? Do you understand how you can provide this in ways that work best for you?
• Do you know your boss’s most important values and ‘hot buttons’ — what he or she believes to be most important to get or preserve? Are you fully aware of your own? What do they tell you about the best ways to proceed?
• If your boss can’t — or won’t — deal with you on the level, how can you discover which are the right buttons to press to get the result you want?
• Will your actions create greater trust between you and your boss or undermine what trust there is? Without sufficient trust, no relationship is going to work out well.
• How well are you listening? How well are you communicating? Do you now what your boss thinks about you? Does he or she have a clear grasp of your needs and concerns?
• What are you and your boss hiding from one another? Why? What are the likely outcomes if you don’t open up on these topics?
• Do you have a good enough idea of the pressures your boss is under from the next people above them in the hierarchy? How can you use this knowledge most effectively?

What to forget right now

There are a few approaches that almost never work for more than a brief period, and whose consequences can — probably will — wreck your own career. Things like by-passing the boss and going to someone above them to make your point; trying to hide behind your colleagues as you slip a dagger into the boss’s back; trying to set up others to do your dirty work, so they will take the blame if it goes wrong; lying to the boss on a regular basis; and acting like a sycophantic ‘yes-man’ and consummate ‘brown-noser’. You want the boss to see you as an important and highly valued member of the team, not someone he or she must never allow to get behind them, or a limp doormat for them to wipe their feet on.

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, when the boss looks back on what has been done, it will be with pleasure and gratitude for your help, not an angry sense of having been manipulated and hoodwinked.

Nest time, we’ll look at the big picture: why you need to manage the boss and how to make sure you help him or her move in the best possible direction for both of you.

Technorati Tags: managing your boss, managing upwards, boss-ology, getting your boss to do the right things, building credibility, building trust with your boss, making yourself look good in the boss’s eyes, how to be a valued subordinate, enhancing your career prospects, dealing with the boss more effectively