How to Manage Your Boss — A Guide for Team Leaders
The position of team leader or manager is innately challenging. While you benefit from holding a leadership position within your own department, your role also lies within a chain of command. Often, managing your boss, and their expectations, can be as vital as managing your own team members.
In this article, we’ll explore some easy-to-implement steps that will help you manage your relationship with your boss, and thereby improve the dynamic within your workplace.
Managing Your Boss’ Expectations
Any successful boss-employee relationship depends on both sides having reasonable expectations. If you find that your boss expects the impossible, then whatever you achieve will inevitably fall short. Clear communication is the key to managing your boss’ expectations, but unfortunately, many managers exacerbate the problem by over-promising initially and signing up to unrealistic targets or goals.
Before you agree to the scope of any project, it’s vital to ensure that you — or your team — possess the necessary skills and resources to deliver the expected result. If not, then instead of simply suggesting the project be handed to another department, try first to think of ways to strengthen your team. This might be achieved by temporarily on-boarding extra team members. Another way is to understand what is trying to be achieved and propose a simpler implementation.
It’s also important to avoid ‘mission creep’ — whereby an initially simple brief is added to, often without any extra allocation of resources. This issue can be avoided by having the confidence to ask for more, whenever more is asked of you — whether that be more time, a larger budget or additional team members. If your boss is unable (or unwilling) to grant extra resources, then be frank about how broadening the project’s scope will affect the outcome. It’s better to have an awkward conversation at the start than at the end.
Maintaining Control of Your Team
It’s common for managers to say that ‘my boss is managing my team’ or ‘my boss undermines my authority’. Such complaints demonstrate the complexities of a multi-level management structure. But before assuming that the problem lies with your boss, it’s worth analysing your own leadership style to ensure that it’s sufficiently robust:
Do you provide your team with adequate direction? Have you created an inspiring team vision? Do you routinely communicate your team’s performance back to your boss?
Unless you can answer ‘yes’ to each of these questions, then your boss may simply be stepping in to cover professional deficiencies, whether real or not, which you’ll need to address.
Conversely, you may find that despite having an effective management style of your own, your boss still won’t let you manage. While it can be difficult to tell your boss to stop doing your job, you’ll need to clearly communicate the difficulties that their approach causes. But instead of simply presenting a problem, you can prove your leadership credentials by suggesting a solution: an alternative way of working, whereby you’ll act as a conduit between your boss and your team.
How to Deal with a Manager Who Doesn’t Manage
At the opposite end of the spectrum are those managers who simply don’t manage — sometimes known as absentee leaders. This situation often results from having an overworked boss, but it’s also one of the commonest characteristics of a weak manager. In this case, it may be that your boss lacks the assertiveness or confidence to direct the actions of others.
If you find yourself receiving no management support at work, you may end up shouldering responsibilities beyond your pay grade. Alternatively, you may find that your best efforts aren’t aligned with any wider strategy, undermining the effectiveness of your work, and the morale of your team.
Dealing with a manager who doesn’t manage can be challenging. Often, an effective first step is simply to show that more direction is needed. It may be that a manger who’s uncomfortable issuing directions will feel empowered to do so if you take the lead and invite direct involvement. Again, outlining the problem and the solution in one conversation will ensure that the tone of your intervention is constructive.
Finally, it’s worth remembering that bosses are, first and foremost, people: human beings with faults and frailties, just like your own. So, while managing your relationship with your boss can create greater harmony in the workplace, it makes sense to aim for modest, long-term improvements, not overnight perfection.
