Learning to Manage the Boss

I recently came across and article titled "Managing your Boss" this was from the Harvard Business Review and was written by Garbarro and Kotter in 2005.

Firstly I can only give my opinion on bosses, but of all the bosses I've had, there have been a greater number of inadequate poor bosses than good ones. Often they would even be given titles as 'leaders' but if there were two of us holding maps and lost in the countryside I would rather follow my own map then be lead by the idiot reading the other map. Bosses are indisputably not leaders, they are individuals who have managed to climb a career ladder which led them to be in the position they currently hold. Usually this is through tenure, other times its because they happened to be in the right place at the right time and never yet have they been through performance. Further I can say bad bosses come in both genders being a woman or a man doesn't make a boss any better. I will say though, those bosses I have felt it is possible to hold a conversation with and have listened to what I've said were more likely to have my respect and cooperation than those who thought they were leaders and carried the torch for the organization. Now to get back to Garbarro and Kotter's article.

Managing your boss appears to be a description of how managers went about their business when they had a new boss. Often there is a way of working which a boss has and all bosses are different in this respect. What Garbarro and Kotter determine is those managers who were able to adapt to the ways the new boss wanted them to work meant they were able to achieve the bosses goals.  The article then goes on to implicate that managers who were unable to do this were then at fault and probably deserved to lose their jobs. Although not in so few words just put. The funny thing is the attribution of blame here. In an example they give of a boss who had bad interpersonal skills but the company knew this man to be very good at what he did. The organization then put a manager with him who had performed very well in the past, one who could communicate with employees. Unfortunately a year and a bit later the manager had been sacked. Garbarro and Kotter did not look at whether the boss was to blame and seemed to accept well it was known he was a poor communicator so this person had no blame at all. To an extent the attitude of Garbarro and Kotter seems obtuse to say the least. Organizations work well when they communicate and what these writers partly understood was those adaptable managers were the better communicators and stayed in business. In another example they give both the boss and the manger were sacked from the organization. However, Garbarro and Kotter fail to identify what the problem was, just that adaptable managers were successful. So attributing blame to those managers who were unable to adapt to bosses. What they didn't do was make an evaluation of the bosses as though the very conception of a boss being wrong didn't have any meaning.  The fact is, if you want to drive a car you need to know how to navigate, have a understanding of how the car runs and be aware your passengers have their needs. 

In a contrary and somewhat more enlightening article by Chris Argyris who likes to talk about learning organizations (Teaching Smart People to Learn, HBR) Argyris makes the following salient and powerful comment

"Until senior managers become aware of how they reason defensively and the counterproductive consequences that result, there will be little real progress. Any change activity is likely to be just a fad.”

Unlike Garbarro and Kotter, Argyris looks to how people recognise when they get things wrong, the barriers they put up and the defence mechanisms they put in place. It is these things which affect how well an organization succeeds or not. He also remarks it is individuals who have been successful most in their career who have a problem of understanding how to learn from their mistakes. Because paradoxically they have had little in the way of experiencing failure.  It is failure which teaches good bosses how to be good. 

The fact is good bosses are recognised by their staff just as much as bad bosses are, and if a boss is bad they are responsible for the failings of an organization just as much as those who follow. They therefore should also be sacked as often as those below them are sacked. Unfortunately we all know this kind of thing doesn't happen. I would hope anyone reading Gabarro and Kotter would use a bit of their own initiative before accepting what they wrote.

One quality not measured

So there I was thinking about an interview and failed to get the job. Yet wasn't bothered, the interview went OK but clearly this candidate was not good enough. It was an internal job and there were fewer than a handful of applicants, possibly only three. It began with a short period of a half hour set aside so as to prepare a presentation. The interview would then begin with the presentation and go onto the finer details of questions. These totalled 9. No psychometrics were applied, the panel were all internal incumbent managers who likely know nothing about such things and probably have never heard of a Gaussian curve to say the least. I don't see it as a failure but as a learning experience about myself, a little like writing a post card when abroad and then getting home home and using it as a memory c que to recall the holiday. Quite simply I did not want the job, but this doesn't mean I was the best candidate and it doesn't mean my lack of enthusiam meant I was incapable.  I am passionate about my work, I enjoy it, love the intellectual stimulation and even research in my own time most weekends. It is a good job, but I'm not a occupational psychologist, which would probably be easier than what I do. I prevaricated because the new boss was someone I didn't particularly like and thought was not I could respect.  Perhaps this was the wrong frame of mind to have.  Yet, I saw how hard the previous person worked in that job, they'd done done two jobs not one. Psychologically I was unable to reconcile how I felt and judge this individual and in turn this has affected my career. 

One measurement which is not measured by occupational psychologists when it comes to selecting job applicants is the enthusiasm and passion they have, or the enthusiasm or passion they may well develop in the job they learn what it is and how to do it. Or alternatively how their future passion may wane. The way I see it is humans are adaptable learning organisms, they change their methods and learn the system. I heard one instance of a girl who wanted to work for the civil service. Each year she would take the online tests or exams and fail. She was only allowed to take the exams once a year. So each year she learnt from her mistakes and then changed her answers. It took seven years before she got a job in the civil service, a job she always wanted to do an had a passion to learn and do. Yet the selection process had failed to select this individual the first time round, it clearly failed and failed the tenacity and ability of a great recruit for an earlier 6 years. In real costs the civil service may have lost hundreds of thousands of pounds in productivity.  So the quality I am talking about is passion.

An individual may pass an interview because they have the skills. Lets say, the skill to make widgets, they then go on to do the job and make the widgets. However, this was all the employer wanted someone to make widgets full stop. Yet another individual who may not have the skill to make widgets has the passion to learn how to make them and would then have the passion to spend their own time learning even more about widgets.  They might not just improve their skills but create an even better widget the world has not seen. It is clear sometimes to get a certain job done it is necessary to learn a new ability. An example of this might be spreadsheets, or powerpoint, the ability to use either of these programs is useful to every manager. Though it may not be necessary for them all. One thing leads to another. It is not necessary to have a skill, it is necessary to have the ability to learn it and it is even far better to have the passion to go beyond what is asked.

In my workplace there are people who do jobs and they know those jobs inside out, the job has become something to do to earn money in order to live. It provides no further passion, they have learnt everything about every possible situation which involves their job. And then these individuals are no longer helped to create other skills utilised. Equally there are some people I have seen who like to harbour their own knowledge and don't let others know what they do. Everything is kept under their hat so as to make them indispensable. Or in their mind they feel indispensable, in reality nobody is. So here's a viewpoint, employing someone who knows little about the job but has enthusiasm and passion to learn and therefore clearly has a pathway where they are going to move and be the biggest asset the department or organization may well ever possess. Now that's a thought.

Passion, Passion, Passion.