Socrata

There are a number of books on how to manage direct and indirect reports. Most are useless. A few are good, to pretty good. That’s a different topic for a different day. Today I’d like to write about another related topic. I haven’t seen much written on how to manage your boss. In my opinion it’s an under-appreciated skill and probably more important than managing subordinates. Here’s my 6-point advice on how to manage your boss:

1) Partner with your boss. The key thing to remember is that a partnership is either win-win or lose-lose. Align goals and work together on achieving them. Understand why her goals are important to her and to the company and learn to appreciate them yourself.

2) Eliminate all surprises, negative and positive. Manage her expectations. The last thing in the world she wants is for her boss to grill her about some problem in your organization she isn’t aware of.

3) If you yourself are a manager, make sure your boss understands who the key contributors in your organization are. From time to time her boss will ask her who the rising stars are. You want the names of these people on the tip of her tongue. The success of your organization hinges in part in your people observing that they are being recognized for their contributions and are being given opportunities to grow and assume more responsibility in the company. I remember 8 or 10 years ago when the CEO of our company was in the elevator with one of our rising engineers, the CEO said “David, I hear you’re doing great things. Thank you. We appreciate your efforts.” He was bouncing off the ceiling for a week and shared with me “I didn’t know that the CEO even knew my name!” The corollary to this is that you need to have the courage to share who isn’t performing. If you say that everyone is a star, you’re indicating either that you can’t gauge and measure individual contributions or aren’t strong enough to handle the discontent of an underachiever.

4) Communicate in her style, not yours. If she likes raw data, give her raw data. If she likes to schmooze every day over coffee at the start of the day, use that forum to update her. If she prefers to debrief by phone on her drive home, accommodate her. If she won’t read long, prosy emails, adopt bullet form. If she suffers from email overload and some fall through the cracks, don’t use that medium.

5) Keep her informed. Use her communication style. Memo. Status Report. In-person daily updates. However she best digests information, keep her informed.

6) Make her successful. Early career employees don’t appreciate the trickle down theory well enough. If the company succeeds, management is rewarded. If management is rewarded, individual contributors are rewarded. It’s horribly self-destructive to think you can succeed while allowing your boss to fail. If you secretly want your boss to fail, do everyone a favor and quit before you get fired. Life’s too short to have so much animosity and you’re only fooling yourself.

Learning to manage your boss is a skill that will contribute to your company’s success, your boss’ success and ultimately to boost your own career.

One of the best examples of the positive impact a confident leader can have on his team is a neat little vignette about Steve Jillings, CEO of FrontBridge Technologies before it was acquired by Microsoft in 2005. This was before FrontBridge acquired MessageRite in 2004, so I wasn’t there, but the story was shared with me by a few of the founders. In the early days FrontBridge was still only ten or a dozen folks and the founders were trying to persuade Steve to join as CEO. They were running out of cash and ongoing viability was a legitimate worry. The founders had been trying unsuccessfully to raise venture capital. While trying to recruit Steve, the founders were jointly conducting a group interview of him and one of them asked “If you had to place odds on your ability to raise venture capital, what would it be?” Without hesitation Steve instantly responded an emphatic “100%!”

That’s what I call no wiggle room. The difference between 99% and 100% is the difference between “something will probably go wrong” and “guaranteed success.” It’s flying a plane with no parachute. It’s burning the ships when colonizing a new territory. It’s exactly the confidence the team needed from its leader and was the start of an impressive path to a very successful exit.