Truth 57. Serving your employees means managing your boss

Before you became a manager yourself, your line of responsibility was pretty straightforward—it was up. If you were lucky, you only had one boss. If things got complicated, you had multiple bosses. But they were still above you on the organization chart. And, ideally, if they had competing demands for your time and focus, they could work it out among themselves before coming to you with it.

Now that you’re a manager yourself, you’ve got bosses all around you. Your philosophy of engagement requires you to take the position that you work for your employees—always making sure they have what they need to do their best work and caring about them personally.

There could be times when your boss gets in the way of your people doing their best work. If so, you’ve got an unruly boss. And it’s up to you to fix that. So here’s the paradox. In the service of working for your employees, as their manager, you sometimes have to boss your boss—preferably without getting fired.

Even without meaning to, unruly bosses can make your team’s life miserable in so many ways:

You sometimes have to boss your boss—preferably without getting fired.

• They impose a pile of conflicting priorities on your group, frustrating their efforts to make any progress on even a few of them.

• They withhold the necessary resources to get essential work done.

• They are unreliable with commitments.

• They alienate your team from you by making you look ineffectual.

• They make them feel undervalued and disrespected by giving them inappropriate projects.

• They make them feel that they are serving him rather than working for the company’s big-picture purpose.

There is no simple solution to dissolving the effects of unruly bosses, especially if you work in an organization that’s not completely committed to cultivating an engaged workplace. It can, in fact, ultimately prove to be impossible. But bosses are just as obligated to take care of their people (you, for instance) as you are obligated to take care of yours. So, it’s reasonable to assume that they at least see the benefit of exploring ways you can work together to make the most of your team’s passions, energies, and talents.

There’s no getting around this. A meeting with your boss is in your immediate future. Call it yourself. That way you have some chance to control the agenda.

Check your own assumptions before going in. Are some of your own issues triggered by some personal, emotional conflicts with authority figures? Are you assuming your boss is just a jerk who doesn’t care about your team? Or a spineless person who can’t say no to her own boss? Is your problem a perceived lack of respect? Or a fear of conflict that your boss will stop listening to you the minute you bring up this touchy subject? You could be right on all those counts. But it’s not your job to judge or psychoanalyze your boss. Your job is to help your boss find a way to help you serve your team, even if it means changing certain disruptive behaviors.

Your job is to help your boss find a way to help you serve your team.

Assume only one thing: a collaborative stance. If you’re working for a company committed to engagement, you can count on the fact that your boss is under pressure from above to help you do your job well. If your team’s performance is measured by numbers and those numbers are slipping, you both know it—as does the leadership up the organizational ladder. So you’re both responsible for improving performance. Now you have the basis for a discussion about partnering for performance improvement. Speak to this mutual need to reframe the rest of your conversation as one between collaborators rather than between master and servant.

You’re both responsible for improving performance.

Be specific about what your team needs to do its job well. More time for each project? Assignments that are more appropriate to employees’ skills, interests, and talents? A clear, unshifting set of priorities?

In return, find out what your boss needs from you. Maybe a weekly report will provide reassurance that everything is on track. A phone call might be all that’s necessary. Or a spreadsheet would show at a glance that your department is already working at capacity on very important projects. That spreadsheet, by the way, could help your boss make a case to the leadership up the ranks that your department deserves more resources and fewer assignments—at least for the immediate time being.

You could be doing your boss a favor with this meeting. It’s possible that she’s been worrying about how to tell her boss to back off and let her do her job. And you’ve just modeled a way for her to do it.