Managing the Difficult Boss - Organization vs. Employee Responsibilities January 27th, 2010

Heather McCulligh

I just read an interesting article on CNN.com on How To ‘Manage Up’ A Difficult Boss that shares some great ideas on the subject.

Odds are that at some point in your own career, you’ve had a manager that is hard to deal with. The article shares the story of Yael Zofi, who had a difficult boss in the 1990s. Her strategy was to “manage up” or as the article explains:

Assessing your boss’s weaknesses, paying attention to his or her management and communication style, and coming up with a strategy for dealing with it.

Fast forward a few years, Zofi has started her own consulting and executive coaching business. Fast forward again to 2008, and Zofi published a book on managing up. As Zofi explains about managing up:

“You have to look at your relationship with your boss as your most critical relationship in your company,” she advises. “Think about the boss not as a boss but as a client.” Approach your boss on his own turf, she adds. Zofi finds there are four primary categories of bosses–trendsetter, outgoing, perfectionist and stable–but she concedes that most humans are complex creatures who can have a little of each quality. Once you’ve figured out your boss’s style, you can come up with an approach to suit it. For instance, if you have a perfectionist boss who can’t tolerate any form of chaos and expects employees to be expert at their tasks, you should always do plenty of background research, ask questions in advance of your work on a project, provide plenty of data to the boss and check in with progress reports along the way.

Personally, I think this is great advice, regardless of whether your manager is difficult or not. You need to know what makes people tick to work best with them. Same applies for working with your direct reports and your peers.

The article got me thinking about what HR’s role in all of this is, and where the line is between the employee and the company’s responsibility for dealing with difficult managers. I am all for employees needing to be flexible and working with different personalities, however, HR does bear some responsibility for helping employees deal with difficult bosses. Manager performance is clearly linked to employee engagement and retention, two of the key metrics HR regularly reports on.

As an organization, a strong talent management process with a culture of transparency and openness can make a major difference in the sheer number of difficult bosses you may have. It’s a fact of life; you are always going to have difficult personalities in the workplace. But if there is transparency, it makes it much harder for these types of bosses to thrive, as employees and peers have input into their performance, and understand what is and is not acceptable for the organization. Furthermore, if each employee clearly understands that they are valued, and that HR is committed to talent management, they are going to be much more apt to seek assistance when they need it to deal with a difficult (or even truly crazy) boss.

As an HR pro, take stock of where the balance between employees and the organization is for dealing with difficult bosses in your organization. Do employees have what they need from HR to ensure that they can deal with difficult bosses? Do they have the skills and training to manage up where appropriate? Do they understand the talent management process and HR’s role in assisting them with these situations on an ongoing basis?

Comment below on managing difficult bosses and where the line between employee and the organization’s responsibilities are.

Tags: employee engagement, talent management