CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

How to Manage the Boss

MOST MANAGERS, including of course most chief executives, have a boss. Few people are as important to the performance and success of a manager as the boss. Yet while management books and courses abound in advice on how to manage subordinates, few if any even mention managing the boss.

Few managers seem to realize how important it is to manage the boss or, worse, believe that it can be done at all. They bellyache about the boss but do not even try to manage him (or her). Yet managing the boss is fairly simple—indeed generally quite a bit simpler than managing subordinates. There are only a few Dos, and even fewer Don’ts.

• The first Do is to realize that it is both the subordinate’s duty and in the subordinate’s self-interest to make the boss as effective and as achieving as possible. The best prescription for one’s own success is still, after all, to work for a boss who is going places. Thus the first Do is to go to the boss—at least once a year—and ask: “What do I do and what do my people do that helps you do your job? And what do we do that hampers you and makes life more difficult for you?”

The Correct Definition

This sounds obvious—but it is rarely done. For even effective executives tend to misdefine a “manager” as someone who is responsible for the work of subordinates—the definition of 50 years ago—and thus tend not to perceive that they have any responsibility for the boss’s performance and effectiveness. But the correct definition of a manager—as we have known it for at least 40 years—is someone who is responsible for the performance of all the people on whom his own performance depends.

The first person on whom a manager’s performance depends is the boss, and the boss is thus the first person for whose performance a manager has to take responsibility. But only by asking, “what do I do to help you or to hamper you?”—the best way to ask is without beating about the bush—can you find out what the boss needs and what gets in the boss’s way.

• Closely related is the need for awareness that your boss is a human being and an individual; no two persons work alike, perform alike, or behave alike. The subordinate’s job is not to reform the boss, not to reeducate the boss, not to make the boss conform to what the business schools and the management books say bosses should be like. It is to enable a particular boss to perform as a unique individual. And being an individual, every boss has idiosyncrasies, has “good words” and “bad words,” and, like the rest of us, needs his own security blanket.

To manage the boss requires thinking through such questions as: Does this individual who is my boss want me to come in once every month—but no more often—and spend 30 minutes presenting the performance, the plans, and the problems of my department? Or does this individual want me to come in every time there is anything to report or to discuss, every time there is the slightest change, every time we make a move? Does this individual want me to send the stuff in as a written report, in a nice folder, complete with tabs and a table of contents? Or does this individual want an oral presentation? Is this individual, in other words, a reader or a listener? And does this boss require (as do for instance most financial executives) 30 pages of figures with everything as his security blanket—and should it be tables or graphs?

Does this individual need the information to be there when he gets to the office in the morning, or does this boss (as do a good many operating people) want it at the end of the day, say around 3:30 on Friday afternoon? And if there is disagreement among the management group, how does this boss want to have it handled? To have us iron it out and report our consensus (as did General Eisenhower and as President Reagan clearly did)? Or for us to report our disagreements in full detail and with complete documentation (as did both Generals George Marshall and MacArthur)?

• What are the things the boss does well? What are his strengths? And what are the boss’s limitations and weaknesses—the areas in which the subordinate needs to support, to buttress and to supplement the boss? A manager’s task is to make the strengths of people effective and their weaknesses irrelevant—and that applies fully as much to the manager’s boss as it applies to the manager’s subordinates. If for instance the boss is good at marketing but uncomfortable with financial figures and analysis, managing the boss means to bring him into the marketing decision but to prepare the financial analysis beforehand and in depth.

Managing the boss means, above all, creating a relationship of trust. This requires confidence on the part of the superior that the subordinate manager will play to the boss’s strengths and safeguard the boss against his or her limitations and weaknesses.

Keep the Boss Aware

• The final Do: Make sure the boss understands what can be expected of you, what the objectives and goals are on which your own energies and those of your people will be concentrated, what your priorities are, and, equally important, what they are not. It is by no means always necessary that the boss approve—it is sometimes not even desirable. But the boss must understand what you are up to, must know what to expect and what not to expect. Bosses, after all, are held responsible by their own bosses for the performance of their subordinates. They must be able to say: “I know what Anne (or Joe) is trying to do.” Only if they can say this will they be able to delegate to their subordinate managers.

And now two Don’ts:

• Never expose the boss to surprises. It is the job of the subordinate to protect the boss against surprises—even pleasant ones (if any such exist). To be exposed to a surprise in the organization one is responsible for is humiliation, and usually public humiliation. Different bosses want very different warnings of possible surprises. Some—again Ike is a good example—want no more than a warning that things may turn out differently. Other bosses—President Kennedy for example—demand a full, detailed report even if there is only a slight chance of a surprise. But all bosses need to be protected against surprises. Otherwise they will not trust a subordinate—and with good reason.
• Never underrate the boss! The boss may look illiterate; he may look stupid—and looks are not always deceptive. But there is no risk at all in overrating a boss. The worst that can happen is for the boss to feel flattered. But if you underrate the boss he will either see through your little game and will bitterly resent it. Or the boss will impute to you the deficiency in brains or knowledge you imputed to the boss and will consider you ignorant, dumb, or lacking in imagination.

But the most important thing is not what to do or what not to do. It is to accept that managing the boss is the responsibility of the subordinate manager and a key—maybe the most important one—to his or her own effectiveness as an executive.

[1986]