How to Manage your Manager

Becoming a good manager takes practice and experience. While some people are natural leaders, for most, it is a journey. To be successful as a manager, you need keen interest and aptitude for this kind of role and eagerness to learn and get better. Unfortunately, most organizations do a very poor job in selecting people managers and people tend to get promoted until they reach the level of their incompetence.

In this post, I outline what I consider to be the very bad managers and the very good managers, how to identify them and how to deal with them.

Bad Managers

Bad managers fail to realize the level of influence they assert on their reports. As an example, for an employee, the effect of a heated discussion is very different if they have it with their manager as opposed to a peer.

In many cases, relatively new and junior employees who might be nervous about their abilities at the job feel overly grateful for any help they might be getting in ramping up. For the same reason, they might feel the need to be overly apologetic for any mistakes they make.

These kind of interactions create a power imbalance which leads to downward spiraling of the relationship between the manager (or mentor) and the report, with the manger becoming increasingly critical and dismissive, taking the report for granted. As an outcome, the report is likely to lose their self-confidence and feel that manager’s behavior is justified.

This is an example of situational behavior — the manager might not necessarily be a bad person, but simply the fact that she has been put in a position of authority as compared to the report can sometimes be sufficient to trigger this kind of behavior.

How to deal with such managers? For any given relationship, including the one between a manager and a report, it is critical to set some ground rules. New and junior employees should know that getting help in ramping up is their right, and that the managers are not doing them a favor by helping them. Thus, while you do want to be polite, make sure you do not feel overly obliged for the help you are getting.

Everyone makes mistakes. When you do make one and it gets pointed out, don’t be overly apologetic. Own the mistake, learn from it and try not to repeat the same mistake again. If you dig deep to ensure that the criticism you are getting is valid, your manager will think more thoroughly in future before being critical.

Finally, if your relationship with your manager does not improve over time, introspect to see if you should really continue with the job. Maybe your manager is just a bad person. Maybe you are in the wrong kind of job. Either way, constant criticism will hurt your confidence and your happiness and is just not worth it.

Good Managers

When I first took on management duties, my boss described the manager’s primary role as that of an observer. Manager is someone who observes the execution of the team and then inserts herself, taking all necessary shapes and forms, like an amoeba, to plug any holes and gaps. As the project goes through different stages in its lifecycle, the role that the manager plays needs to change. For example, for an early stage project, manager needs to play the role of a visionary, trying to find the direction for the team. If the team is junior, manager may need to jump in and take a more hands-on role. With a more senior team, manager needs to step back and play a more supporting role.

Managers need to know how to delegate while still remaining sufficiently engaged so that they can jump in if need be. They need to provide visibility to their team and provide support and cushion for the team members. They need to help the team manage external stakeholder and collaborator communications. They need to ensure that they do not set anyone to fail. Good managers focus more on ‘what’ rather than ‘how’, and trust the team to figure that out.

Good managers work to create a team with a good mix of skills, realizing that no two individuals are the same and a good team needs individuals with varied skills, interests and temperament to be successful. They do a good job aligning organizational priorities and team’s interests and actively look to grow the scope for the team. They ensure that they create a team that executes well and delivers results, but not at the expense of team’s long term happiness. They know when to cut their losses and do not hesitate in making tough decisions, even with limited information. They own up team’s failures and mistakes rather than passing the blame.

It is easy for good managers to go unnoticed since it is usually difficult to tell exactly what it is that the managers do. It is easy to take their good contributions for granted and only focus on the mistakes they might have made. It is easy to assume that a well executing team will be able to do so even if the manager leaves and the worth of good managers is usually noticed only after they leave.

Just as a ship needs a captain, a team needs a manager. So, if you are part of a team that is executing well, has low churn and great visibility, good growth potential and you do not dread coming to work every day, you probably have a good manager.

How to Deal with Your Manager

If your manager lies on the bad end of the spectrum, RUN! There is no amount of money worth losing your self respect over and there will always be another job. If your manager lies on the good end of the spectrum, realize that and celebrate it. Make it known to her that she is doing a good job and capitalize on your good fortune.

In most cases, your manager will lie somewhere in between and will be doing a few things well and others not so well. In such cases, try to leverage on their strengths and compensate for their weaknesses. As an example, say your manager tends to forget the instructions she gave you and thus often ends up giving conflicting instructions. You can compensate for that by summarizing your communications with her and sending them over email for record. Another common example, say your manager does not keep track of your contributions and is not aware of your goals and needs. You can compensate for that by sending periodic status updates and forcing the manager to meet with you where you catch them up. It is also usually a good idea to ensure that you repeatedly tell the manager the ONE thing that is most important to you that she could help with. It is easy for people to remember one thing and this will increase the chance that you get what you need.

When possible, without burning any bridges, you should give constructive feedback to help your manager improve. As stated at the start of this post, becoming a good manager is a journey, and without feedback, your manager might never know what they are not doing well.

References

[1] Peter prinipal: Managers rise to the level of their incompetence

[2] Stanford Prison Experiment: Situational behavior

[3] Video of amoeba changing its shape