Managing my boss

Managing Your Manager
7/28/2016 www.LTSemaj.com 1
Leahcim Semaj, PhD
July 2016

Dr. Leahcim Semaj
Chief Ideator & Resultant
The JobBank/ Above or Beyond
7/28/2016 2
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www.LTSemaj.com 4
The Next Level: 4 Management Styles
Low Task
High Relationship
COLLABORATION
High Task
High Relationship
INFLUENCE
High Task
Low Relationship
DIRECTION
Low Task
Low Relationship
DELEGATION
7/28/2016

The Exec Assistant Prayer

What is Managing Your Boss

Before you manage Your Boss

Before You Manage Your Boss

Managing Up

You Are In charge

Relationship Management

Customer #1

Build on Strengths, Compensate for Weaknesses

Manage Your Performance

"Wait, I should be managing my boss?
• But they manage me!" Indeed!
• You’ve heard of managing your teammates, managing your stress,
managing your time but who ever heard of managing your boss?
• Interestingly ink has been spilled to define this concept.
• The fact remains that some managers and bosses are shoved into
positions without skill or training while others just have bad
personalities; but, don’t despair, they can be dealt with.
• If your boss falls into that 'bad manager' category then don't
despair.
• Perhaps a paradigm shift is what you need.
• There are things that can be done to remedy this relationship so
that it doesn't begin to damage your productivity or the morale of
your team mates.

Here are some techniques
•that can be involved in managing
a bad boss or just managing your
manager:

1) Diagnose the problem
•This was cited by research from Georgetown
University's McDonough School of Business, which
found that incivility is a major cause of
disagreements between workers, and can lead to
tension between managers and their direct reports.
•The researchers also pointed to workload as a
significant cause of the stress that leads to incivility
and poor working relationships between managers
and employees.

There's no such thing as the ultimate
bad boss.
• Often, a poor relationship with a manager will come down
to a very few fundamental disagreements, along with a
range of personal attitudes that cloud this disagreement.
• At the same time, 'bad' managers can cover a spectrum of
different behaviours.
• A micromanager, for example, presents a completely
different issue to a manager who is hands-off to the point
where they don't provide support or guidance.
• Again, this is why it's so important to diagnose what makes
your boss 'bad'.

2) Focus on your communication skills/
Talk it out
•The Australian Workplace Relationships Survey
revealed that communication and other soft
skills are among the most fundamental to
healthy workplace relationships, but also the
most lacking.
•This is despite 84% stating that communication
and the ability to build positive relationships
was important for their success in the
workplace.

Over-communicate if you have to.
• Give updates.
• Even if you think your boss knows what's going on, update
her with what you're seeing.
• Talk about your progress, new data you're discovering that
could improve the outcome, and, of course, the potential
challenges.
• You can even put structure around this by implementing
something dead simple like “Jane doe did, the 2pm report.”
It's a weekly update that takes 15 minutes to write and 5
minutes to read--no more.

2 Way Street
• Just as your bosses are accountable for managing you, you are
responsible for managing them.
• Chances are your boss will be impressed and will want to work with
you on revising the plan, empowering you to continue doing good
work.
• How often have you heard that something as simple as better
communication can offset the potentially damaging effects of a poor
manager.
• Only 58 per cent of respondents felt they have the ability to remain
positive in the face of adversity.
• The research also pointed to the closely related factor of personal
resilience.

According to the authors,
•only 58% of respondents felt they have the
ability to take control of the situation and
remain positive in the face of adversity.
•According to the researchers, developing these
qualities requires managers to invest in their
own skill set, through short courses and
professional training that will help them build
their own skill sets.

Additional skills to communicating
with your boss are:
• Know what you need.
• You cannot expect your manager to instinctively know what
you need to perform your job to the best of your ability —
especially if you haven’t yet figured it out yourself.
• Make a list of the tools and supportive measures you require
and share that list with your manager.
• Any decent manager will be relieved to be freed of the need
to guess, whether fulfilling your entire list is possible or not.

Make your intentions clear.
•Let your manager know, during your
interview or as soon as possible after you
are hired, in words or actions or both,
that under no circumstances are you
willing to break the law or violate a
Pharmacist’s Code of Ethics, and express
any moral objections you may have in
regard to specific job duties.

3. Own the Problem
• Don't avoid the problems, tackle them head-on.
• Face the facts and don't let your emotions get in the way.
• If things aren't going according to plan, that's OK as long as you're
actively communicating the challenges and what you plan to do
about them.
• What's not OK is waiting until it's time to report on progress to say
that something came up so you couldn't get the job done.
• Ironically, some transit systems have a campaign that's fitting
here: “If you see something, say something.”
• While the transit authority is focused on public safety, at work this
slogan speaks to overcoming obstacles before it's too late.

4. Anticipate
• Sometimes you have to just look to the future and
anticipate what may happen.
• Pull out that crystal ball called a "gut instinct" and mix it
with some due diligence to anticipate what may happen
that could derail your plan.
• Don't be afraid to be wrong or to bring up something that
might have an adverse impact.
• Undoubtedly, something will come up to partially thwart
your progress--but it's better to anticipate these things than
to let them smack you in the face.

Once you have a sense of potential
challenges,
•develop a plan for what you're going
to do about them.
•Play out different scenarios and have
an opinion about what will happen
and what your recommendation will
be.
•Then, communicate it.

5. Model the behaviour you want to
see from a manager
•This last step is perhaps the hardest when
you are trying to deal with a bad manager
- build a culture around you which
discourages the negative behaviour you
are seeing from your manager.
•After all, bad bosses don't occur in
isolation, and their behaviour will already
be shaping the company as a whole.

Research from Georgetown University
• found the main reason for middle managers to behave in an
uncivil way is because they have experienced the same
behaviour from their superiors.
• In this way, a bad boss quickly sets the tone for the
organization as a whole and shapes the entire business.
• Addressing this cultural aspect requires taking the opposite
approach, and actively modeling the behaviour that you want
to see from your boss.
• After all, company culture is a two-way street that shapes the
behaviour of everyone in the business, including those in
management roles.

Sometimes you just have to:
•Give and take.
•If you expect your manager to cut you
occasional slack, be prepared to return
the favor.
•You cannot hold your manager to a higher
standard than the one your manager
observes or the one you follow yourself.

Get over it and move on.
•At times you just have to be the
bigger person, as much as it hurts.
•If you can’t get over it, take a deep
breath, march into your manager’s
office and hash it out.

Get Human Resource involved to
mediate, if you have to.
•Don’t fool yourself into thinking
a broken relationship with your
manager won’t affect your
ability to care for your clients.

Conceptually, this is quite simple.
•However, it does represent a new paradigm of
action for most individuals walking the halls of
today's companies.
•The biggest shift for many people will be the
adoption of proactivity as their default behavior.
•Let me be clear, the concept of "managing up" is
not about reporting lines or matrices, it's about
responsibility and ownership-taking responsibility
for communicating what's happening and owning
the process of getting something done.

References
•Managing Your Boss - Emeka Anazia
•Emeka Anazia, ACIPM, MITD, MAHRD, MATD
Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority Workshop

Managing my boss

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