Chapter 17
Coping with a Time-Wasting Boss
In This Chapter
I entered the work world prepared to be impressed by those running the show. Surely everyone out there knew more than I did, worked as hard as or harder than I did, and provided employees with everything they needed to perform superbly and eventually be promoted themselves. After all, that's why the boss is the boss, right? However, I've since discovered that although many good bosses are out there, not every manager or supervisor is an employee's dream, and even decent bosses can be poor time managers.
A boss who manages time beautifully can help make your career. But if you report to an inefficient Hindenburg of hot air or even a boss with only average time-management skills, you have three choices:
- Deal with it, knowing that your opportunities for advancement are likely to drop because other teams and departments can outproduce you. No matter how hard you work to overcome it, this situation reflects poorly on your skills and abilities. In addition, stress takes its toll on both your potential advancement and your mental and physical health.
- Move on, either to another department or position within your company or to another company altogether. If you switch companies, though, you may also leave behind benefits, vacation and personal time, and possibly a company that's a good place to work.
- Gently and unobtrusively help your boss provide the tools you need to do your job in the timeframe that you need them. Accomplishing these goals lowers your stress, improves your work life, multiplies your advancement opportunities, and enhances your value to the company. That's why this chapter helps you examine the impact your boss's work style has on your productivity and ability to manage your time. It also tells you how to outline and implement an action plan to improve that work style if unnecessary.
Fulfilling Your Objectives to Help Your Boss Meet Hers
Whether you like it or not, your boss's time is more valuable than yours. Delegating activities to the lowest-paid competent person — someone who can complete assignments as well as the boss while freeing the boss to focus on higher-level tasks with more expensive price tags — is a basic business practice. Your goal is to supply your boss with more time. The more you take on, the better it is for your boss and for you. Ideally, your pay increases and your opportunities for advancement are directly tied to how valuable you are to your boss, how well you support her, and how much you contribute to the department.
I coach salespeople around the globe, and I have a lot of sales clients who are in real estate, insurance, and financial planning. Top performers in these fields have assistants who work for them, and I tell the assistants that one of their primary jobs is to keep their bosses on task — that is, prospecting — daily. Many salespeople put off prospecting and try to stay busy with other tasks. I tell the sales assistants that the best way they can spend their time is to help their bosses prospect with greater consistency.
The best bosses have already assessed themselves and their staff and are using the information to minimize team weaknesses by maximizing everyone's strengths. You, of course, may not have a “best boss” — or you may simply have a good boss who lacks this ability or hasn't yet figured out how to use it to full advantage.
Workers often expect perfection from their bosses, and vice versa. Begin by understanding that you and your boss are both human and that you both have weaknesses. That said, determining how your boss operates makes life easier for both of you and is essential to your success.
Sit down and look at your boss as objectively as possible. Start with some of the same general questions your boss answers when she completes your performance appraisal, and listen for conversational clues whenever you speak with her:
- What are your boss's long-term goals? It's usually safe to assume that most people are looking for more: more money, more prestige, more challenge.
- What are your boss's strengths?
- What are your boss's weaknesses?
- What is your boss's greatest frustration?
- What's the best use of your boss's time?
After you assess your boss's situation, try to pinpoint ways you can better support your boss. Doing so leads to a well-oiled working relationship with your boss and greater productivity for you both. (And assessing someone's performance is a good skill to have on your résumé — you'll use it when you're the boss!) Ask yourself these questions:
- How can you help alleviate your boss's frustration?
- How can you help your boss spend more time on tasks that only she can do?
Maintaining Personal Boundaries
Part of being a responsible employee includes setting boundaries for yourself, both in regard to the allocation of your work responsibilities as well as in your work-life balance. That's not to say, however, that you should be on the defensive with your employer. The objective is to maintain a positive working relationship for all — you need a healthy balance between work and personal time in order to function most effectively, and at the same time, you need to make sure you're a valuable, dependable, hard-working resource for your employer.
Sometimes, you may find yourself in a situation where your employer fails to acknowledge your need for work-life balance — this is often the case when you're working for a workaholic. Most workaholics think everyone else operates the same way they do. If you don't, they may feel your level of commitment doesn't match theirs because your hours at the office aren't at the (sometimes unbelievable) levels theirs are.
You can expect to work longer hours once in a while, depending on deadlines, but don't let yourself become the office whipping boy and regularly work longer hours just because your boss does. Here are some solutions:
- Communicate reasonable expectations. Figuring out how to defend your boundaries is about communicating reasonable expectations so you don't get burned out. At the same time, you want to convey support and a willingness to go the extra mile. But your goal is to make working overtime the exception rather than the rule. Here are some ways to tactfully discuss schedule concerns:
- “I have X projects to finish by the date you've given me. Is there something you want me to drop or put off so I can take on this project?”
- “I appreciate your confidence in me, but I know if I take on this project, my other responsibilities and commitments will suffer.”
- “I can do that, but I'm afraid I can't finish it until middle of next week. Is that all right?”
- “I have a number of key projects in the queue right now. Can we talk about what's most important in the next two or three weeks and balance that with what I can realistically do in that time?”
- Clearly establish boundaries around your personal time. Most workaholics continue to impose unless you actively defend your off time by having something planned. Treat family events as you would any work appointment (see Chapter 4). T-ball games, ballet classes, church activities, and even family dinners are appointments not to be missed. The workaholic boss doesn't need to know more than that you're booked — and unavailable.
You may not be able to avoid being on call, at least once in awhile, for a workaholic boss. You can't always be booked because your boss will see your unavailability as lack of commitment. To offset this perception, you may want to share details of your prior commitment, such as, “Bobby's soccer team is playing the most important game of the season, and he'd be crushed if I weren't there.” Other times, a simple “I already have plans” or “I'm committed” suffices.
- Know when to say no (gracefully, of course). You don't need to take a Miss Manners class to discover how to say no. All you need are a few tried-and-true phrases. Here are a few of my favorites:
- “I'm committed to going to (such-and-such athletic event, birthday, or recital), and I can't miss it. I promised my (son, daughter, wife, grandson, granddaughter, third cousin twice removed).”
- “I wish you'd brought this up a few days ago. I've committed to going to the symphony, and we've already paid for tickets.” Or “I'm sorry. Our family is taking an underwater basket-weaving class. We've looked forward to it for months.”
- “Let me get back to you tomorrow — I need to check with the family to see what's planned.”
Preparing to Discuss Your Concerns with Your Boss
If all else fails (or if your job is rapidly becoming intolerable), you may want to have a serious conversation with your boss. If you're frustrated and getting more exasperated daily, approach your boss soon. Waiting until you're ready to explode with rage won't help your cause. Prepare by writing notes, if it helps, and then just do it.
Identifying concerns and gathering supporting evidence
Assignments usually come from the top down, and how your boss hands off those responsibilities can have big effects on your schedule. One of the most frustrating situations in business is working for a boss who procrastinates, dumping several to-do items on your lap at once, or one who's a workaholic, expecting everyone else to push the work through. If your boss's procrastination, disorganization, or overdeveloped drive for advancement (which may have landed your boss in his position in the first place!) is affecting your work or putting your career in jeopardy, try applying the following techniques:
- Identify the problem, figuring out the who, what, where, when, how, and why of the issue.
Look at where you're losing the most time, and list specific examples that illustrate your points. Where do you notice the biggest problems? In planning? Advance notice? Overcommitment? Poor organization?
Also make sure that you aren't part of the problem: Are you taking responsibility for solving some of the problems yourself? Or are you waiting for someone to tell you in detail how to complete every step of the project?
- Gather supporting facts.
If your workload is unmanageable, try keeping a time sheet for a few weeks. Perhaps your boss is a performance bottleneck because he's unrealistic about what can be done in a given time frame or because he can't say no to new projects. Document hours you work on various projects and include the time you spend on generic administrative tasks, such as project-related telephone calls and email. Then, instead of saying, “Boss, I don't have time for this new project,” you can point to your time sheet and say, “Look, Boss. There are 40 hours in a work week; to complete my current assignments, I'd have to work 80 hours per week for the next four months. The numbers have spoken, Boss. Something's got to give!”
- Describe how these problems inhibit your job performance and efficiency.
Bring up how putting things off causes you and others in the department to deviate from the company's mission statement and core values. Or explain how disorganization forces you to waste time with more frequent stops and starts to the project, along with more interruptions of your boss's time because you have more questions throughout the project.
- Devise a few viable solutions.
Regardless of your boss's strengths and weaknesses, he appreciates successful solutions. Staff members who point out that the company or department is underserving customers, losing sales to competitors, or wasting company dollars are a dime a dozen, but true problem-solvers are rare. If you have a favorite among solutions you propose, make sure to let your boss in on it — and be enthusiastic. If you're right, it could earn you a few feathers in your cap and set you on the road to more responsibility and a tidy salary increase.
Consider the following solutions:
- Can system and procedural changes improve existing processes? Talk about time frames and work flow, supporting your ideas with industry figures and statistics if you can find them. Show proof of typical turnaround times.
Use specific examples. Cite examples of past projects when work flow, deadlines, and quality expectations were well-defined, and show how the work produced was excellent. Focusing on policies, procedures, and time lines is less personal and therefore less confrontational.
- Would you benefit from brief, fairly frequent meetings with your boss? Consider recommending that you touch base more often. Meetings don't have to last 60 or even 30 minutes. Ask your boss to meet more often so you can “better align your work with his priorities.” Then use the meetings to keep ahead of the land mines that lie ahead.
Your enthusiasm may also boost your boss's confidence enough to act on your suggestions. Over time, as your boss gains confidence in your ability to make mid-range decisions, those decisions (and lower-level ones) will be delegated to you. You win twice: Your boss has fewer decisions to put off making, and you have more autonomy.
Keep your expectations realistic. Don't expect your boss to change. Do expect to be hit, at least occasionally, with fallout from his work style, and do what you can to work with it so you can meet your own objectives.
Reflecting on your boss's behavior style
Before broaching project and schedule concerns with your boss, think through the discussion thoroughly and plan your focus. Your boss has a particular behavioral style that dictates how she reacts to events and situations. If you're knowledgeable about your boss's behavior, you can open the lines of communication and discuss how and why she makes decisions. Then, and only then, can you prepare for the roadblocks and one-step-backs that come up in any project and deal productively and positively with your boss throughout the process. Essentially, your boss's behavior patterns revolve around the dimensions I cover in the subsections that follow.
You can use what you know about your boss's values and behavior to frame the conversation in a way that gets your point across. For instance, if your boss is task-focused, position problems in terms of task accomplishment (“Boss, in order for this project to surpass customer expectations by X date, I need the following specific information: A, B, and C.”). If you report to a people-focused supervisor, couch your questions in softer terms (“Boss, I'm feeling frustrated by the way this project is going. Can we talk?”).
In addition to getting an overall perspective of your boss's behavioral pattern through the sections that follow, one formal way to get a clearer picture of yourself and your boss's basic tendencies is to take a validated behavioral assessment. I've made an assessment available at my website (www.saleschampions.com/DISC), and you and your boss can take it for free.
Focusing first on people or tasks
Is your boss people-oriented — warm, persuasive, engaged with people, and relying on feelings and connections with others to get things done? Or is your boss more oriented to facts, figures, and task lists? Here's how these types compare:
- Task-focused managers: These people may take time to talk to subordinates about issues and challenges only if the problems are seriously blocking progress. This can be frustrating because without direction or corrections, you and your co-workers may feel you're spinning your wheels, doing the wrong things the wrong way (only to have to redo them later). The communication you have with a facts-and-figures boss is usually labored, infrequent, and impersonal. On the pro side: Task-focused managers don't often interrupt. If you know your boss is task-oriented, understand that she's driven by deadlines, results, and accomplishments. That doesn't mean your boss doesn't like people; it means that she focuses first on tasks and then on people.
- People-focused supervisors: These bosses spend more time communicating and cultivating a feeling of teamwork, and deadlines are often fairly fluid. Although you may feel good about your relationship with these bosses, the amount of work getting done is often compromised: Highly interactive managers can be walking, breathing interruptions.
Following rules and procedures
Does your boss bend the rules or follow them absolutely? If your boss is strictly rules-oriented, expect quick changes to be limited.
Some bosses follow rules so closely and consistently that, in reality, the rules are ruts. Rigidity in today's rapidly changing business world sounds a professional death knell. A boss who lacks responsiveness to change won't be your boss for very long in the future. That rigidity can also put your job and career in jeopardy.
On the other hand, if your boss tends not to follow rules, follows them only sporadically, or allows employees to bend the rules to achieve desired results, you have other issues. If this approach has set you and your fellow employees up for a fall, you may be able to help your boss understand that some rules were made for good reasons and that sometimes following the rules gives you and other employees better control of your time and energy, allowing you to work more efficiently.
Facing problems and challenges
Is your boss risk-seeking or risk-averse? Does your boss solve problems aggressively, approaching them fearlessly and expecting success? Or is she cautious and deliberate?
Expect more changes, interruptions, short deadlines, and performance demands from a risk-seeking boss. How well you work with a risk-seeker depends on your own work style and preferences. Does this type of up-and-down, stop-and-go make you crazy or cause you to shut down? Are you willing and able to handle lots of projects going at once? With the risk-taking boss, that's what you get.
The risk-seeker's opposite is the risk-averse boss, with whom problems and challenges usually come at a slower, more controlled pace. If your boss is risk-averse, you probably won't get hit with ten things today that have deadlines of yesterday. However, the challenge is that a risk-adverse boss is more inclined to fight change and protect the status quo. When change is imminent, then the time left to make the change will be shorter because so much energy was invested in the-way-we've-always-done-it.
Planning and tackling new projects
How does your boss respond to new projects? Does she chunk them into smaller, more manageable tasks, plan and delegate well, consult a calendar, and assign interim deadlines? Or does she leap ahead without planning, get stressed out, and then move from planning to implementation and back to planning again? Maybe your boss is a combination or is a complete maverick in how she approaches new assignments.
Handling pressure
How does your boss handle pressing deadlines or work overload — with grace or blowups? When pressure increases, is she paralyzed, frustrated, curt, lethargic, and unproductive? Or is she energized, challenged, positive, encouraging, and determined to meet deadlines and exceed expectations?
Pacing work
How does your boss pace her work? Does your boss work at a steady and predictable pace, one project at a time? Or is your boss more of a binge worker, varying the tasks themselves as well as the speed and intensity of work, laboring without break for days or weeks, then slowing down, and then gearing up again?
Not surprisingly, the volume of work you get from a steady worker is easy to manage and plan for, but the volume of work from a binge boss arrives in bunches. Binge bosses often commit to too many projects because they have unrealistic expectations of what can be accomplished in a given time.
Taking responsibility and responding to missed goals
If goals, quotas, and standards of performance are set aggressively, then people in the company won't hit them all. Your boss can affect how many are achieved by deciding how lofty the goals, quotas, and performance standards will be. That's where there can be a disconnect. When goals aren't met, what does your boss do? Does she make excuses or look for scapegoats? Blame the marketplace, other departments, employees, the competition, or unfair pricing? Or does she work alongside employees to figure out solutions by trying new ideas, approaches, and strategies? Does your boss engage everyone to solve problems and overcome challenges, or is her preferred style more autocratic?
You've probably already stumbled across your boss's ego. Can you tell your boss that she's wrong (or even suggest it) without bringing down a hail-storm? If you can, your boss's ego is probably healthy and intact but not out of control.
Initiating and Fostering a Win-Win Discussion
Envision the conversation about your boss's time management from start to finish. Imagine the meeting as a calm, productive, successful exchange of information in which neither you nor your boss is unduly upset. Practicing the meeting in your head helps the actual meeting come closer to what you've envisioned. You may still face some bumps, but you may be surprised at how smoothly the meeting goes. Athletes use this technique to prepare for competitions, and it works equally well in difficult interpersonal situations.
As you enter the conversation, think positive, but be prepared for a negative reaction. No one likes to be told, even gently or indirectly, that he or she lacks skills or is causing problems. Here are some tips for a productive conversation:
- Approach your boss in private. Your boss won't hear a word you say if he's losing face in front of others, regardless of whether they're peers, superiors, or subordinates. I suggest setting an appointment with your boss to discuss a large issue like this. Don't do it in the course of your normal daily or weekly meeting; your boss already has an agenda set for that meeting, at least mentally.
- Explain your concerns in a cool, calm, encouraging manner. Keep the dialogue work-centered. Tell your boss how delaying affects your job performance and outline what you could accomplish if lead times and decisions were more timely — or whatever the case may be.
Frame your discussion in a positive I mode, using I-statements rather than you-statements, to make the discussion go more smoothly (“I could get more work done if …” or “I could help you so much more if …”). Avoid telling your boss how you feel, and stay away from personal attacks (“If only you'd …” or “You should be more/less …” or “I hate it when you …”). Though your feelings are involved, you're discussing a performance issue.
Avoid nagging your boss. Remaining encouraging for extended periods of time without becoming impatient or critical can be difficult, but try. Nagging can put your job at risk.
- Present possible solutions and solicit some from your boss, even if you think you have the solution nailed. People buy into solutions more fully if they've helped develop them. Ask what you can do to help. Offer to take some items off your boss's plate so he can devote more time to decision-making.
- Close the discussion by assuring your boss that you're a team player and that you want to do the best job for him, as well as for the company and its customers. Be clear that you want to support your boss's goals and objectives, not undermine them. Tell your boss that you realize your advancement is linked to his and that your job is to make your boss look good. Ask your boss to help you do that to the best of your ability.
Watch other employees in your department. Does anyone seem to handle your boss's ego more capably than anyone else? Study that person's technique and try it yourself.
Irreconcilable Differences: Knowing When to Move On
If you find that your work style is drastically different from that of your boss and it's impossible for you (or your boss) to adjust, you may have to bite the bullet and look for another job and a boss whose time-management style is more in tune with yours. If you've checked yourself and can honestly say you're doing everything in your power to make the situation better, accept that your job may require you to take on more responsibility than your job title, skills, and even your experience warrant.
A few years ago, I hired Clara as my assistant. Although I explained my work style to Clara before she came on board, she spent the first six weeks on the job trying to change me. (I fall into the risk-taker category: I have lots of projects, ideas, and deadlines going at all times.) Finally, after weeks of frustration, Clara told me she needed materials four weeks in advance of a speaking event or she couldn't guarantee that my workbooks and presentation slides would be finished. I tried to adjust my work style to meet Clara's request for additional time, but in the end, we agreed that our work styles were incompatible, and Clara left to find employment elsewhere.