Leading your boss

Your boss leads YOU and the rest of the team, right? So what does it mean for a subordinate to lead their boss?

I’ve had a surprising amount of experience at doing this successfully over the course of my career, so I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve learned.

There’s a popular phrase “managing upward” but sometimes that has overtones of I need to limit the amount of damage that my boss does to me. I have to admit that there can be times for this, but it’s not the kind of collaborative relationship you’d like to build.

What you’d like to do is to have your manager focus on setting strategic direction and organizing all the moving parts – of which you are just one.

Here’s how I approach this.

I first work to understand my manager’s goals, degrees of freedom, and working style. If you’re working at cross purposes, you’re going to be creating unnecessary anxiety and friction. And it lets me evaluate in advance the overall success of any proposal I might make.

This was always my first step when connecting to a new manager. For ten years I was positioning myself as a professional coach internal to the business, a new concept for most of them. But before I could propose that, I needed to connect it with how they viewed their job, business goals, and managed their people.

Then I would have a conversation where I expressed why I was so committed to coaching, but also the value it would bring to the team and the broader organization. Some managers were quite motivated by potential influence into the executive ranks that coaching might have, while others focused on more immediate metrics.

A key step is to accept accountability for actual results. If it’s important to improve sales by 10%, then make that your goal too. Because managers do worry that they’re held accountable for concrete results but their subordinates often aren’t. Often they don’t state it this way, but it’s one of the reasons why managers have trouble sleeping at night.

I’ve been there.

Another idea which worked for me was to propose things as limited-risk investments. For instance, I spent six months delivering team coaching for my peers, in the hopes that they would see the value of this service and the boss would see improved team performance. I was firm that the experiment would be limited to six months, and entail no additional costs as I was doing this in addition to my “day job.”

When we evaluated it at the end, it didn’t pass our agreed criteria, so we terminated the experiment. That was fair to everyone. But there were some very positive results for me – it was then that I decided to commit to some in-depth coaching education. Which the company helped pay for, by the way, because my boss saw the potential in doing so – both for me and the team.

And don’t forget the fact that I was a very motivated employee during this period – delivering results for my boss and for the team. And that boss was just as firmly supportive of what I was doing.

By the way, this led to future situations where I actually wrote my own job description in collaboration with certain managers. Something that most people don’t think is even possible.

But that’s a story for a different day.