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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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:
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?
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!”
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.