The Rules Of Management (Pioneer Panel's Library) (13 page)

OK, so your boss is a jerk and you can’t stand working under such a weasel, and you’ve just got to tell everyone you meet what a fool this boss is. Yes? No. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You do not bad-mouth your boss under any circumstances. OK so your whole team knows your boss is useless and they make that clear to you. Do you agree? No, you do not. Never, ever. If you can’t find anything good to say, then say nothing at all. You do not criticize them even if they deserve it, or you feel they do anyway.

Your boss is your boss. If they are that dreadful, then don’t work for them, go look someplace else. If you are going to work for them, then that is your choice and you have to stick with it, live with it, support it, believe in it—or you’ll go mad.

If your boss is a nightmare, it is your job to turn that around. Get them to trust you. Then get them to delegate to you. Then get them to hand over responsibility to you. Then replace them. Simple, isn’t it? Obviously not, but these are the steps you must take if you are serious and committed.

Watch what you say about your boss in case it gets back to his boss—who might just happen to be a fan of your boss and not take kindly to you bad-mouthing them. After all, they put them there and for you to question that decision publicly leaves you in a precarious situation.

I once worked for a complete son of a...who drank, kept bad company, and didn’t know if it were New York or the New Year most of the time. Someone complained about him to the head office, and the HR director was sent to take statements. Twelve junior managers, including myself, were questioned about his
behavior. I refused to cooperate and said nothing. A year later my boss was still there and I was still there but 11 other junior managers no longer worked for that company. Moral: Keep quiet if you can’t be nice. How come he survived? Beats me. He obviously had friends in the right places. How did I survive? No idea. He trusted me and I kept my head down and got on with my job; his behavior didn’t affect me unduly and I coped.

So you can’t bad-mouth the company and you can’t criticize your boss. “Surely,” I hear you ask, “I can criticize my team?” Not in public you can’t. Behind closed doors when there is no one there but you and you alone, then and only then are you allowed one small silent scream when things really hit the fan, but apart from that, nothing.

It’s a poor work person who blames their tools. Your team is your tool to getting your management job done. If your team is useless it is you who hasn’t sharpened the tool, oiled it, cleaned the rust off, repaired the handle, replaced worn out bits, checked for damage, that sort of thing.

Your team will make mistakes; that’s a given. Things will go wrong, that too is a given. You’re dealing with people; they screw up from time to time, get emotional, let you down, fail to work as a team, goof off, and generally behave completely normally. You’d be a fool not to expect this, to plan for it, to build it into your plans. Look, things go wrong and bad mouthing your team doesn’t help. Learn from it and move on.

You have to “publicly celebrate those who move the organization closer to the attainment of its vision and strategic goal”—that’s your team, that is. If you criticize your team, you are focusing on the negative, which will spiral them downward. If you praise them it’s an uplifting experience.

If you criticize your team, you condemn yourself and are admitting publicly you are a crappy manager. Don’t do it—you’re not.

Just because you do your job well doesn’t mean everyone else does. Some bosses are useless and there’s no getting around that. Sometimes they will tell you to do stuff that is crazy. Sometimes they will issue orders that are so obviously off the wall you can’t help but gasp. Sometimes they will tell you to do things that are completely wrong. What are you to do?

You have various options:

• Refuse.

• Leave.

• Seek advice from your union/management advisory body/trade body if you are in one.

• Ask advice from Human Resources.

• Ask advice from other managers.

• Ask advice from your boss’s boss.

• Put your concerns in writing.

• Do the work but grumble a lot.

• Do it with a cheerful smile and a whistle.

• Talk to your boss about your misgivings.

Initially it might be polite to go and talk to your boss in person, face-to-face, over an informal coffee; a chat, nothing too heavy. Point out you think you have a problem with their order. Don’t make it personal. Don’t attack them. Don’t tell them they are crap. Explain that it is you that has the problem. The order and your boss are fine but you feel uncomfortable. Put the ball firmly back in their lap. If they insist, end by
saying you still feel uncomfortable about it and would like time to seek further advice. Ask if you can put your fears in writing and whether they would do the same.

Sometimes you have to accept that bosses don’t know what they are doing, ain’t going to change, and you have to put up with it. Or you could simply refuse or leave. Your call. The Rule is that you should accept it happens from time to time.

Poor thingss; they too get frightened, paranoid, lost, feel unloved, confused, vulnerable, and alone. Your job is to take away your bosses’ pain and their fears and make them relax.

You are a manager and have to manage not only downward but upward as well. When you deal with your bosses don’t ever

• Threaten

• Usurp

• Intimidate

• Pressurize

• Menace

• Disrespect

• Question (apart from under
Rule 82
)

• Undermine

• Ridicule

Instead you have to support, back, encourage, comfort, console, cheer up, relieve the pressure on, be utterly dependable, take the strain, guard the fort, and eventually perhaps replace them—with yourself of course.

Some bosses are so stricken with panic they are incapable of making decisions. You will have to make decisions for them and reassure them that everything is fine—the doctor is in the house now, and they can go and lie down.

When you’ve got your head down and things are flying at you from all directions, it is easy to forget that you are supposed to be an innovative and a creative, cutting-edge sort of manager. We all do it. We get so close to the work under our noses we lose sight of the fact that we can invent, inspire, lead, motivate—and say “Yes.” The team comes to you with a new idea and you are so weary from fighting the bureaucracy, the system, the weather, and the commuting that you just say, “No,” no matter what it is they are suggesting. It’s often a “No” with a subtext of “And leave me alone, I’m too busy/ stressed/irritable to think about this now.” Is that you? Bet it is sometimes. It’s all of us.

So, we need to throw the straitjacket off. We need to lift our heads. We need to consider the options and think “Why not?” and “What would happen if we did this?” We need to stop being constrained by pressure and by work.

An easy way out of the straitjacket is to consider how you would view your job, your department, your team if you were a stranger coming in from the outside, coming in to do your job for the first time. What would you change? What would you leave alone? Think of what you’re doing from the point of view of your customers—what makes sense? What doesn’t?

It is easy to get so bogged down in minutiae that we fail to stand back and look at things with fresh eyes every day. But if we are to be simply the best sort of manager ever to roam the Earth, we must stay fresh or go the way of the dinosaurs. Staying fresh means being open to new ideas, new suggestions, new concepts, and new directions.

OK, before you actually become one of them, you should be
practicing
to become one of them. If you are a junior manager, you should be studying the way middle managers walk and talk and be ready to become one. If you are a middle manager, you should be acting and talking as if you were already a senior manager. And on, right up to the top.

When I first became a managing director of a company, I almost forgot this Rule. I carried on managing as if I were a senior manager. But sales weren’t going as well as I would have liked. I was organizing corporate sales and couldn’t get to talk to the right people. I read somewhere that kings only talk to kings. I became a king. (Substitute “managing director” for “king” and you’ll see what I mean.) Immediately doors which previously had been closed were opened and sales exceeded my expectations.

If you’re going to be a king in the future, you had better start practicing now. Watch how anyone senior to you does things. The way they answer the phone, talk to staff, what they wear, what paper they read, how they get to work, what they do at work, and how they do it.

I recently met a managing director of a large company, and I was seriously impressed with how friendly and informal he was with his staff—who obviously adored him—and how genuinely relaxed he seemed. That is until we came to negotiate, when he was obviously totally up on his job and had facts and figures at his fingertips in a second. I watched him because he is my next step, if you like. He is my “one of them.”

And no, no matter how high you go, you never walk on people—ever.

Why don’t we ask questions more? Are we worried that people will think we don’t know enough already? The smartest operators are those who do ask questions, all the time, and they invariably benefit from doing so. It’s not so much a specific strategy for a particular purpose, as a general approach that can be helpful in all kinds of ways.

For a start you’ll learn a lot more about your team if you ask them more questions: “Why do you think we’re going about it in the wrong way?” “What do you think is slowing up the invoicing process?” “How would you tackle this customer?” And you may elicit solutions you wouldn’t have done otherwise. And encourage them to express opinions or offer suggestions or submit ideas.

Asking questions is also a classic solution when you’re in a tight corner. If you don’t believe me, just listen to politicians being interviewed by pushy journalists. It’s a standard response. When your boss asks you to explain something tricky, respond with, “Why do you think that?” or “Is this something our customers have been saying to you?” At the least it will buy you a little time, and at best it may provide you with usable information.

Questions are a great way to tell people they’re being absurd without telling them they’re being absurd. It’s especially helpful therefore when dealing with inept bosses. Instead of saying, “That will never work” or something similarly inflammatory (if heartfelt), you just ask, “What outcome are you hoping for from this?” or “How do you think the design team will cope with that?” or “In what way will that improve our
performance?” or “What effect do you expect that to have on sales?”

So long as you adopt a tone of friendly inquiry, it’s hard to cause offense with a question. However it’s an effective way to draw attention to the flaw in any plan, and to get other people to damn themselves without you having made any accusation at all.

It makes sense to ask questions about any new proposal of course, and generally people will. What’s rarer is a manager who keeps on asking questions, even difficult ones, throughout a project to ensure that nothing is overlooked. But that’s the kind of manager you’re going to be from now on. Far too many people get the proposal accepted or the project launched, and then sit back and let it run. If it hits problems, they deal with it. But if you keep asking questions, there’s a far better chance you’ll spot the problems before you hit them.

Being an underling—as we all know because we’ve all done it, been there—is tough. You get to take a lot of orders from a lot of people delivered in a way that puts your back up and makes you angry.

But hey, being a manager is often no better. Now you are caught in the middle. You get all that flak from the staff, plus all the crazy directives from the chief executive. You are no longer an underling and not quite an overling. You are the middle of the sandwich. You’re going to get it from both directions, upward and downward.

One of the best ways to take the pressure off is to let underlings all know you understand their viewpoint. Don’t just smile and say, “Yeah, I know where you’re coming from,” when it is plainly obvious you don’t. You really have to make sure they know you do understand their needs and wants, grievances and demands, fears and hopes. Up and down the chain.

When push comes to shove, you are going to have to side with the overlings sometimes. When you think they are right of course. Your underlings—non-PC for team—will obviously resent this, particularly as they will not welcome any changes (especially ones they don’t understand). This is a good time to let them tell you how they feel and tell them that you do understand this, and explain why the overlings have decided to do what they have.