Why is it so hard to find a treatment of boss-employee relations that doesn’t characterise the boss as an ass or a psychotic and the subordinate as a helpless underling? Case in point: Fortune columnist Stanley Bing’s book, Throwing the Elephant. Bing describes a workplace jungle in which the boss is an elephant that can easily crush you by accident or whim. Your job – indeed, your survival – depends on your becoming a slavish ‘student of this elephant,’ learning and aligning yourself to its various likes and dislikes.
Admittedly, the book is a facetious take on that well-charted Dilbertian world of feckless managers and workers resigned beyond all hope to their fate. It’s not intended to be taken seriously (right?), but its underlying characterisation of bosses as dumb beasts that must be placated at all costs is widespread.
Progress won’t come from catering to this notion. It trivialises a serious management issue – the need to ‘manage up.’ The goal of managing up is to develop a pattern of interaction between your boss and you that delivers the best possible results for your organisation (and by extension, for each of you).
The accommodations you make help you gain better insight into your boss’s context: his strengths and weaknesses, the pressures he feels from above and from his peers, and the combination of organisational and personal objectives
he’s trying to meet.
“Too much has been written about managing up in a self-centred, ‘get mine’ way,” says Harvard Business School professor John P Kotter.
“This may have worked in a slow-moving world of oligopolies, where internal politics can dominate and the enterprise can still win. But not today.” To Kotter, clarifying the boss-employee relationship is important because it enables the people involved to move on to the true business at hand – grappling with the challenges and opportunities facing the organisation.
Kotter’s book, The Heart of Change, profiles firms that do this well. “Manipulative boss management plays no part in the process,” he says. “Zero. You do sometimes need to help the boss develop a sense of urgency, to craft a vision, to communicate the vision, and more. But the word is help, not manipulate for your own selfish needs.”
Beyond politics and the power differential
The whole notion of managing up was considered inappropriate when Kotter and fellow Harvard Business School professor John J Gabarro wrote their now-classic article Managing Your Boss (Harvard Business Review, January-February 1980).
In the top-down business culture of the early ’80s, good managers paid attention to their relationships with subordinates and peers, but managing upward didn’t make sense unless you were interested in political manoeuvering. Gabarro and Kotter’s work helped change managers’ thinking.
The goal of managing up is not currying favour, they emphasise, it’s becoming more effective. After all, relationships with key customers, suppliers, and vendors are crucial to your business success. Your relationship with your boss is simply another critical relationship.
What makes the boss-subordinate relationship a special case, however, is the power differential. To put it bluntly, your boss can fire you but you can’t fire him. This power differential will always affect the dynamics of your interaction, resulting in “a certain degree of frustration” when your actions are constrained by your boss’s decisions, write Gabarro and Kotter.
“The way in which a manager handles these frustrations largely depends on his or her predisposition toward dependence on authority figures.”
“Counterdependent managers”, they continue, “unconsciously resent the boss’s authority. Seeing the boss almost as an institutional enemy, they often pick fights – especially with an authoritarian boss – just for the sake of fighting.”
At the other end of the spectrum, ‘dependent’ managers ‘swallow their anger and behave in a very compliant fashion when the boss makes what they know to be a poor decision.’ Although altering your attitude toward authority is very difficult, “an awareness of these extremes and the range between them can be very useful in understanding where your own predispositions fall and what the implications are for how you tend to behave in relation to your boss.”
This awareness is important, but not more so than understanding the wider context of the boss-subordinate relationship. As the subordinate, you may find it difficult to see the ways in which your boss “can be severely hurt” if she doesn’t receive the “cooperation, dependability, and honesty” she requires in order to do her own job, write Gabarro and Kotter. In fact, the relationship is one of mutual dependence.
The more thoroughly you understand the goals, constraints, and pressures under which your boss operates, the better you’ll be able to help her succeed. In return, she’ll be more likely to link you to the wider organisation, ensure that your priorities are aligned with strategic company goals, and secure the resources you need to excel.
How do you make good on your end and develop that thorough understanding of your boss’s situation?
Begin with a discussion of goals and expectations
“40% of my clients tend not to be aware of their boss’s needs,” says Relly Nadler, a psychologist and executive coach at USA-based True North Leadership.
“There’s a vague notion that they’re just not clicking but they’re not able to articulate why. I ask them to clarify their top five responsibilities with their boss so that both understand and agree on what those priorities are. That’s a conversation everyone needs to have.”
Few bosses spell out their expectations as explicitly and with all the detail that you’d like. Gabarro and Kotter cite the example of a new marketing director at a recently acquired company who didn’t know until it was too late that “improving marketing and sales had been only one of the CEO’s goals.”
The CEO’s most immediate goal had been to make the company more profitable in the short term because, as a strong advocate of the acquisition within the parent company, his credibility was at stake. As a result, the marketing director “ended up taking actions that were actually at odds with the CEO’s priorities and objectives,” write Gabarro and Kotter. The lessons here: Don’t take information at face value.
Don’t make assumptions about areas in which you lack information. Regularly seek clarification and updates about your boss’s objectives – concerns and priorities have a way of changing over time.
In addition, don’t focus only on organisational goals. Your boss’s personal objectives can have just as much effect on how satisfied he is with your performance, as Ken Montgomery discovered while working for the CEO of a Silicon Valley IT outsourcing company.
“My team had achieved press coverage in many major publications, always around what the company was doing,” says Montgomery. “What my boss really wanted was a splash in one of the new-economy magazines like Wired that focused on his personal contribution to the space.
“Instead of rolling my eyes and thinking this guy’s got a major ego, I made it happen for him. Doing that small thing for him not only bought me credibility as an achiever, but greater trust and respect that resulted in getting his buy-in on projects that were important to me.”
Pay attention to clues in your boss’s behaviour
One CFO that Relly Nadler was brought in to coach drove his boss crazy by always closing the office door when they were discussing things. The boss prided himself on his open-door policy and felt that his CFO’s action compromised his integrity.
“I gave the CFO feedback that he didn’t have conversations, he took prisoners,” says Nadler. “While he was extremely competent in other ways, he never got himself out of that habit, and when there was a restructuring he was one of those released.”
The boss’s preference for an open door was more than a pet peeve; it was a symbol of his availability to his employees. By failing to notice that preference, Nadler’s client was inadvertently sending the message that he didn’t support one of his boss’s strongly held values.
Observing your boss – paying special attention to her preferences about such things as meetings and modes of communication – offers many clues about how best to interact with her, note Gabarro and Kotter (see box above).
Obviously, you score points with your boss by aligning your work style to hers. But if impressing the boss has become your primary goal, you’re missing the point. Eventually you’ll undermine your own credibility with your boss, who needs to be able to rely on you for an accurate reading of events.
But you don’t have to deny your own goals in the process, says Anita Belani, senior human resources manager at a large high-tech firm. For three years, she worked as a member of the human resources team of a financial services company in India.
Although she loved her job, her relationship with her supervisor was a constant source of frustration and anguish. Her efforts at managing up did nothing to instil a more respectful or collegial attitude in her boss, she says. Even so, their collaboration produced business results that other department heads noticed.
Eventually, Belani became HR director at a different financial services company, an opportunity that she doubts would have materialised had she left the first firm prematurely because of her difficult boss.
“Managing up is not about changing your personality or giving in to your boss all the time,” she says. Learning to adapt to the boss’s preferred way of doing things actually helps you “maintain control of your career. Once you have that skill, you need never feel apprehensive about working for anyone.”
Maintaining the proper focus
“Managing the boss is a constant, like being in a good marriage,” says Deborah Singer Dobson, co-author of Managing Up. “You don’t go around saying you’ve done enough modifying your behaviour for your spouse.
“We’re all in the business of modifying our behaviour on a daily basis in relationships that are important to us.” Sharon Jordan-Evans, co-author of Love ’Em or Lose ’Em, agrees. But once you and your boss have established a trusting relationship, she adds, the time you have to spend managing your boss should decrease dramatically.
